http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMSinyx_Ab0
Here is a link to a 48 minute documentary on Wikipedia and Truth.
It makes some interesting points but doesn't quite cover enough ground in the areas that I'm interested in.
The contemporary media environment has shifted dramatically in regards to the production, dissemination and reception of information. In terms of ‘audience’ media consumption, that shift has precipitated a move towards a complex mediascape where individuals now have a huge amount of influence over what media they engage with and when, or how often – in effect rendering them no longer ‘audiences’ but what Axel Bruns calls “prod-users”. Lievrouw and Livingstone address this shift from the perspective of traditional media modes of operation towards one where its focus is on ‘mediation’ – I will look at this in more detail in a future post.
With the arrival of new media technology, specifically the internet and the development of Web 2.0, people are now enabled and encouraged to seek out and furthermore question information in a much less traditional manner than before. This is through offering forums and spaces where public discussions and debates not only take place, but are also recorded in their entirety and displayed for anyone who is interested to see. This transparency is a vital key to the longevity of a system whose goals are to host and publish open discourses on just about every topic as it exemplifies the level of inclusion that applies to all users, not just the creators.
Charles Leadbetter identifies a growing social desire for explicit control over our own media diets. He summarises this social development:
In the we-think economy people don’t just want services and goods delivered to them. They also want tools so that they can take part in places in which to play share, debate with others.
Web 2.0 offers Internet users the facilities through which they are able to participate in a variety of online communities. Different platforms available through the Web 2.0 services vary according to user behaviour and expectations of that platform. For example, blogs are designed around contribution, of both the blog owner and its readership; social networks are designed to do exactly that: to network people, to connect them. Leadbetter states that “for sustained creative collaboration to take off” another tool is needed: at present that tool is the wiki. The power of the wiki lies in the power of the collective. What wiki’s allow, is for people to co-operate with the goal of “summaris[ing] a debate or amass[ing] a body of information and creat[ing] documents with a collective author.” This change in approach has seen massive growth with the arrival of Web 2.0 platforms; blogs, networking sites and, of course, Wikipedia. With Wikipedia, users are automatically placed in a position of authority, asserting this new produser approach for its users and enabling them to participate fully in the activities taking place within it.
The tone of the media is shifting (or has shifted, really) – people don’t like being told anymore, they want to find and then decide for themselves. They want to participate and engage and make sure that they are not being duped as a result of hidden interests. With this shift comes a changing face for ‘audiences’, one where they are respected for their individuality and knowledge and not talked at in ways which are designed to relieve them of their time and money.
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.
Wikipedia is an open-source free encyclopaedia, which relies on the participation (in the practical form of writing and editing information) of its users to keep it up-to-date and relevant. Although it is easy to identify the flaws of such an online service (some of which I will discuss in detail in future posts), I think it is also pertinent to assess the value of Web 2.0 services like Wikipedia in relation to the potential of achieving a truthful global record of historical and social events. However, in order to address this topic it is pertinent to discuss several of the issues and theories surrounding a service such as Wikipedia.
The predominant questions that arises when addressing issues centred around Web 2.0, and Wikipedia in particular, focus on access, equality and education as well as the notion of collective intelligence. Services such as Wikipedia rely on user interaction and participation to fill its database. Users are encouraged to write about what they know, and edit previous articles in a bid to build a database of information: “the sum of all human knowledge”. Not surprisingly, one issue for the general populous accepting this kind of ‘information evolution’ is authority – who has the authority on that information and where did they get the authority (or authoritative information) from? After all, as Martijn de Waal points out, “[e]very link from a blog to an article in a newspaper raises that paper’s ‘page ranking’ in Google and thus its visibility and potential authority”. This unintentional voting system works against the valid “systems of collaborative intelligence” which predisposes that all users will “work together on the basis of equality to create meaning and compile knowledge”.
According to Stephen Lax (2007), user-inequality is a key flaw for the egalitarian ideals of the internet and Web 2.0 as expressed by Charles Leadbetter (We-Think) and de Waal. Aside from access issues, dubbed ‘the digital divide’ (as in not everyone has access to the internet, and the system privileges those who do and rewards them for it), Lax maintains that new information and communications technologies (ICTs) are not the answer to bring about a more equal society. Instead, the Internet merely reflects the general material inequalities which currently separate the rich from the poor, the fed from the starving and the privileged from the underprivileged.
However, Pierre Levy (2001) disagrees with Lax when he argues that, likewise with the television then the film industry, that the potential for the internet to exclude some and include others is not as big a problem as other deem it to be. Not everyone has access to a telephone and corporations make massive profits off the communications industry (and regulate it) but that certainly does not make the case against them, is Levy’s argument. He goes further to point out that it is “not the poor who are “against the Internet, but those whose power, privilege (especially cultural), and monopoly are threatened by the emergence of new configurations of the communications infrastructure”. Here Levy is hinting at the power structures which are in place and prove more of a threat to equality than the existence of new communications technologies.
Critics and sceptics of Wikipedia also cite vandalism as a concerning factor as to the reliability of the information on the website – how can users tell that the information they seek has not been written by a vandal trying to misinform? Users assume, and granted are sometimes right, that people will abuse the system through vandalism. However, this I liken to a school goer defacing an encyclopaedia in the library. At first it is gratifying and fun to write vile words and draw crude pictures on the pages but eventually it becomes boring because the environment they are in (the library) always maintains the same purpose and the librarians diligently erases all the vandalism as it occurs. It becomes tiresome to continually vandalise something where other people have a vested interest in returning it to its original (or improved) state. With Wikipedia, the hope then is that eventually the vandals will become bored and move on to another forum for (or form of) expression. Charles Leadbetter, the father of We-Think theory, has faith in this eventually happening, in believing that, given time, “a collective consensus will emerge”.
Beyond vandalism, access and equality, huge concerns still exist around the quality of the information (see Lax: 2007) as a result of the contributions not being written by those in authoritative positions (a graduated historian writing about history, for example). Martijn de Waal discussed these concerns through looking at the current shift from the expert paradigm (“in which experts accredited by official bodies determine what is true and what is not”) towards a more meritocratic system (where what counts is proven expertise rather than institutional embeddedness”). De Waal claims that “the position of traditional experts is being undermined by ‘collaborative intelligence’ systems such as Wikipedia in which media users cooperate in an egalitarian manner”. Through the demise of the expert paradigm, according to de Waal, we can expect to see “a new balance” gradually emerging; in other words, “new collective forms of canonisation” . Furthermore, Leadbetter states that “as people become dependant on the expert knowledge of professionals they loose faith in their own capacity to act”, highlighting the importance of ongoing social engagement in relevant discussions through platforms such as Wikipedia.
This is a complex topic and through this blog I hope to explore it as fully as I can. One important aspect of my discussion here is reader participation, so, if you have any thoughts on the topics covered here I would like to hear it: you have a voice, use it!
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