Dark the dawn. Organized excellence is about to have its day. Burgeoning legions of righteously indignant and pragmatically networked knowledge workers are self-organizing, creating and linking up with the best information sources available (which are VASTLY better than sources existing even a few years ago). It is now orders of magnitude easier for the civil society to shine the light of truth on conventional norms, exposing every nanoscopic crag in the yawning chasm between rhetoric and reason. This is a recipe for much conflict in the coming years, between “conventional antiquarians” on one side and wikipedians (for example) on the other.
How? Information flow through the networks is much more ordered than a simple random walk in the cacophony of information flow would suggest, and significantly less centralized than the mass media environment was. [Benkler, Wealth of Networks Ch. 1, @ 12]
Some sites are much more visible and widely read than others.[The idea that a sufeit of information with no real way of separating the wheat from the chaff forms what Benkler calls the Babel objection. WN, Ch. 5, p. 169:
This is true both when one looks at the Web as a whole, and when one looks at smaller clusters of similar sites or users who tend to cluster.
Most commentators who have looked at this pattern have interpreted it as a reemergence of mass media - the dominance of the few visible sites.
But a full consideration of the various elements of the network topology literature supports a very different interpretation, in which order emerges in the networked environment without re-creating the failures of the mass-media-dominated public sphere.
Sites cluster around communities of interest: Australian fire brigades tend to link to other Australian fire brigades, conservative political blogs (Web logs or online journals) in the United States to other conservative political blogs in the United States, and to a lesser but still significant extent, to liberal political blogs.
In each of these clusters, the pattern of some high visibility nodes continues, but as the clusters become small enough, many more of the sites are moderately linked to each other in the cluster.
Through this pattern, the network seems to be forming into an attention backbone."Local" clusters - communities of interest - can provide initial vetting and "peer-review-like" qualities to individual contributions made within an interest cluster.
Observations that are seen as significant within a community of interest make their way to the relatively visible sites in that cluster, from where they become visible to people in larger ("regional") clusters.
This continues until an observation makes its way to the "superstar" sites that hundreds of thousands of people might read and use.
This path is complemented by the practice of relatively easy commenting and posting directly to many of the superstar sites, which creates shortcuts to wide attention.
It is fairly simple to grasp intuitively why these patterns might emerge.
Users tend to treat other people's choices about what to link to and to read as good indicators of what is worthwhile for them.
They are not slavish in this, though; they apply some judgment of their own as to whether certain types of users - say, political junkies of a particular stripe, or fans of a specific television program - are the best predictors of what will be interesting for them.
The result is that attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable.
Because of the redundancy of clusters and links, and because many clusters are based on mutual interest, not on capital investment, it is more difficult to buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view.
These characteristics save the networked environment from the Babel objection without reintroducing excessive power in any single party or small cluster of them, and without causing a resurgence in the role of money as a precondition to the ability to speak publicly. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Ch. 1.
Individuals must have access to some mechanism that sifts through the universe of information, knowledge, and cultural moves in order to whittle them down to a manageable and usable scope.
The question then becomes whether the networked information economy, given the human need for filtration, actually improves the information environment of individuals relative to the industrial information economy.
There are three elements to the answer: First, as a baseline, it is important to recognize the power that inheres in the editorial function.
The extent to which information overload inhibits autonomy relative to the autonomy of an individual exposed to a well-edited information flow depends on how much the editor who whittles down the information flow thereby gains power over the life of the user of the editorial function, and how he or she uses that power.
Second, there is the question of whether users can select and change their editor freely, or whether the editorial function is bundled with other communicative functions and sold by service providers among which users have little choice.
Finally, there is the understanding that filtration and accreditation are themselves information goods, like any other, and that they too can be produced on a commons-based, nonmarket model, and therefore without incurring the autonomy deficit that a reintroduction of property to solve the Babel objection would impose.]
Let us hope that it is the dark of dawn, at best, from the contemporary-conventional sensibility that sees groupthinking doofuses as firmly in control of all the (traditional) levers of power. [hortatory subjunctive alert] Or is the sun is already visible in the morning sky?
What if incumbent doofuses in all walks of life are in the process of being hauled onto the carpet, Hearthstone-style.
[Hearthstone Fidelity served as a poster-child for regulators seeking to reign in an industry that had developed a ruinous appetite for increasingly unfair and deceptive acts and practices. One hallmark of that episode was the steadfast insistence by the regulatory community on honest-to-goodness honest governance. A seeming shot across the bow by the forces of reason. Query how well remarked this shot.]
Highly visible. The highest visibility. The tone from the top is now: truth be brought to bear. Truthpeople everywhere take heart and bring truth to bear on their local doofuses. Clearing channels, letting the light of truth flood in. Linking up, growing their numbers exponentially along with the effectiveness of their methods.
Doofuspeople peel off slowly, joining the crowd, adopting habits more conducive to being able to get along in this environment. Which, increasingly, involves being truthful, including especially to oneself. The slow-peelers ratchet up their outrageousness in proportion to the effectiveness of the “threat” from this new, intolerant, inflexible, non-negotiable force of nature now invading their bloated livelihoods—up to the limit of what they can maintain, in their particular circumstances. So this can get pretty ugly here and there. Or maybe everywhere.
Will the networked information society ice-9 the field fast enough to thwart destructive doofus-headed earth-scorching recalcitrance? Well, it is possible to see from herenow vast tracts of multiversal real estate in which this condition is true. Which is to say, it seems both possible and highly desirable to steer the system therethen.
Author’s note: therethen, in addition to being an (annoying?) coinage and bookend to the (even more annoying?) herenow of the previous sentence, is a deliberate (and annoyingly pedantic?) tweak of the potential use of thither in its spot (which stands signal to an egregiously pedantic patch of design space indeed, and by dissing it in this fashion, I counterbalance to my own satisfaction the annoyance of the coinages and leave them as dialectic vectors. Thither only gets us there; it doesn’t get us then. In addition to the vector economies, it is salutary to develop a background-independent intuition, which can be greatly aided by suitable vocabulary.When invoking quantum mechanical interpretations of reality (“multiversal real estate”), spacetime words seem more apt than mere space words.
Reference is once again made to this ancient articulation of the practical problems encountered by those who desire to influence the steerage of large ships. Consider: the networked information economy. Is there now in the world a substrate on which strategies based on truth and reason enjoy selective advantages?
2 comments:
Is your truthperson likely to be Taleb's epistemocrat? Someone who holds his own knowledge to be suspect?
Taleb:
Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgment.
Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean that he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will call an epistemocracy. The major modern epistemocrat is Montaigne.
Well, my truthperson has epistemocratic tendencies; but her awareness of her own ignorance serves to sharpen her intolerance of others' ignorance of their own ignorance. She may hesitate to commit on a substantive issue, but does not hesitate to upbraid doofuses on sight, and take them to task for the faults in their reasoning (especially the bogus factual premises). The strategy rigorously truthful is spelled out a bit more in this post.
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