The Elusive Truth

Straying a bit from the usual The Secret Of Life subject matter, I was intrigued by a recent article in The Sunday Times called "According to Wikipedia, I'm The Mona Lisa", this title appearing alongside a picture of Rodin's The Thinker. (Get the joke?) This article is based on an interview with 'net entrepreneur' Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur who argues that web 2.0 is killing our culture. The article is only available online on subscription (which is unfortunate but also pertinent to this post). But you can read about Andrew Keen's book on Amazon.com and on the BBC Newsnight site.

According to Keen, we amateurs who are producing our own content through blogs, pods, and YouTube are like the proverbial infinite number of monkeys who have finally been connected - courtesy of the web - to all those typewriters, and are producing not masterpieces but a deluge of bad art and inaccurate information.

What with all the wacky ideas I go on about in this blog, I suppose that Keen would consider me to be the epitome of what he's talking about. But I try not to be a channel for misinformation, and generally speaking, as far as I can tell, so do the other blogs I see. Some of their material may be opinionated, but it usually seems to be clear enough that this is what it's intended to be - this in contrast to some of the professional news media, which frequently try to pass off comment as information.

My favourite blogs are those in which people reflect thoughtfully - and sometimes wittily - upon their own lives. A problem with the professional media is that we only hear from 'ordinary people' under editorial control. 'Reality TV' is only as real as the editors wish to make it, while radio phone-ins often offer little but garbled repetitions of second-hand ideas. Having been on a couple of radio shows myself, I know how hard it can be to get any more than simplistic ideas across. In a blog, you have the time and space to say what you really want to say. A post can be as long or, crucially, as short as you wish it to be. This latter, too, is a welcome contrast to many newspaper articles, where sparse ideas are often stretched to inordinate length to fill up the necessary inches.

You'll have gathered by now that I don't exactly agree with Andrew Keen's ideas, not that I see web 2.0 as any kind of replacement for the mainstream media, more as a welcome adjunct. According to the Sunday Times, however, Keen sees us driving the professional media out of business altogether. 'If traditional news-gathering disappears,' the article asks, 'who will hold the politicians to account?'

Could that be the voters, perhaps?

This is clearly going OTT. No one is getting driven out of business. Many people realize that the news corporations have their own underlying agendas and if they turn to blogs it's to read the opinions of those who are free from such constraints. It's to broaden their outlook and perhaps be entertained. They're not looking for something to supplant the commercial media.

In any case, which medium you turn to for information and opinion is as much a matter of convenience as anything else. During most people's leisure time, newspapers, radio and TV are more conveniently to hand than the internet. If the predictions of the dawn of the computer age had been correct, paper would have been phased out long ago. And yet, surprise surprise, people still read books, newspapers, and even magazines. These media have outlasted the floppy disc, and I'm willing to bet they'll also outlast the DVD. All this stuff about web 2.0 driving newspapers out of business is simply hyperbole, presumably intended to sell more copies of Andrew Keen's book - just as similar hyperbole is used on a daily basis to sell more newspapers. And what seems particularly remarkable is that Keen appears to be actually praising newspapers for their accuracy. If you have ever read anything in a newspaper about which you had special expertise, you may not share his opinion.

Andrew Keen's ideas about all the fiction and poetry on the web appear to be even less convincing. Here again, he seems to believe that commercial publishers are being driven out of business. Yet what it seems like to me, as the author of three unpublished novels (one of which is really quite good, honest) is that while there might be all sorts of opportunities these days for self-publishing fiction, it's just as hard to get anyone to read the stuff as ever. While the standard of professionally published fiction may be more uneven than it used to be - with some books apparently finding a publisher less because of their literary merit than because they fit a promising marketing niche - professional publication is still the best indicator that a book may actually be worth reading. And with so many such books on the shelves, why should anyone turn instead to a self-published ebook by an unknown author?

Self-published non-fiction may stand more of a chance of finding readers, but only if its subject matter is being overlooked by the professionals. This alternative channel for publication serves to keep the professionals on their toes and is surely all to the good. Keen warns of the dangers of inaccuracies in such books, yet readers are able to judge them the same as they can any other work of non-fiction: at least partly on the strength of the sources they cite. Our modern world certainly requires wary readers, but I suspect it has always been so.

Yet what of the sources themselves? What of our sources of reference? Here, at last, I find Andrew Keen's ideas more convincing. I've touched on the shortcomings of Wikipedia in a previous post but I hadn't realized quite how 'democratic' the site is. According to Keen, no weight whatsoever is given to the established expertise of contributors. The input of a university professor is apparently given the same weight as that of someone who wishes to remain anonymous. If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt Keen's word - after all, it appears in a proper newspaper! - then it does seem to be taking even-handedness a bit far. In some areas, such as - arguably - the interface between science and spirituality which I was discussing in that previous post, expertise may actually be an impediment to the emergence of new ideas. The defence of an entrenched position may sometimes be seen as a greater priority than the establishment of the truth. In others, however, it is simply a matter of getting your facts correct, and turning your back on the experts seems a bit daft.

