Perhaps we also need to become better critics and listeners, more careful about what we take in and who’s telling it, and what we believe and repeat, because stories can give power – or they can take it away

Social software works well given these conditions because these tools are the internet’s response to the enormous volume of information the internet helped create. Social software is the answer to the internet by the internet. The quantitative change in information availability (going from scarcity to abundance) leads to qualitative changes in our information strategies. Social filtering is one of those changed information strategies. Social software caters to social filtering.

To really deal with this crisis we need to recognize centralization — of social media, of ad networks, of media ownership, of power over our daily communication, and in many other areas related to news publishing — and poor media literacy among the public as crucial underlying causes that need to be tackled.