One of the often lauded/ lamented aspects of the Internet is it's so called "democratizing effect". Basically, everyone can say whatever they want i.e. "democratic" followed by the lament but then everyone can say whatever offensive rubbish they want.
But the internet does more than simply change the volume of political discourse (humor me) it actually changes how we process information. ..... Ok, I better give an example (
here ) . The EFF ( Electronic Freedom Foundation) recently obtained a whole lot of documents (1138) from the FBI using the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). This information needs to be "processed" which really means scoured for relevance i.e. given a particular agenda you look at the information in relation to other technical, legal and political information. So they did the sensible thing, published the information and asked everyone (anyone interested enough) to have a look and report back on what they find. They got 8000 people to do just that.
This all seems very run of the mill until you compare it to the status quo. Which might go something like this: journalist obtains documents; hires a lawyer, techi, and political researcher; given limited knowledge they scour the documents; the result doesn't match the editors idea of a story (or doesn't support his politics) and it's filed away. Yea, I'm a cynic.
The new approach is different because the "positive" effects of the amateurs add but the "negative" effects don't. i.e. the agenda is the sum of the individual goals , the knowledge base is the sum of all their knowledge (i.e. lots of amateurs beats a few professionals) and because their is no organisation (as in institution) in control no one can veto an idea (or story) i.e there is no gatekeeper. Yes, they make more mistakes but the group self corrects (at least on matters of fact), like if you play Chinese whispers but talk openly to everyone.
This kind of approach isn't new to the Internet. It's the basis of open source programming and NASA has even used it to analyse map data, using thousands of "clickworkers". But I guess my point is that this is a radical departure from the present.
Labels: internet, politics
