Some thoughts

I think that like most people I have a love/hate relationship with the media. I know it manipulates people into believing that boots look good over skinny jeans and that ugly men are attractive just because they're famous. I am aware that the news media blatantly omit (and put emphasis on) what they want in the interest of selling more papers. Television advertising talks down to their audiences in the most patronizing ways, trying desperately to reinvent their products in order to sell more to consumers who didn't need it in the first place. The main newspaper of the capital city of New Zealand, the Dominion Post, has recently shrunk their world section to cover 2 - 3 pages, on a good day, and those pages are often riddled with advertising. And they still call themselves a newspaper.

But then there is the internet. I love the internet. I remember many conversations with friends about the potential for the internet as a means of bettering the world; the potential behind the unhindered spread of information; the potential to fully realise a true democracy. For example, would they ever allow online voting for government or local elections? If they allowed that then maybe they would have forums where people could vote on other issues, such as policy changes and the spending of tax payers money. I guess the joke is that you can submit your thoughts and opinions to the council on certain matters, when they call for submissions; you can even do this online. The difference between what my friends and I were musing about seems to me to come down to participation and transparency. Your opinion is not actively sought and it takes time and effort to participate, with no guarantee of a favorable outcome. You cannot read other submitters' opinions nor can you get a summary of the overall results. And after reading the submissions and taking them into account the councillors still get to decide on the matter at hand.

If there were a way for all those affected by a decision to have the chance to vote and/or state an opinion on a matter (the process of which was transparent and available for everyone to see) surely the best outcome for those affected would be reached by debate and consensus. And in the same vein, if everyone were able to participate in a debate about any topic known to man, surely eventually the ultimate truth of that topic would be reached, regardless of whether or not everyone agreed with each other, as long as the process of debate was transparent. The only way to arrive at an ultimate truth (within the limitations of human knowledge) is to have accessible all the knowledge and the ways in which a consensus as to the truth of that knowledge was reached. The obvious thing to bring into this topic here is the Web 2.0 services that are available through the internet such as blogs and more specifically wikis.

Wikipedia is a good, albeit limited, example of the potential of a site for holding an open discourse with the ultimate goal of arriving as close to the truth as possible on as many topics as possible. Traditional encyclopedias (Brittanica, etc) are taken as ultimate truths but those involved in writing them, we are assured, are very well informed. And therein lies the problem for many people with Wikipedia - it is not guaranteed that the information we are reading is put forward by an educated or well informed person. At university you are never allowed to use Wikipedia as a reference or source and it seems common place to doubt information presented on the site, mostly thanks to the general air of paranoia about uninformed people writing rubbish to mislead everyone. And yet within the legal system it goes unquestioned that all it takes to decide what the truth of a matter is is twelve people and as much time as they need to debate and arrive at a consensus.