Social media is to knowledge what fast food is to nutrition

"Social media" is the term we now apply to technology platforms and the networks of people created on them. Social media made mass communication universally accessible. This means that any moron with a smart phone and a bit of software installed on it can deliver their "thoughts" to a broad audience at the push of a button, a click of a mouse, or a tap on a touchscreen. In essence (highlighting the two terms in italics):

Broadcasting moronisms has never been easier.

Once upon a time, a faster machinegun decided which army could kill more people in less time and win it a battle decisively. Then the drawn-out stalemated trench warfares of World War I demonstrated to us what happens when machineguns became universally accessible. When every army and its grunts are able to spray lead at 700 rounds per minute at their enemy, you know it is time to invent a better approach to winning a war.

What is interesting about the rise of "social media" is that it has supposedly "empowered" the average individual to speak her mind. The trouble is that this "empowerment" is in the hands of that individual and a billion-odd others. So like the proverbial machineguns in early Twentieth Century shooting battles, the social landscape mashed up with the noise emanating from "social media" metaphorically looks a bit like the landscape of a typical World War I battlefield -- a gray tragic wasteland pockmarked by foxholes and trenches.

In today's world where "social media" is interwoven into the minutiae of our lives, we are much like those poor British Tommies crouching in their trenches under the din of constant machinegun fire overhead. Every one of us is similarly hunched over our laptops and smartphones in a stupor, being drip-fed rubbish by the data "feeds" continuously churned out by our Facebook and Twitter accounts. The only difference is that while the World War I Tommy kept his head down to keep it from being shot off, the 21st Century social media warrior is keeping her eyes peeled lest she "misses out" on the latest dirt slung by the moron of the moment -- literally.

Whereas in the past, we opened our minds in a conscious effort to absorb insightful knowledge, today our minds are a sad sub-conscious dumpsite for mere data -- those waste products of the modern technologies that transfix us and the modern "social networks" that bind us today.