I think it does among the cognitive elite, and that this explains the rise of complex but good ideas such as applied rationality and Effective altruism. I'm less sure about other groups.
If I look at our LessWrong Dojo in Berlin and it's usage of CFAR techniques the internet does play a role. However the fact that a few people attended CFAR workshops also played a key role. I think I would know significantly less about CFAR if I wouldn't have meet Valentine in person and chatted with him.
From my perspective the German Pirate Party started off well but never actually went deep and did the required thinking to provide a real political alternative. Online conversations on Twitter fractioned them further. There was a lot more development of new political ideas in '68 than today.
When it comes to newspapers reputation becomes less important while writing sensational articles that get clicks becomes more important. Factual qualities of articles might suffer through that mechanism.
But there room for creating the future in which we want to live. We can actually create better systems.
I think it does among the cognitive elite, and that this explains the rise of complex but good ideas such as applied rationality and Effective altruism. I'm less sure about other groups.
The Internet increases the speed and the convenience of communication vastly. It also makes it much easier for people with shared interests to get in contact.
This will of course lead to a tremendous increase in the amount of false or useless information. But it will also lead to an increase in true and relevant information.
Now members of the cognitive elite are, or so I claim, reasonably good at distinguishing between good and bad ideas. They do this not the least by finding reliable sources. They will quickly pass this, mostly true information, on to other members of the cognitive elite. This means that the higher pace of information dissemination will translate into a higher pace of learning true ideas, for this group.
What about non-elite groups? I'm not sure. On the one hand, they are, by definition, not as good at distinguishing between good and bad ideas. On the other hand, they are likely to be heavily influenced by the cognitive elite, especially in the longer run.
By and large, I think we have cause for optimism, though: good ideas will continue to spread quickly. How could we make them spread even quicker?The most obvious solution is to increase the reliability of information. Notice that while information technology has made it much more convenient to share information quickly, it hasn't increased the reliability of information.
There are a couple of ways of addressing this problem. One is better reputation/karma systems. That would both incentivize people to disseminate true and relevant information, and make it easier to find true and relevant information. (An alternative, and to my mind interesting, version is reputation systems where the scores aren't produced by users, but rather by verified experts.)
Another method is automatic quality-control of information (e.g. fact-checking). Google have done some work on this, but still, it is in its infancy. It'll be interesting to follow the development in this area in the years to come.