“He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.”
—George Orwell, 1984

The German metal worker Johann Gutenberg is arguably one of the most important figures of the last millennium. His invention of the printing press in the 1450s totally revolutionized the way people communicate. Rather than reproducing each copy of a given work by hand, the printing press allowed people to mass-produce identical copies of the same material for widespread distribution. And thus, the media as we now know it was born. However, one might suggest that we stand now at the beginning of a very similar revolution in communication—the weblog.

The major breakthrough achieved in the creation of the printing press was in allowing a single person to communicate with a mass audience. This gave great power to the individual to effect change by influencing the way people think. Newspapers, and later on radio and television news organizations, proved to be a power on par with the state. In the United States, the media has been referred to as “the Fourth Branch” of the government for the effect it has in serving as a check on the other three branches. French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as having once said, “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”

However, there is a fundamental flaw to this model as well; that being that access to the presses is limited. Information is therefore essentially funneled through a central location. As a result, all one needs to do in order to control the flow of information is to find a way of controlling the printing presses. And indeed, various government entities have taken advantage of this flaw at several points in the past. Many dictatorships such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union carefully monitored what was printed in the newspapers.

There are far less nefarious examples right here in the United States, though. For instance, the 24-hour cable news channels like CNN may have at one time been an annoyance for the politician that did not yet fully understand how to deal with the concept of instant access to information on the day’s news. Over time, however, people with their own political agendas learned how to use this new medium to their advantage. These days, the cable news channels devote a large portion of their time to interviewing pundits—people whose job it is to go on shows like The Situation Room, Hardball, or Hannity & Colmes, and continuously regurgitate their party’s list of talking points. In this way, politicians were able to use television news as a means of controlling the debate.

But the internet works a little differently. Rather than one person communicating with many people, the internet allows many people to communicate with each other. Because the flow of information is now decentralized, it becomes much more difficult to control. Furthermore, it allows users to build on each other’s work. One person may publish p on her blog. Somebody else may read it and write, “Oh, yeah. And I also read that q.” Important information is much more likely to be overlooked by a staff of a few dozen reporters than it is by a collaboration of millions of reporters.

The result is that it becomes a great deal more difficult for people in positions of power to get away with behavior that violates legal or ethical codes of conduct. Issues such as the Bush administration’s condoning of torture, faulty justifications for war, and abuse of civil liberties under the Patriot Act, which might have been easily hidden in another era have all found long life in the threads from which the internet is weaved. In general, the easier it becomes to access information, the harder it becomes for misdeeds to go unnoticed. Plus, because people in the blogosphere generally write about what they feel is important rather than what an editor decides people should find important, the internet is capable of more accurately reflecting the stories that people genuinely care about.

Yet this is not to suggest that the internet is impervious to the controls that media have succumbed to in the past. In fact, political groups have already begun efforts to bring the internet under their control. During his bid for the presidency in 2004, former Vermont governor and now DNC Chairman Howard Dean proved that blogs could be a powerful tool for both fund raising and communication. Others have taken notice, and since then weblogs have become an essential part of any campaign. And these political weblogs have enjoyed a great deal of success. Visit any blog wherein political matters are being discussed, be it a site like Little Green Footballs or Daily Kos or a personal weblog on Livejournal, and nine times out of ten the opinions expressed will be all but indistinguishable from the talking points provided by the Republican or Democratic National Committees.

This is the test that the internet must overcome. In spite of certain rare exceptions such as the Rathergate story, bloggers are still allowing television pundits, and by extension the political parties they serve, to control the debate. Take, for instance, last month’s debate over the “War on Christmas.” This is the very definition of an artificial debate. The “issue” wasn’t one until people like John Gibson and Bill O’Reilly of FOX News decided that it was. It was a debate that they created to distract people from the issues that were really important while simultaneously energizing their core audience by giving them a made-up outside enemy to focus their hatred on, just as has been done in the past by Salem Puritans, McCarthyists, and conservative Christian homophobes. But everyone on the blogosphere had an opinion on the matter and wanted to share it. And in doing so, they merely fueled an issue that never would have been able to continue on its own while diverting precious attention and resources away from the countless issues that actually matter. Thus, bloggers essentially ceded their right to set the course and tone of the debate to FOX News.

During the 1990s, we all used to hear about the potential of the internet. Unfortunately, it has become such a common part of our everyday lives that most of us have forgotten about that potential. And that is precisely what bloggers must remember again if they wish to truly be a source of valuable information. People must remember that now more than ever, we all have the power to change people’s minds and thus, to command the future.