To the Editor:

Before Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1440s, Europe was in what historians used to call, The Dark Ages. News traveled slowly and infrequently, mostly by word of mouth.

Traveling visitors were its primary source. They would tell locals about things they saw and heard in other places. Important government news would arrive in a more formal fashion, usually by messenger on horseback, or even by carrier pigeon.

In the Americas, some cultures communicated across long distances aurally using drumming patterns. Others used smoke signals, a visual technique.

Although imperfect, all these methods served an important function. They disseminated important news - matters of war and peace, life and death. The political spin, opinion, and gossip that qualifies as news today would have been difficult to share 600 years ago. Imagine trying to represent who slept with whom in a smoke signal.

Nowadays, we have the opposite problem. We are bombarded with news twenty-four hours per day via social media, text message, computer, radio, television, newspapers, and cell phone apps. It is an endless stream of news, often labeled

"Breaking News." Just ten years ago, seeing "Breaking News" on the television screen was scary. It meant there was a major earthquake, plane crash, or other such tragedy. Today, it could mean something as mundane as a Presidential candidate's arrival at a meeting on Capitol Hill.

Given current technology, we should be the most informed, enlightened, intelligent people in human history. But our vast and varied media make it difficult for us to distinguish important news from trivial news, fact from opinion, and truth from gossip.

We have created our own twenty-first century dark age - not through too little information, but through too much.

Marty Wimmer

Canton