Digital Democracy

In “Digital Maoism,” Jaron Lanier claims that trends in Internet technology are rasing the status of the “hive mind” in favor of individual, accreditted human beings. He argues, by looking at Wikipedia articles and comments on Digg, that the thoughts of the collective are empty and devoid of content. Lanier acknowledges that occaisionally, the collective is efficient at solving hard problems, such as setting a fair price for market goods. Generally, however, he believes that the collective must be lead or directed by powerful personalities, as has been done consistently in the pre-Internet age of free and independent press. However, I don't think that we've lost that ethic in our new Internet age news aggregation sites.

Most community aggregation sites today rely heavily on dedicated content authors who are not simply part of the collective. Slashdot, a news aggregation site with a technical slant, has paid editors who determine which user submitted stories make it to the front page. Wikipedia, an online community maintained encyclopedia, relies mostly on a core set of individuals, wikipedians, to maintain the quality of their content. That quality is being called into question now, and Wikipedia is taking measures to prevent renegade vandalism. On Digg, a general aggregation site for articles, it is estimated that one out of thirty readers of an article will “digg” the article, meaning they find it interesting. In short, the “collective” that these sites call on are not the general populace, but a small subset of enthusiasts who, surprisingly, are reliably intelligent and interesting.

As the Internet grows, however, it loses its elite status and becomes accessible to everyone. As this happens, it will become more necessary for these sites to filter out senseless drivel and establish a system for evaluating the credibility of their members. These systems are already falling into place. On Slashdot, there is a notion of Karma, or what the general quality of the user's comments is. Wikipedia is now adopting protection policies to block completely anonymous editting of touchy articles. I predict that as we enter the Internet age, we will continue our tradition of creditted peer review, only through a more open process that anyone can enter. It's easy to imagine a system where paid editors of Wikipedia or Digg distribute status to a set of users based on their contributions, who in turn can assign a smaller quantity of status to other users. I see no reason why in harnessing the collective, the brightest minds on the Internet will abandon the fundamentals of valuing the individual.