@The Pentacle Queen,
Quote:Will the internet liberate or aid the control of knowledge?
This is a great question.
First off, I would like to be picky about the word "control". I don't think the Internet will control information at all. However, I do think that the Internet will have a great effect on how we treat information.
I have often thought that the next big revolution in the Information Age will come from mechanisms which classify the veracity of information within the overall flow of data.
Search Engines were the first tool to allow selective extractions of information from the flow, but they only extract based on terminology. Search Engines are beginning to incorporate extraction based on context and relevance, but so far there is no measurement of veracity.
Human beings normally assess veracity by collecting multiple views/opinions and then parsing those views against some pre-accepted baseline of knowledge. The scientific process uses Peer-Review for example.
The Internet is exacerbating a condition in which the volume of information greatly exceeds the relevance of the information. This not an entirely new problem, as anyone who has asked a crowd of people to answer basic science questions can see. Most of the information in any collection of sources is invalid. But in the case of the Internet, I think the ratio of invalid to valid information is greatly skewed.
Anyone who wants to get rich... just figure out a way to automatically assign some level of "veracity" to internet searches and the world will beat a path to your [web]door.