Author: Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis

How will the internet evolve in the coming decades? Fiction writers have explored some possibilities. In his 2019 novel “Fall,” science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a near future in which the internet still exists. But it has become so polluted with misinformation, disinformation and advertising that it is largely unusable. Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy. The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content. To some extent, this…