Blogging over the Atlantic
As I am flying over the Atlantic, on my way to Spain for some well deserved family vacations, slightly bored by the in-flight movie, Miami Vice, I can’t avoid redirecting my thoughts to the future of the Internet.
The original idea behind the Internet was to build a tool that would help share knowledge by making it easy for scientists to publish information that would be easy to access and navigate. That original idea never really disappeared, but once large corporations entered the Internet and started the e-business era, that originally focus was largely lost.
Now, after Time named “Person of the year” You, we have officially entered a third era, the era of user generated content. This has a number of advantages as it makes sure that nobody can control the public opinion. However, there are also a lot of drawbacks, the main one being that all kind of questionable material is made available to people who are not prepared to separate truth from fiction.
I was recently listening to a podcast in which a member of a non-profit organization, devoted to make the Internet available to poor regions of Africa hailed some of the initial results that he had seen. He said that one community had started to create a site documenting traditional medicine that the population could use, which was important since this region was being devastated by the AIDS virus and that since anti-virals where extremely expensive, this could prove to be a good alternative.
That assertion got me thinking. How do we know that those traditional remedies are effective against AIDS? I have no problem helping poor people get cheap medicine, as long as it works. Otherwise this is just a total waste of time. The problem is, how do poor people with elementary education understand that this information has not been validated by the scientific community and that they may be wasting precious time using ineffective medicine?
This problem, of course, is not limited to Africa. Every day, students all around the world use the Internet in order to do their homework. Their process, Google, Cut and Paste, also known as plagiarism, is becoming the standard way to quickly produce reports and research documents. Most of the time, those who perform the searches go with the first result they obtain, without trying to analyze the quality of the data or the source of the information.
The result is that urban legends, questionable information and plain damn lies are quickly spreading all over the Internet. There is a clear danger that in the future, there will be no more trusted sources of information. Today, most quality data is posted by those who have gone through a classical education. However, as younger generations who rely on the Internet in order to obtain their information grow older and traditional, respected information sources start disappearing because they can no longer compete against free content, we may see start to see a new phenomenon, more information than ever before, with a rapidly diminishing quality or accuracy.
Many may say that Wikipedia proves me wrong. On the contrary. What will happen when a popular belief becomes so strong that those who know the truth are on the minority. Sure, the article may be disputed, but who defines the truth? Truth is not obtained through a democratic process, it is the result of analysis, investigation and science. Today, the most prevalent opinion is likely to get ahead on Google’s result page. It could mean that in the future we may, as a society, believe in Creationism, the Earth being the center of the Universe or the Horoscope being able to predict our future. That is scary thought.
In the past, we lived in a world full of certitude. The truth was available from a limited number of trusted sources. That was dangerous. Today we are moving to a world where the truth (if it exists) can be challenged by anyone, even if that person is absolutely not qualified to make an informed judgement. That is even worse, specially if our kids are not properly trained to develop a critical thinking and the general quality of education continues degrading.