Of late I’ve been having on-going discussions with @Lewisronald on the merits and failings of Wikipedia. It’s an old debate that’s been thrashed through by more knowing people than ourselves. But in coming across this wonderfully titled essay by Jaron Lanier, Digital Maoism, I’ve realised that neither myself nor Lewis Ronald are wrong.

Some big points:

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don’t. Often we don’t live long enough to find out.

In other words there is wisdom in crowds but they get an awful lot wrong too.

Most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.

Tim Berners Lee is famous for inventing hypertext, not copy and paste. So why are people duplicating information when they should be linking shit up.

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

Yes, yes, yes. Sure I can see and roll back revisions in Wikipedia, but for the most part these people are anonymous. Would the information be more valuable if there was a real name and real face attached? Quite possibly. The difference between trust quotients on Facebook and MySpace may provide a clue here but I have no hard studies to base this theory on.

And now on to Lanier’s feelings on the wiki/collectivism approach adopted by society at large. And remember this was written in 2006.

It’s not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual.

Mortgage meltdown, credit crunch, general financial crisis. Certainly in the world of mortgages the populations of western democracies can be accused of mass collectivist dellusions. Yeah, I’m talking about you Ireland and the US. But maybe that’s just a easy to make cheap shot.

In summing up:

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

And:

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

The last point I agree 110% with. But in a sense this goes some way to refuting some of Lanier’s claims. I feel, despite making valid points, he is not giving the crowd enough credit. The crowd is not an anonymous cloud. It’s made up of sentient individuals. As I state above, Wikipedia needs to introduce a better trust system but this takes only a little away from some of hugely valuable work it contains.

Right now what is the alternative to Wikipedia, a five pound per month subscription to a walled in Encyclopaedia Britannica? Fine if you want (debatably) more reliable information, admittedly important for research but hardly a practical solution for the billions of internet users unable to afford such a luxury.

For further reading check out some of the responses to the original essay from some top dollar internet brains.

A week ago I was on a web seminar call with Nick Carr, journalist, dismisser of corporate IT and author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the world from Google to Edison.
Having just finished reading said TBS I was looking forward to getting up close to Carr’s ideas. The seminar was hosted by Google but so what, a lot of things are hosted by Google. What transpired though was an unfortunate sales pitch for Google’s cloud services. You get nothing for nothing so not much complaining coming from keepfakingit, but it would have been good to see Carr get stuck into some of the real issues he addresses in TBS.
Issues such as: Thomas Schelling’s theory of self selecting neighbours as applied to online communities and social networks.
Schelling’s thesis was that a randomly placed collection of nodes in a network, when given the ability to move independently at random, will eventually choose more like minded neighbours. for nodes and network replace ethno-racial families in city boroughs to get a real flavour for the social theory here.
Carr agrees with Schelling and points to examples of this happening in real life online communities. He argues that whilst many “Net defenders” points at a rich tapestry of life and opportunities online, the reality is an even bigger ghettoization of thought than happens on our streets. Net communities are more homogeneous  and polarized.
A great example is the inward looking nature of the political blogosphere in the US. A study of blog coverage of the 2004 presidential election found a clear split in red and blue blogs. Republicans talked about their issues, trashed Democratic policy, but for the most part only quoted and referenced their on blogs. And vice versa.
Crowd sourcing is another danger area. Take for example Amazon’s auto recommendations. I bought a Nick Cave album from Jeff Bezos six months ago so now every time I login to Amazon I get offered random selections from Nick and his Bad Seeds’ back catalogue. Not a bad service and it’s getting better all the time. Or is it? Is it not the case that what Amazon have created is the ultimate pseudo-AI feedback loop. Instead of refining, Amazon is narrowing my choices and the more I use it the narrower it gets. If I were to pay attention to Amazon I’d have all 14 Nick Cave albums in my collection within a few months but not a lot of other additions. And there’s only so much Anglo-Aussie guitar slinging anyone, or their neighbours, can take.

All this would seem to fly in the face of the logic that has made Amazon exhibit A in the case for a long tail economy but it is a social insight that must be paid attention.
This is happening throughout cyberspace. Is the internet becoming the world’s biggest feedback loop?
From first hand experience the online sports community follows similar patterns. The net has embellished and enhanced real world walls and barriers. Spurs and Arsenal fans rarely if ever congregate together. Even for an England match they’ll silo themselves. In fact it could be argued that in an online sports community the team allegiance is an even bigger social marker than it is in real life. And once marked, and outsider will find it even harder to integrate into a hostile neighbourhood. Ultimately in the case of the Premier League we’re left with 20 silos of fans who are even more divided online than in reality.
And as we spend more time online and when online in social networks the real life effects are tangible and numerous.
Of course this isn’t to say social networks are inherently bad, but as we start to port more of our real life tasks to networks (job hunting on LinkedIn, date hunting on Facebook, new band hunting on MySpace) we should be aware of the allies we’re running down. And there should be an onus on the gatekeepers of these alleys to clearly signpost them and keep them well lit.

Finally, this is something new media patron saint Marshall McLuhan warned against but ultimately was optimistic about in Understanding Media. On the subject of television he wrote that man rejects uniform integration because he becomes more deeply involved in the human condition…

 The entire approach to these problems in terms of uniformity and social homogenization is a final pressure of the mechanical and industrial technology. Without moralizing it can be said that the electric age, by involving all men deeply in one another, will come to reject such mechanical solutions.
It is more difficult to provide uniqueness and diversity than it is to impose the uniform patterns of mass education; but it is such uniqueness and diversity that can be fostered under electric conditions as never before.

It’s up to us to make sure that we’re constantly pushing the uniqueness and diversity envelope.