“I don’t trust those blogs,” my English teacher defiantly remarked the other day. Emphasis on the word blog, as if the name itself were something obscene. Did she just say what I think she said? My heart began to pump a little louder. Sweat began to accumulate on my forehead. “They’re just not reputable,” she admonished in a you-crazy-teenager voice of skepticism. Yep, the earth-shattering declaration of unreliability was made. The trump card was played. "It’s simply unsanitary to associate with the plebeian multitude -- to peer into the cacophonous chamber of unfettered free-speech that is the internet 2.0," she seemed to suggest. I practically died right then and there of a coronary thrombosis of the most anxious degree.
Despite the pompous Parthian shot to my fragile ego -- and the ensuing panic attack -- I have to admit that her fear is not altogether irrational. As a species designed to operate on an individual level, we like to believe that an intelligent referee is monitoring the veracity of the media we digest. We like to believe that every piece of information is fact-checked, impartial, and wrapped in a pretty bow. We like to have faith in those above us and in those around us. To the dismay of many, the blogosphere, on the other hand, is not monitored, not refereed, and not fact-checked. Instead, it is what I consider to be the paradigmatic uninhibited marketplace of ideas. It is the ultimate forum for freedom of speech and for the democracy of thought so vital to our survival as a society.
What makes us uncomfortable about Wikipedia, Google, and the blogosphere, is that our brains were not designed to conceptualize the whole at the expense of the part. We are fixated on individual reliability (Is this article accurate? Is this reporter accredited? Is this book on Oprah’s book list?) at the price of large-scale optimization.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, uses the reverse logic: It sacrifices a little bit of accuracy on the microscale for a whole lot of efficiency on the macroscale. This is the concept of probabilistic statistics. In the world of the internet, information is emergent: an invisible hand steers the flow of ideas and information, sifting the good towards the top, and the bad towards the bottom. In the backwards entropy of our democracy, our economy, our evolution, and our internet, chaos on the individual level comes together to form a coherent whole. The whole is stronger than sum of the individual parts.
Therefore, Encyclopedia Encarta’s biggest flaw isn’t accuracy (although we give it more credit than it deserves), it’s omission. Despite sloppiness on the microscale, Wikipedia will excel over time by amassing greater and greater quantities of data, and higher and higher concentrations of the world’s information supply. Encarta will inch forward. Today, Wikipedia’s 1,045,000 articles absolutely eclipse Encarta’s meager 40,000. Tomorrow, the gap will only widen.
A free market place of ideas provides a breadth and depth of information unimaginable to the intellectual plutocracy that edits the mainstream media. Sure, no one blog post or one Wikipedia entry is authoritative, but their function is not as the ultimate ends for accuracy, but as the means for the probabilistic emergence of the world’s collective intelligence.
No comments:
Post a Comment