Making Sense of The Internet is The Defining Problem of Our Era

I’ve been thinking about a variety of problems that need solving within social, technical and geopolitical landscapes. What I keep coming back to is the fact that the internet mediates all of them, either directly or indirectly. We are using the internet as a sense making mechanism for communication and learning, but the problem is the internet is a mess. It is a deep dark abyss flooded with more information than anyone can make sense of and the content in my opinion is being negatively influenced from a variety of factors, not always in bad faith but the result is the same. The defining problem then becomes, how do we make sense of it? What tool, what social rules or habits need to be in place for individuals to most effectively use the greatest thing ever made my humans. We are in desperate need of norms around digital diets and a suit of tools that can help sift through the madness. The digital stds, ads and misinformation are out of control. It isn’t going to be done by independent fact checkers, as uncomfortable as many people are with this line of thinking “facts” are much harder to decipher than we like to imagine the collective intelligence has deemed. We need a dialectic style of knowledge generation moving forward. The best scientist and thinkers are already doing this in their networks but that norm has yet to trickle down to the rest of the population’s understanding of how knowledge and science actually works. I’m not confident we'll be able to solve the rest of the problems on our hands without stabilizing our communication through the internet first.