The New Scribes: The Hidden Skill Gap of the Information Age

With every new technology comes the replacement of a previous professional class, and the creation of a new one. Writing used to be the exclusive work of scribes. When Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type, a new professional class emerged to manage the printed word. This evolved into the era of mass media, where radio hosts and news casters became the navigators of information.

The internet, however, is different. It is deceptive. Because it is so easy to create and consume content, we have been lulled into believing that discovery is also easy. But the truth is that finding useful information on the modern internet has become a specialized, high-effort skill. We have inadvertently created a “New Scribe” class.

The Deception of Ease

In previous eras, the barrier to information was technical. Producing for radio or television was difficult and required expensive equipment. With the internet, the means of production are in everyone’s pocket. This ease of use makes us laud the discovery engine, without realizing that finding quality actually requires more discipline than ever before.

Take Google Search as an example. Most users only know how to perform a basic search, accepting whatever the first page of results provides. But there is a growing class of “Power Users” who know how to use operators, navigate forums like Reddit to find human-vetted answers, and bypass the “Reputation Trap” of SEO-optimized content.

The internet may be full of information, but it takes an incredible amount of skill and grind to find the stuff that is actually useful to you.

The Paradox of Choice

We often hear that the internet is the “great equalizer.” But if finding information that improves your life requires a high level of digital literacy, the internet is only an equalizer for those who already have the skill to navigate it. The gap between a person who can use the internet to their advantage and a person who is merely a passive consumer of the algorithm’s noise is widening.

As product builders, we face a moral and technical challenge: we must increase the odds that an “average” user can find information that improves their lives. For decades, the tech industry tried to solve this through the concept of the Semantic Web.

The Failure of the Semantic Web

Pitched by Tim Berners-Lee as the future of the internet, the Semantic Web was supposed to make information readable by machines. It aimed to move beyond matching keywords to helping machines understand the context of documents through a system called “triples” (Subject-Predicate-Object).

But the Semantic Web failed to achieve mass adoption. Why? Because it required humans to do the heavy lifting. It required every creator to meticulously tag their content with metadata that machines could understand. In the chaotic, high-volume world of the Creator Economy, nobody had the time or the incentive to do that.

We were left with a digital library where the books have no covers and the librarians only speak in binary.

The Return of the Specialist

Because the Semantic Web failed to organize the chaos, we have returned to a world where “finding” is a profession. Whether it is a researcher using specialized databases or a developer searching through documentation, the ability to find “Signal” is now a high-value skill.

The fundamental value proposition of the internet remains unfulfilled for the majority of people. We have the data, but we lack the context. However, a new node in the spectrum of discovery has emerged. We are finally moving away from asking humans to “tag the world” and toward machines that can “infer the context.”

This is the third essay in the Signal & Sense series. In our final piece, The LLM as the Semantic Bridge, we will explore how Layer 3 systems are finally achieving the dream of the Semantic Web and bringing the “magic” of discovery back to the user.