David Moschella

If you Google the question “Is the Internet killing local languages and cultures,” you will receive a lot of results that suggest the answer is yes. But if you look at them a bit more closely, you will see that the most dire warnings tend to be from 2010 to 2017. More recent results often take the opposite stance—that technology actually helps preserve local languages. Advances in machine translation are clearly part of this shift in opinion. But there are also important economic, geopolitical, and cultural forces at work. Languages have always evolved as if in a marketplace.

Big Tech’s enforcement of various official truths that turned out to be false has undermined trust in both the leading tech companies and society overall. In addition to their own content moderators, four other organizational entities have been used to determine misinformation, disinformation, and so-called malinformation.  All four have serious shortcomings:

The Internet is bringing restructuring to the news industry. But what, if anything, does the shift from vertically integrated newspapers to specialized information services tell us about the state of journalism? After all, the car, aerospace, and computing industries all became much bigger, more innovative, more efficient, and more global after they adopted a focused-supplier approach, and these changes greatly benefited consumers. The restructuring of the news business will likely do the same.