Can the death of intellectualism be blamed on the internet which has reduced expert opinion to that of any opinion?

.. and I have nothing to do with you, not sorry. This post was edited by O-uknow at November 7, 2016 11:52 AM MST

The internet facilitates if not is the root cause. So I accept a half Nope. "The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter teased out of the national DNA, although both of those things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects—for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert."  Is essentially everything I concisely said with "expert opinion reduced to the level of any opinion". This post was edited by O-uknow at November 7, 2016 11:51 AM MST

@O-unknow -- I'm going to stand by my full nope.

To be sure, the Internet makes is much easier for people  to find raving nonsensical bullroar to reinforce their preferred beliefs. But people have engaged in selective information processing in pursuit of ideology reinforcement long before the Internet existed.

Here is but one of many examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion This post was edited by OldSchoolTheSKOSlives at November 7, 2016 11:53 AM MST