Our top news networks are co-opting the lowest, most sensationalistic denominators of celebrity and gossip news in a desperate attempt to lure viewers, resulting in an aesthetic that lies somewhere between a performance art installation and the lost scenes from a Felini film.

Recent media clunkers like “Snowmageddon,” a failed series of attempts to hype the winter weather as something akin to a Michael Bay movie, was a predictably stupid follow-up from seeing our nation’s talking heads chase an empty balloon around the Colorado countryside this fall. Reports of a salacious New York Times exposé on NY Governor David Paterson initially became a bigger story than the scandal itself, putting the Governor in crisis mode before he knew what the damage was (disappointing the gossip-hungry masses, the scandal ended up involving a member of his staff, though Paterson’s association led him to step down from reelection). The day after a devastating 8.8-magnitude earthquake hit Chile on Feb. 27, cnn.com’s third-top headline was “Dog the Bounty Hunter Evacuated,” in relation to Hawaii’s non-existent tsunami. How is this news?

This stray-bullet journalism got bad enough with the creation of a 24-hour news cycle, but it’s only gotten worse now that the media is forced to compete with the unfathomably messy signal-to-noise ratio perpetuated by blogs. Gawker’s Nick Denton has publicly promised to break stories before the facts have been confirmed (a philosophy reiterated by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington). Wired magazine Founder Kevin Kelly famously stated that all books should be melded into a “single book.” These are just a few examples of the rampant idiocy permeating the technocracy’s sorry excuse for “journalism.” The mainstream networks need to stop aping these tactics while they still maintain a narrow lead.

Simple math shows if you create a bottomless news hole, you’re bound to end up with a lot of garbage. We’ve always had a habit of turning to outlets that parrot our own preconceived beliefs. Now there’s a limitless supply of ignorant, irresponsibly conceived channels tuned to our subjective tastes, its collective output forming a homogenized mish-mash with diminishing returns. Quantity trumps quality. Time is more important than the facts. Got the news wrong? Who cares — all that matters is you got the story first.

One has to wonder: If “print is dead,” why don’t even the biggest blogs break news in 2010? The Huffington Post still relies primarily on editorials and gossip links, leaving the news-breaking business to “dinosaurs” like the New York Times. Of course, a typical response to anyone who dares question the technocracy is that you’re a Luddite, that you don’t understand new technology. Obviously. This sort of smugness has become a commonplace reaction from dedicated followers of Web 2.0’s totalitarian crowd-think. The Internet is a wonderful thing, capable of connecting people across the globe, giving individuals access to a diverse spread of information and allowing companies unlimited brand reach. Technology is supposed to work for us, you see; it should aid our development and facilitate our quest for information, not conflict with it. When technology is programmed to leave wisdom to the control of crowds, we all suffer for it.

There is an underlying habit to believe technology will eventually solve these problems, that things will “work themselves out,” a claim akin to free market enthusiasts’ responses when the stock market crashes or a religious person’s admonitions when tragedy strikes. The biggest problem with technological determinism is that it undermines humans’ role in all this. Science is millennia away from understanding human concepts like “quality,” so why do we presume our still-nascent machines could do so? Computers can’t determine the value of friendships, so why think the number of our Facebook friends has any bearing on our real world social skills? How about art, loyalty or trust? Finally, how about privacy? Technology understands none of these concepts, yet has made an indelible impact on each. It is our job to ensure that the Internet continues to harness our human potential without interfering with it. As long as we remain in control, quantity should never trump quality.