Sunday, April 22, 2007
Here I am again...
... in The Sunday Times - The Web is Dead; Long Live the Web, an article that asks for trouble. Everybody thinks they know more about the internet than everybody else so I anticipate a tirade of abuse and de haut en bas dismissals. But, heigh ho, there you go.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Great piece. The part about identity and anonymity particularly resonates. I've never got the idea of why anyone would want to be an anon, except that they usually want to be more outrageous or more belligerent in their identity-less persona.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, time to walk the dogs; they're itching to get back on their laptops.
Ah, the destruction of civilsation argument, must be up there hookers, for longevity. While, the Keen argument was, more or less word for word, used by Baron Macaulay in the Reform debates of the Nineteenth century. And culture somehow muddled on.
ReplyDeleteThe word freedom used in the context of the web is similar to its use with reading/writing. And with reading and writing there is no limit, once learned, on how it is used. Social commentary or porn, as with Lady Chatterly's Lover, is your freedom.
The notion that all wisdom is based on identity is a rather odd statement, while the connection of authority with wisdom ?. Idi Amin ?.
The Shakespeare segment of the article is an valid argument for the blogs. Before him, Seneca for the plays and Horace/Catullus for the poems, in Latin. After, widespread access to good art.
And should the sensitive little flowers have such difficulties with the current situation, Latin is always available. If they find that language too inclusive, they could notate their gems in the insular style.
this blog of yours is a good move because I actually looked out for your page today instead of rushing ahead to find AA Gill and what old tosh the CD reviewers were recommending this week. so there you go.
ReplyDeleteBut I can't remember what it was about now... (if it's any consolation, you were much better than Gill this week - possibly any week, I don't actually know).
ah, yes, thanks vince.
now why does everything need a purpose to exist, and why can't we hope to be happy until we've found out what that purpose is? I've never thought of it in terms of control vs. anarchy. for me it isn't a matter of here's the internet, what's it for exactly? rather it's, we're in the internet, what can we do here!
If I had to choose one of those two options I'd choose anarchy, I guess. so, hands off our internet! look at it as the last wilderness we have.
Excelent piece, Bryan. However I disagree with you regarding the danger of anonymity. I don't think that it will overwhelm the practice of identity based discoruse, mainly because at heart we all crave recognition. Anonymity can act as lubricant to online conversations, easing the anxiety that many people have.
ReplyDeleteI write under the name Duck, but my true identity is available to anyone who looks my profile. If I someday write something truly noteworthy I want Robert Duquete to get the credit, not Duck.
Another reason that the realm of identity based interaction won't be threatened is that it is indispensable. Any information that we actually need, that we take action on, will need attribution and verification. Dan Rather found out what happens when you don't get your sources straight. Noone is going to arrange for eye surgery with a character named "Ninja" or "Crazy Alice".
Sorry, that should be Robert Duquette.
ReplyDeleteAh, identity problem of your own, Duck. Thanks for the kind words.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up with a French name in an English speaking country is bound to lead to identity problems. That's how I became Duck.
ReplyDeleteIt is a great piece. But anonymous commentators, or those who pretend to be Edwina Currie etc, grate in blogs because blogs are not about anonymity at all. The opposite is true: they are about personalities.
ReplyDeleteBut the blogger has the ability to manipulate his persona in a way that is not nearly so easy in real life. 'Brit', for example, is not exactly me: rather, it's me, but more so.
Good point, Brit, "Bryan Appleyard' is not me either. He's more jaunty.
ReplyDeletei read your article while the nearby on but unlit oven filled the house with gas, which i failed to detect till my landlady rushed in cursing and panicking at my near demise.
ReplyDeletei only see anonymity as a problem with abusive commentators (courage.com, as someone on my blog put it). If one assumes a 'fake' identity, and if one remains static, i.e. not changing one's identity Carlos the Jackal-style, then that fake id becomes as graspable as one's official, tax-paying name, just differently so. i advised a soon-to-be undergrad not to pretend to be anything 'cool' in his first-year, because his real self would naturally re-assert itself, and the lie would become apparent.
