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.

It's a Wiki world - Pt. 1

An article in the current Atlantic looks at the Sotomayor nomination news cycle in terms of demonstrating how "news" content is coming largely from political ideologues who are effective at skimming all those feeds out there in order to isolate the most incendiary moments. The author, Mark Bowden, calls this "post journalism."

The article then repeats the meme that serious journalism -- the pursuit of a story that is focused on understanding context and background and worrying "truth" out of a mess of facts -- is dying, if not dead. As the profession of journalism becomes smaller and smaller, the time spent on news programming is more often filled by uncritical commentary on little splinters of reality. The point is not to find the truth: "No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right." And the Internet has a lot to answer for in promoting this type of post-journalism reporting.

That may explain a lot about our current political debate and the tenor of our news media, but just how long has journalism been around in any form? From its beginnings in the 17th and 18th centuries, journalism flourished as a tool of different power groups. Slanted, vitriolic, aggrieved -- the truth had little to do with it. We have been fortunate enough over the last 100 years or so to have, somehow, been blessed with an enlightened practice of journalism that did make, at least some of the time in some places, an effort to find the truth. We can bemoan its passing, but why should we expect anything different, people being what they are?

Which brings me to Wikipedia. The idea of a user-generated encyclopedia struck fear into the hearts of those who believe in experts and objective truth. While I accept that experts are important, there are a lot of "amateur" experts out there who, taken collectively, have a lot to add to our understanding of factual reality. The stories of bogus articles and slanders got a lot of attention, but a recent study showed that Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. In other words, even the experts don't get everything right.

The real question concerns how we know whether something is a fact or ... something else. That comes down, I think, to trust. My own rule of thumb is  simple: In matters of truth, trust no one." My second rule of thumb, a corollary if you will, is: "Trust everyone -- to get it wrong."

Every story is incomplete, slanted, infected with an incomplete understanding of which facts count, which ones don't. But all those stories might help you (me) understand what the larger truth is. And as you pay attention to who tells you what, you might be able to trust some people a bit more than others. Which does not relieve you of the obligation to test and verify. And to keep track of those who just don't seem to get anything right about the facts.

Wikipedia is a fantastic tool, but you shouldn't rely on it as your only source, any more than you should rely on the Encyclopedia Britannia as your only source. Wikipedia is here to stay, and it should be. The power of the decentralized and distributed learning, I think, opens the door to views of reality with a less restricted point of view. And I believe that where we are right now with blogger journalism is just an early phase of this development towards a more subtle, varied and variegated understanding or factual truth.

As more of us learn how to participate in the Wiki world -- sharing our knowledge with others in a cooperative and skeptical conversation about our world -- I have great hope that we can all learn important lessons. Especially about trust.
But then, perhaps I'm a little too trusting.