Neil Postman, describing the Founders' vision of the public square (implied in the First Amendment), in which a literate populace could make productive use of information in reasoning together about the common good and in judging the merits of arguments (and the evidence on which they’re based):

There is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it. This is not to say that the Founding Fathers believed information could not be false, misleading, or irrelevant. But they believed that the marketplace of information and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge its usefulness to their lives. Jefferson’s proposals for education, Paine’s arguments for self-governance, Franklin’s arrangements for community affairs assume coherent, commonly shared principles that allow us to debate such questions as: What are the responsibilities of citizens? What is the nature of education? What constitutes human progress? What are the limitations of social structures?

What purchase does this First Amendment vision have in a nation as far down the road to Technopoly as America? The key line seems to be this one: “They believed that the marketplace of information and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge its usefulness to their lives.” I don’t know anyone who would claim that “the marketplace of information” is properly ordered for these kinds of substantive discussions. The question seems to be: What are the cultural/material/technological/institutional/social conditions needed for enabling the genuine exercise of these First Amendment freedoms? And how has the American Technopoly eroded these conditions as the relationship between technology and culture has been transformed?