We interrupt this social network for the following rant against the new world media order:

This rant is brought to you by a former member of the soon-to-be-extinct media elite – a guy who has started longing for the days when newspapers were newspapers and we all sat around smugly secure in the knowledge that we knew what the rest of you needed to know about the important events of the day.

We decided what was news. It’s only in retrospect that we can see the power and the privilege we had over the world of information. 

Computers came into the newsroom in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Some of us grumbled, but most of us marveled at the new machines. No more starting over to produce clean copy. You could actually move paragraphs around! Within a few years, all the reporters in the office had access to the wire services right there on tiny screens on old desks that were still pushed together -- not yet divided into little cubicles. We knew what was happening in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. and Paris and South Africa the day before everyone else got the news – or at least a few hours before Walter Cronkite told the unwashed masses “that’s the way it is.”

 We wrote stories late in the afternoon and late into the night, and then something extraordinary happened.They were printed on paper – hundreds of thousands of copies – and tossed on doorsteps early the next morning across a major metropolitan area. Our stories went out on wire services and were printed in other newspapers that same night and thrown on hundreds of thousands of more doorsteps across the nation.

It was not hard to imagine that a million people were reading what we wrote within hours of us writing it.

Today, in the chaoticallydemocratic new world media order, all of us have little screens on our desks and instant access to the news of the world. Anyone with computer and Internet access can Twitter away the hours posting little nuggets on Facebook or writing their blog. Everyone’s a reporter.

If you’re smart enough or patient enough to sift through this ever-flowing avalanche of data, you will be better informed than ever with countless perspectives on all and everything. Of course, the problem is that most of us aren’t smart enough or patient enough to do that, so we’re drowning in a world of too much information and not enough wisdom. It  gets harder and harder to wade through the snark and the celebrity gossip and personality cults and the idiotic culture of argumentation and figure out what’s really going on in the world.

Newsrooms used to be full of people with decades of experience and contacts and perspective on politics, science, religion, labor, law and other important subjects. Their used to be editors, too, people who would correct my constant misspelling of the word "there."  Some of them are still toiling away, but in just the last few years, thousands upon thousands of seasoned reporters and graceful writers and sharp-eyed editors have gotten laid off, bought out or taken early retirement from newsrooms coast to coast.

Some of us have even been reduced to ranting about the good old days, adding to the noise with an obscure blog on an obscure website for people who still read books. At least we can take heart in the fact that only a few people will actually read it. 

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Don Lattin's new book, "THE HARVARD PSYCHEDELIC CLUB -- How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in  a New Age in America, will be available in fine stores everywhere on January 5, 2010 .