Keen contrasts the popularity of Wikipedia (17th most trafficked site on the net) with that of the venerable Britannica, with its Nobel prize-winning contributors and 4,000 experts (which comes in at 5,128th). This may be partially a reflection on Britannica's level of readability but it  probably has more to do with the fact that it is subscription-based. And it may say less about surfers' lack of discernment than about Britannica's failure to adapt to the realities of the internet. Perhaps it is time for Britannica to drop its charges and start using Google AdSense instead.

But what should a humble blogger do? I've tended to provide links from The Secret Of Life to Wikipedia as some kind of independent source of information because it is popular, frequently (though not always) readable, and is accessible to all. Is it time for me to re-think this policy? Andrew Keen suggests Citizendium as an alternative, which apparently "aims to improve on Wikipedia's model by adding 'gentle expert oversight' and requiring contributors to use their real names". This sounds like a reasonable compromise between people power and established expertise. What do you think? As ever, your views on this are welcome. (It's OK - you don't have to cite your credentials.)

One closing thought: my wife Chris buys The Sunday Times, so it is often lying around the house, and occasionally an article attracts my attention enough to make me want to write about it here. I find it rather irritating, therefore, that articles on The Times and Sunday Times web sites are only available free for a week after publication. After that, access is only available via subscription. OK, I could pay the subs, but I can't expect all my readers to do so too. So I can never put in a link on my blog to the article I'm discussing.

Why do the Times newspapers adopt this policy, I wonder? Presumably it is to increase their revenue. But I can't honestly see it bringing in that much money. This seems to me to be another case of a traditional medium failing to accept that we are now in an age where people expect to access information freely online. If people start to turn elsewhere, then perhaps the newspapers should look to themselves for the answer.

Comments

[People in the Sun]

I wonder if a thousand writers for The Sunday Times wrote a column they would be able to come up with anything not-elitist and pretentious.

Personal blogs have the potential to teach the main-stream that each individual has a story, while political blogs already do a better job at holding politicians accountable than newspapers do. Yes, there are many of us out there, and yes, we sometimes don't know what we're talking about, but I'd rather read an honest blog post about nothing at all than an editor-approved review of the latest cultural craze. The Times can't decide what I think about anymore--this power now belongs to Google Reader.

[new illuminati]

I've been a journalist, editor and publisher. Writers are people, nothing more - any pretentions to authority held by publishers are generally based upon an ignorance of the fears and favours that drive their business; no publishers run eclectic libraries and all have their own agenda.
But of course they lay claim to greater credibility than the average Joe - why else would people pay them for something that emerges from their minds?
It's all about money and social standing - not TRUTH.
Fear of retribution and legal action utterly stifles the mediated media.
Long live the free web! We all need to research for ourselves and make up our own minds about issues.
R.A.
http://www.newilluminati.blog-city.com

[Mark]

Keen's perspective is interesting and to some extent has some validity. Blogs are not meant to be the one stop shop for news. Blogs do extend the reach of the news and gives an incredible voice to the masses. As with everything you read, one must weigh the intent of what is written against the facts which are available.

[Malcolm Campbell]

The web seems to me to be a mix of vanity, anarchy and democracy. We are discovering new freedoms here--to connect, reach out, share, and even influence.

But we have not yet finished distinguishing between solid, verifiable facts and expert opinions AND everyday people talking about things they haven't really studied any more than the next guy.

When that happens, the Internet will really come into its own.

Malcolm

[Robert Mandrake]

Thank you.

[sirjorge]

This was a great post..amazing.

[Robert Mandrake]

I found your awesome blog via Blogexplosion!
Really great stuff here...
I bookmarked this.

I would really appreciate your opinion or comment via posting a comment on my blog if you get a spare moment :)

[Guilty Secret]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for your comment on my blog. I have replied to it there, but I thought I'd just drop by to let you know I got my blogroll going and I've linked you :)

Thanks,
GS

[cardiogirl]

Amen brother! I also enjoy different people's takes on the life. How do they deal with everyday things and monumnetal things?

[cardiogirl]

p.s. Found you through Guilty Secret. She has good taste in blogs!

[Secret Simon]

Thanks for all your comments and a special welcome to those who are writing here for the first time! Just to pick up on new illuminati's point about lack of eclecticism, when I was learning how to write submission letters to editors for my fiction, I was phased to discover that I was supposed to compare my work to that of other writers: "this book has the breakneck pace of writer A together with the wit and observation of writer B" that kind of thing. But to my horror, I found I'd written a novel that wasn't like anything else! So what was I supposed to write in the covering letter? There was clearly no way that this was ever going to sell. If I ever write another novel, I think I'm going to work out who I'm like before I start. That way, I won't make the same mistake again.

Seriously though, I think it is very hard for any artistic effort which doesn't fit into a specific marketing category to make it in the mainstream marketplace today. I'd be willing to bet that a truly original blog, on the other hand, has a lot more chance of success.

[Mel]

I am very pleased to announce that I have added your site to my blogroll. I know my readers will like your site.