In the early twentieth century, the young print journalist Walter Lippmann claimed that U.S. citizens are too gullible and ill informed to govern a modern, complex society. In response, philosopher-activist John Dewey responded that in a democracy, the answer was not, as Lippmann sug-gested, to confine governance to an elite but rather to make the entire pop-ulation less gullible through better public education and better informed through better journalism.69

If you want more than the elite to be free and autonomous, you face the problem that there aren’t enough tutors to explain the meaning of everything. If you want to radically broaden the scope of literacy, the loss of some depth might be part of the price. The question at present, not a new one, is whether loss of depth is preventable or instead is an inevitable consequence of technologies that democratize knowledge.