It's a Wiki world - Pt. 2

Yesterday we looked at the changes in journalism and the reliability of the press, and used Wikipedia as the new model of distributed intelligence. My point, in part, was that we should not place absolute trust in any source of information: nobody gets it exactly right, and some get it disastrously wrong (or are disastrously wrong-headed).

This understanding also relates to the idea that asymmetrical information -- when one person has more info than the person she is negotiating with -- is in itself a moral hazard. If we want to deal with moral hazards, we don't need to get tough with punishment so much as make sure that everyone has access to the same information.

I find this casts an interesting light on the idea of privacy. If we are all human, what is there to fear from someone else knowing our human-ness? That's meant to be a rhetorical question, but the fact is that some parts of this society know a whole lot more about us than we think they do, or that we know of them. That type of asymmetry can easily be turned into impositions of power that is markedly asymmetric.

It's not so much about privacy as it is about guilt and shame -- we fear that our personal foibles and failings will makes us vulnerable to someone with intimate knowledge of us, especially if that person also has political power. But what if we all know so much about each other that we recalibrate guilt, and separate private human weakness from psychopathic, destructive behavior? What would that do to our astonishing homicide rate?

Small, cohesive social groups, like tribes or villages, are often marked by low levels of violence or crime. It could be argued that one reason for that is that in those cultures everybody knows everybody, information about people is pretty equally shared. The village works by both setting standards of conduct, and by helping identify and deal with personal problems before they are catastrophes.

Very few of us live in that type of village. But some of us are experiencing a heightened sense of personal community as we observe and engage in the conversations that flourish on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social media networks. As a corollary, Wikipedia is an instructive model of how distributed learning creates a process that engages people across a broad spectrum while it also delivers a product of high (if not perfect) reliability.

I have great hope for Wikipedia, and for all the other tools that help us build meaningful social networks. We are just beginning, still learning how to handle these new sources of information, but perhaps this can be a way to share what we learn with a larger and larger part of our planet. I think that may be an unprecedented way to understand the unexpected ways we are, indeed, connected. To my mind, there is no more important lesson to be learned in our lives. Wiki on.