It did that, but we had an overly rosy view of what “democratize” meant. We thought that citizen journalists would leaven the bulky corporate media of the time. And they did. But there was also a torrent of bullshit. We have no excuse for not seeing this. The Greeks and Romans spent a great deal of thought on what would happen if the rabble were given a voice. We dismissed their ideas as gatekeeping oligarchy, but it turns out that populism is moatly a dirty word.