@Mark Ollig
During the Middle Ages in Europe, society was divided into three main groups, called estates.
During the Middle Ages in Europe, society was divided into three main groups, called estates.
The First Estate consisted of the clergy, who were important for teaching morals and providing education.
The Second Estate included the nobles, who owned land and held military power.
The Third Estate consisted of everyone else, including merchants, tradespeople, and laborers, who made up most of the population but had limited influence.
By the 18th century, a new force, the Fourth Estate, emerged in the form of newspapers.
Their content spread across Europe and the American colonies through the printing press, shaping public opinion, challenging officials and at times influencing government policy.
For much of the 20th century, the Fourth Estate, made up of newspapers, radio, and television, reported the news and helped shape the social agenda.
Behind the scenes, wire services used the telegraph and later the telephone to move news quickly, accelerating reporting and expanding journalism’s reach.
These outlets largely determined what the public saw, heard, and understood about the world.
Editors in print newsrooms, along with producers and anchors in radio and television, served as content gatekeepers.
They chose which stories made it into the morning paper or led the evening broadcast and controlled when audiences would see or hear them.
News organizations distributed their work through printing presses and over-the-air broadcast stations, keeping people informed about events in their communities, their state, the nation, and the world.
The Fourth Estate began to change as news and public information began moving to digital platforms.
One of the earliest examples of those platforms was the public dial-up Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS, launched by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess in Chicago during the Great Blizzard of 1978.
A January blizzard made it impossible for their local computer club members to meet, so the two created a virtual meeting solution.
CBBS went live Feb. 16, using a single S-100 bus microcomputer and a 300-baud modem wired into a residential phone line.
The system allowed computer club members to leave messages for one another and upload files that others could download and comment on.
These ongoing exchanges became the model for future hobbyist bulletin board systems, or BBSs, run by system operators known as SysOps.
A BBS enabled users to post messages, share files, chat in real time, and create online communities.
By the late 1970s and 1980s, home computer users were dialing into large online server networks that offered many of the same features as local BBSs and, in some cases, additional services.
In 1979, CompuServe launched its dial-up service, offering email, forums, file libraries, news, and real-time chat.
Prodigy, founded Feb. 13, 1984, began as Trintex, a joint venture of CBS, IBM, and Sears that offered online news, shopping, and banking.
In 1985, GEnie and Quantum Link followed. GEnie was operated by General Electric Information Services in Maryland, and Quantum Link, based in Vienna, VA, was designed specifically for Commodore 64 and 128 computer users.
Unlike local free-to-access BBSs, these large commercial services operated from centralized computer host systems that supported thousands of dial-up users.
In 1992, I launched a local bulletin board system called WBBS Online from my home computer, using Major BBS software and modems connected to four telephone lines.
WBBS offered discussion forums, real-time chat rooms, private email, file libraries, and games.
In 1993, I expanded to six modem lines and switched to Galacticomm World software, which added a graphical, point-and-click interface.
BBSs were the early stage of what would come to be called the digital Fifth Estate. They enabled individuals to publish, respond, and debate directly in shared online venues.
BBS popularity lasted into the mid-1990s as users began moving to internet-only access and using web browsers to reach the World Wide Web.
Later, large mainstream social networking platforms emerged, including MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006 (later renamed X in 2023), and Bluesky, which opened to the public in February 2024.
However, the rise of artificial intelligence-generated content and algorithmic coordination is now altering this decentralized power structure.
These changes are creating a new Sixth Estate in which computer algorithms generate, rank, and distribute information at an unprecedented scale.
AI-driven systems now serve as primary gatekeepers, determining what information is collected, prioritized, and delivered to users.
This raises concerns that people may accept AI output as fact, even when the content is presented without clear citations or sources.
Florence, a former colleague from the Winsted Telephone Company, once told me, “Mark, always consider the source.”
The Sixth Estate uses artificial intelligence and algorithms to create, collect, organize, and quickly share information.
Algorithms can spread false information as easily as they can spread facts, often without clear sources or accountability.
Platforms like TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn use AI-powered recommendation systems to decide what content each user sees.
These systems analyze engagement signals such as clicks, likes, watch time, follows, shares, and comments to predict what users are most likely to view.
As a result, automated algorithms, not human editors, now handle most of the distribution of information.
AI models such as ChatGPT by OpenAI, Gemini by Google, and Claude 4.6 by Anthropic can draft and refine text, summarize information, and translate languages.
Some of these models also can generate images or create video, and some can interpret images.
They also can answer questions, explain complex topics in plain language, analyze information, draft outlines and lesson plans, brainstorm ideas and create step-by-step instructions.
AI assistants such as Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity use underlying AI models to provide conversational and search-based responses to queries.
Image-generation tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Google’s Gemini image tools can create images from text prompts.
Video-generation platforms such as Runway, Pika, Synthesia, and OpenAI’s Sora can generate and edit AI-created video clips.
AI audio tools such as ElevenLabs, Descript’s Overdub, and Amazon Polly can generate realistic synthetic speech for narration, voice-overs, and dubbing.
Sixth Estate systems will blur the line between human and AI-generated content; human oversight is essential to maintain safeguards that protect accuracy, source attribution, and accountability.
Florence’s sage advice to “always consider the source” is more relevant today than ever.
