Self-Improvement in the Internet Age: A WIRED Investigation | Culture - WIRED

Peter Rubin, oversees WIRED's cultural coverage and is editorial lead on digital platforms summarizes, The internet has made us a planet of autodidacts—but just how are we improving ourselves? 
 

Photo: Emily Waite, Getty Images.

That Johannes Gutenberg guy was on to something. He may not have been the first person to print texts on paper using movable type—systems in China and Korea predated his—but his printing press made it faster, and cheaper, to create a record of a thought. One by one, those thoughts spread across Europe, philosophy and science and poetry. They might have been a cause of the Renaissance, or simply a symptom, but ideas grew legs they'd never had before.

Nearly 600 years later, we don't have an easy analogue for that printing press. Or maybe we have too many. The web, and dial-up BBSes and Usenet before it, incubated and distributed knowledge and commentary; later, blogging platforms democratized the power of publication...

So here at WIRED Culture, we decided to take stock of those ways. How game streaming can lead to urgent discourse. How podcasts can make us care about things we never thought we might.
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Source: WIRED