Just as with any other form of conveying information from one party to another, the new wave of digital communication and preservation has both advantages and disadvantages. For anyone who has ever spent more than a few minutes on a Wiki page of some sort, it is clear that information on the Internet has the potential to be either highly credible and informative or misleading and facetious. In some cases, tit is even possible to observe a blending of the two within the confines of a single paragraph. However, this sort of freedom in the sharing of information and ideas also provides a forum for discussion on less popular or more personal topics in a more peer-to-peer conversational format, or at least with more personal experience pertaining to the problems associated with everyday life, instead of just lofty ideas encased in elevated language. Is this aspect of the Internet an advantage or a disadvantage as we move forward with the use of the Internet as a source of historical information?
“Like postmodernism, the Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral. . . . Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is ‘privileged’ over any other.”
[Quote in context found here.]