Truth, Rumours, Real Science and the Social Graph
Sir Tim Berners-Lee said the internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science according to a BBC article published today, “Warning sounded on Web’s future“. The BBC said Sir Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, told them he is worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation. He wants to see a new system where websites would carry a label for trustworthiness after they had been proved reliable sources.
I think this certainly opens an interesting conversation. I wonder if he thinks this is a new problem unique to social media or the same old phenomenon that already existed in word of mouth or even mainstream media?
Berners-Lee wants to create a mechanism to separate rumours from real science, but this quickly gets to the question, “what is truth” and “who gets to decide”? In today’s pluralistic, post modern society, which is increasingly reflective of much of the world’s thinking, even science isn’t considered to be objective anymore.
In the modern era, science reined as king and humankind had all eyes on center stage which was featuring the greatest show on earth and it was called “progress”. People believed that science could and would discover the objective truths of our world; we would eventually “figure it all out”. We were confident about reality and believed that the universe was knowable and manageable. Using our rational minds, proven methods of observation (scientific method) and better technology & instruments we could attain the truths needed to improve life and solve the world’s problems. As American philosopher John Dewey put it, “the patient and experimental study of nature, bearing fruit in inventions which control nature and subdue her forces to social use, is the method by which progress is made”.
Well, like it or not, the show is struggling in its final season and the modern mind is no longer so confident. The beliefs of modernity are in radical decline. Although there are still those who think that the dream has just run into a few temporary snags, fewer are willing to believe it.
The post-modern mind, however, believes that reality is mediated by your perspective. Some take it even further concluding that reality is purely a human construct or more particularly a social construct. And so throughout history, the post-modernist would say that it was always some social group’s construct of reality that has been the generally accepted one. The post-modern construct is gaining that position in present times asking, “whose reality” and “why should your version of reality rule the roost?”. The result is that every voice, every perspective is given equal standing and presented to society as a menu of realities. Since the choices are all believed to be constructs, the post-modernist is free to take different truths for a test drive, pick his favorite colour, and change it as often as he likes.
Ok, back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his concerns about the social web and his idea about a system of labels of trustworthiness.
If truth today is perceived to be perceptual and not objective (yes, that statement has circular logic), then you can never get to a universal agreement on what constitutes trustworthy or truthful. It will just be perceived as one person or group’s version of trustworthy which has no right to be the dominant view and so it won’t be trusted. Someone might object and say, let’s use the wisdom of the crowd to determine trustworthiness and go with the majority (i.e. crowd-sourced trustworthiness), but then you end up back where you started, because the problem Berners-Lee is trying to solve is stopping bad ideas from spreading rapidly (where many people end up believing something which isn’t “true”) . If you use the crowd, however, to determine what is trustworthy or true, then the rapidly propagating idea, once it spreads, would no longer be considered a bad idea since so many now believe it.
I guess my point is that I think Sir Tim Berners-Lee is in for a really tough challenge in developing & implementing his new system, to put it mildly.
There is another characteristic of social media that I think plays into this conversation: the social graph and trust. People trust certain people; ideas propagate more easily through a network of trusted relationships. Ideas themselves are not just intellectual facts, but have emotional, relational and other considerations which come into play. Particularly in a post-modern culture, people might easily accept an idea because it feels good and they may not care if it is true (after all they believe truth is a construct).
Sir Berners-Lee might successfully build a system with labels of trust, but it won’t work if his goal is to stop “bad” ideas from propagating. Now if he could integrate his idea into the social graph somehow, he might be onto something. However, I think the social graph IS the new system.
Person Tim Berners-Lee
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September 16th, 2008 - Posted in Trust, Influence, Social Media | |
on September 16th, 2008 at 7:12 am
Great post Marcel. Unfortunately all the books we have are still packed because of our move but I read recently that it’s impossible to ever tell a story exactly the way it happened because in order to capture what happened you need to have a human mind interpret the situation. It’s the human mind that becomes the wild card in each situation and no matter how hard one tries no human mind will interpret the exact situation. You then in order for the story to spread it must be heard by other human minds which again interpret the story in their own way. Again, no matter how hard the second generation tries to understand the original story exactly their minds will interpret things slightly different. So, regardless of social media or real life truth, determining what happened exactly is impossible because of the human element. IMHO, to try to determine truth, at best, is an interpreted game and always will be.
Great post for making us all think Marcel.
on September 16th, 2008 at 9:24 am
It is a great post.
Variation is the key to natural selection and that is how ideas spread. I.e., memetically.
Trust is a collective asset, an extrinsic variable of social capital, one of many. Social capital can help ideas spread faster or slower.
The social capital in social graphs already contains the kind of “trust worthiness” gate keeping that Sir Tim is talking about.
Do we need an artifact to symbolize it? Won’t that artifact just end up being another factor that free thinkers will take into consideration at the time of transaction? Another floating currency?
I suppose such a currency could speed negotiations, i.e., deliberation over how an idea will be varied before it is passed.
on September 25th, 2008 at 8:35 am
I clicked through to the linked article and found that the issue of perspectives was already addressed even in the soundbites:
“I’m not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways,” he said. “So I’d be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways”.