Internet: Today's agora for the learned and not-so-learned is a petty, abusive wasteland

The village wise man has been telling us that the Internet is the modern-day global agora. That is to say the marketplace of the present day. It is a school without standards. Anyone can walk into any classroom and claim to belong there. In the olden days, our man Orende says, the Greek fellows were the wisest of humankind, with the man called Socrates being the wisest of them all.

They say that it was an oracle which said Socrates was the wisest of men. The Oracle at Delphi. When the Greek people said that they wanted to find out who the wisest man was, the Oracle said the wisest man was the one who knew that he knew that he did not know. And that was only Socrates. The rest did not know, but they liked pretending that they knew.

These Greek people met regularly in this agora place. They assembled to listen to wisdom from Socrates and other men of great learning. They were truly men of ideas. And so, this agora thing was at once the place where the people met. When they were not in this place, they were just citizens. But when they met here to float ideas and debate them, they became the agora, our wise man Orende says.