One of the interesting effects of the internet is that it has led to an entropic loss of information. Good information and good content has been driven out by uniformly bad content. By allowing masses of people to post anything to the internet, and allowing for a dumbed down mass of people, good content is quickly driven out. This can be understood as the heat death of the internet, in that originally the internet was used by physicists for exchanging scientific papers, but today is used by hoodlums to harrass and heckle innocents.
The excessive reliance individuals now make upon tools such as google and wikipedia is another sign of a decline in knowledge. Whereas in the past individuals had to commit large amounts of material to memory, including learning multiple languages and difficult mathematics, today individuals can simply rely on google or wikipedia to achieve these same feats. The mass communication throughout the world between all kinds of individuals has not led to an increase in knowledge or learning. Instead, it has led to the triumph of ignorance in which the mass mob and the crowd blocks out any true understanding.
The decline in knowledge may further be seen in the mass media which is not only bland and insipid, but also features brutal, disgusting images. These violent images spawn mental disturbance in the weakest individuals. The mass media is irrational and constitutes the role of a surveillance society.
The decline in general knowledge is perhaps best illustrated by the events of a recent French tv quiz show. A contestant was asked whether the moon revolved around the earth. Unable to answer this question, the contestant turned to the audience who answered the question incorrectly. The contestant then maintained that the audience was also wrong and responded with an indepedent incorrect choice. While many educated people may scoff at this contestant, very few educated people would actually be able to demonstrate that the moon revolved around the earth given that they have only "learned" this fact from text books and teachers. Examples such as this illustrate a further decline in general knowledge.
Some individuals of the Darwinian persuasion seem to now argue that doubting Darwinism amounts to heresy and that those who doubt Darwin are responsible for the decline of Western civilization. It is to be noted though that these arguments are rarely or never used for those who doubt other aspects of modern Western science such as atomic or germ theory. Further, the Darwinian foundations appear to be weakening which may explain the over-enthusiastic zeal of such people. Finally, there is the opposition to religion and the recent rise of a militant atheism among certain individuals. Very few of these atheists however discuss science and mostly focus their ire on ridiculing all religion. Alternatively, the advances in cosmology (the rise of the Big Bang theory pointing to a point singularlity as origin of the universe), quantum mechanics (the role of the collapse of the wave function and the interaction between physical reality and the conscious observer that takes place there), neuroscience (the understanding of the human brain and its relation to mystical states of consciousness), and finally mathematics (the role of the Godelian incompleteness results and the understandings developed behind the notion of a Turing machine) all seem to point to a refutation of a strict physicalist viewpoint. Further, developments in the field of parapsychology add to this understanding, though this field remains controversial. All of these developments plus the apparent decline of the Darwinian account seem to strengthen the idea that the nineteenth century view of materialistic and mechanistic science is false. Unable to deal with these facts, its proponents have become zealots and rabid atheists. The rise of this militant atheism (which denies not only a creator deity but all morality) actually is a problem for Western civilization in that it allows for the rise of dictatorship and mass immoral behavior (which is best illustrated in the behavior of atheists such as these as witnessed through their actions and comments).
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