Here’s a blog post entitled Stupidity in large numbers doesn’t equal smart, the basic premise, I think, being that the blogosphere excels at being an echo chamber for daft notions which tend to drown out intelligent thought. I’d agree with the analysis but I’m not sure it’s a problem.
The thing about the echo chamber is it’s very easy to spot because everyone’s saying the same thing. Once you’ve identified the nonsense you simply filter it out. Being someone who parses a number of tech blogs I’ve come across the iPhone nonsense described in the post but, while annoying, it doesn’t bother me because I’ve already flagged these people in my mind as stupid. In a perverse way it actually helps because I can then disregard anything else they say based on this evidence, thus lopping off a whole swathe of nonsense from my radar. But when I come across someone who, through exasperation, is driven to write something thoughtful and intelligent I spot them and make a note. This person has a brain. What else have they written?
95% of anything is rubbish. This applies to the internet as much as the rest of the world. The beauty of the internet is we’re able to curate that 5% into something useful rather that just swimming through the shit. And as for Digg… Well, I never go there because it’s a stupid magnet, but I like that it exists. It keeps the stupid in one place.
I got the link via Ben Hammersley who titles it “When they start crowd-sourcing news, this is what will happen.” Sure, if you use the whole crowd. More sensible to parse the clever from the crowd and source that. Which is what we’ve been doing with our blogs all these years.
The future is safe.
“Sure, if you use the whole crowd. More sensible to parse the clever from the crowd and source that. Which is what we’ve been doing with our blogs all these years.”
I’m not so convinced. There are two problems to deal with here. The first is that the crowd is on both sides of the divide: they’re the audience too. Which means that you can’t rely on them to effectively filter the stupid out. (If we could rely on crowds to do that, we’d not have an echo chamber in the first place). Sure, you and I might be right, but that’s not going to help when the everyone else is wrong. For the iPhone, who cares, but for important news, this is a big problem.
The second problem is that you can only filter on topics you know about. Sure, I know which blogs to read about Apple news, from long bitter experience. But how do I build that experience about the blogs about, say, Pakistani politics? How do I know who is part of an echo chamber, and who is a provider of quality independent thought? I have no “don’t go to digg” type reference for that topic.
It’s late, but I keep thinking “layers”. It’s not just The News vs The Crowd. The crowd covers all manner of people at many different levels of knowledge, intelligence and ability.
The other thing that springs to mind is that we haven’t lost the notion of information gatekeepers, rather we’ve got networks of them now. To deal with the second problem, look at the tech blogging networks. You know which blogs to read about Apple development. That network will overlap with one on, say, Python so you should be able to find the Python gatekeepers fairly easily.
The tech world is obviously more mature online than everything else but we can expect everything else to catch up eventually. When the news bods are fully intertwingled you should be able to travel from Finance to Pakistan to Ecology fairly easily through recommendation. And those people will be parsing the crowds for us.
I’m pretty sure we’ve developed the tools to do this over the last decade but the noise of the stupid is proving a little daunting (and understandably so).
Like I say, it’s late.
I think you just reinvented Mainstream Media.
It really always comes back round to this: how do we know what to read. Well, we’ll find someone/something/somemagicbox that will tell us what’s good and what’s not. Maybe we’ll pay them for the service.
Thing is, we already have that. It’s called “The Media”.
I’m not saying to challenge the idea of the new forms of reporting, but rather to point out that the old forms are like they are for a reason. They grew up in pretty much the same way as New Media has. And at every point in the history of any medium, there’s been a time where Gatekeepers had to arise.
Ben traditional media had limited bandwidth and a very high cost of entry. The layers that Pete is describing can admit new players and shift far faster than traditional media has done.