Nationalistic and sectarian media has an aversion to authentic dialogue and debate; something new is needed

We need a global town square. Or many.

Our media landscape is dominated by media which is nationalistic in the worst sense and/or sectarian.

The internet, which once promised a World Wide Web of ideas and dialogue is dominated by shadows of those same Big Media outlets and the power of Big Tech, which is using technology much more to surveil, maximize profit and manipulate information than to facilitate honest dialogue.

That mindset of profiteering then proliferates in how many “content creators” and “influencers” on various Big Tech platforms act. They seek to manipulate markets and audiences, nationalist or sectarian, for their perceived personal benefit.

The concept of global citizen seems quaint.

As the farmer poet Wendell Berry writes in his new book The Need to be Whole, it seems “much easier to converse, at a safe electronic remove, with people in whose category you feel you belong. A great many people now seem to have abandoned any willing membership in the great category of ‘all humans’ perhaps because of its implied obligations.”