With every new technology comes fascinating discussions about how technology shapes human relationships. Socrates took issue with one of the basic building blocks of all technology, written language, believing that it negatively affected the public perception of the truth. Victor Hugo wrote extensively about how Gutenberg’s printing press shifted the ownership of knowledge from the powerful few, whose repository for power was stone architecture (think hieroglyphs in the pyramids or frescos in the Sistine Chapel) to those who could read and write (think Martin Luther’s 95 theses). More recently there have been similar discussions around the inventions of the photograph, the moving picture, and radio and television broadcast.

The technology that is creating the revolution in communication today has been deemed “Web 2.0″, and focuses on content that is generated by users. Some critics of this technology fear that sites such as Wikipedia represent the end of truth as we know it - they argue that if anyone can contribute content, then we’ve lost the traditional measures of truth. Supporters of Wikipedia are excited about the end of truth as we know it - why were we relying on elitist knowledge purveyors to begin with?