The way I see it is that the internet has allowed professional journalism and scientific discourse to compete with schoolgirl gossip and yelling in bars.
One problem, though, is that the needs of these forms of communication aren't really the same. In a low-latency medium, for example, it's difficult to avoid strong structural biases toward both recency and immediate responses; these are both corrosive to the quality of the discourse. (I think these structural biases mostly account for the very low quality of professional journalism, but they are even stronger on e.g. reddit or HN.
One problem, though, is that the needs of these forms of communication aren't really the same. In a low-latency medium, for example, it's difficult to avoid strong structural biases toward both recency and immediate responses; these are both corrosive to the quality of the discourse. (I think these structural biases mostly account for the very low quality of professional journalism, but they are even stronger on e.g. reddit or HN.
pg and I have written some things about this:
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January... http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html (under "Fluff Principle" and "Comments")