Conclusion: Fears and Solutions

This book has examined how the flow of news and information is changing in society and the role of social facts in shaping public knowledge and social epistemology. All the media-related changes I have described are happening in a political, emotional, and psychological climate that remains quite volatile. This volatility has something to do with the decentralized nature of our media ecosystem, which, as mentioned, is changing the structure of knowledge across many issues and domains. ICTs and decentralized digital networks fuel divergent civic epistemologies and lower the threshold for accessing them. This means that we can see, find, and be exposed to alternative, nonmainstream, and nonauthoritative sources of information with increasing ease.