So if i write as 'Elberry', what i write will form around that supposedly hidden self, and define it. i may pretend to be a prestigious academic, an authority of some kind, but what i write will in fact constitute my on-line 'me'.
i allow my on-line self to say what i feel like saying, and don't try to form a coherent id; and i don't fear retribution, because i'm a temp with no 'real world' standing, hence no reputation to lose.
I notice that the 10 comments you've received so far are on the whole agreeable and good natured. Does this negate your argument, or does it reflect an editorial policy? I'm tempted to Digg your article to help you engage more with the "Web 2.0" audience. Hope that's OK with you.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Anon. I have no editorial policy on comments.
ReplyDeleteWhich Bryan Appleyard is it that's more jaunty I wonder...
ReplyDeleteThe blogger, B.
ReplyDeleteAs promised, you've been Dugg http://digg.com/tech_news/Web_2_0_may_be_destroying_civilisation. I hope it helps widen the debate.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, there was a thoughtful piece a little while ago on The Huffington Post about the absurdity of using anonymous comments as the basis of an argument. (In my business, it happens with depressing frequency).
ReplyDeleteWith regard to Bebo MySpace and Facebook - I don't think these are creating an inflated sense of ego in teens; teens and youths have always had massively over inflated egos, and these site simply reveal how bananas teen identity really is!
ReplyDeleteInteresting article. Certainly gave me pause, though I, perhaps predictably, don't think it applies to me or my blog.
ReplyDeleteNot too bad of an article, but it seems to have a bit of the "teen age ego problem" it laments. Specifically, the idea that people Mr Appleyard reads are the first people to discuss this issue. One need only read back through old USENET discussions of a decade or two ago to see exactly this same sort of concern for exactly the same reasons (I remember, I was there). The AOL interconnect issue is a goldmine of this sort of angst.
ReplyDeleteI was actually engaged in a discussion on whether anonymous commenting was a good thing or promoted incivility back in the mid 1970s in a different online community. We also discussed the effects of opening up a small, homogenous online environment built on trust to "the masses" in basically the same terms that Appleyard quotes in his article.
I feel like a parent listening to my teenage child go on about problems that are unique and different for him and his generation. I am glad to see the issues being brought up, but realizing that others have thought about and dealt with precisely these same issues in the past is important as well.
Two things spring to mind when reading the article. Firstly, the main reason the "wisdom of the crowd" works so well when guessing the weight of the ox is that everyone really is doing their best to guess the actual weight. There's no reason why anyone should gain any advantage by "tactical guessing", or want to misrepresent their own opinions - they want to win the competition, and to do that they can only make their honest best guess. In other fields - such as politics, business, sport and religion - on the other hand, there are often very good reasons why people may not want to offer their true opinions or have reasons to have opinions that diverge from the facts. Ask the crowd to predict the results of a football tournament and the results will be biased towards the team with the most supporters and/or the best repution, which is often a long way from the true probabilities (Fink Tank passim). You can only trust the wisdom of the crowd where the majority of the crowd actually want to be wise.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the criticism of Wikipedia as if it's an example of the failure of the "wisdom of the crowd" motif is, in my opinion, misplaced. Wikipedia is not a monolithic whole, with thousands of contributors to every article. Some articles have only a handful of contributors, or even only one. So there's no wisdom of the crowd there, it's just as likely to be off-centre as any individual perception of the facts. As it happens, the articles on Wikipedia that do have the most contributors are, on the whole, the least likely to be wildly wrong, thus suggesting that the wisdom of the crowd can work in at least some sense there. But even so, it's working because Wikipedia has a large core of contributors who do care about trying to be accurate - they really want to give the correct weight of the ox. Apply the same user-contributed principle to, say, a politics wiki and it's likely to fail under the pressure of crowd bias.
I think it's hilarious when people from one media criticise another media. The 'dead tree' story writers of your article claim a greater level of authority on many topics, but on mass, just about every media has their grubby tabloid story to eloquent piece of insightful investigative journalism. Maybe the scary part of web 2.0 is not that there are more of the grubby tabloid voices, but that soon we will have generations of people who know that they must take anything they see read or hear with a pinch of salt
ReplyDelete