Josh Porter, of Bokardo, comments on the pithy words of Tim Berners Lee, remarking about the fundamental truth of the web.
But if you walk down Main Street, USA, and listen in on conversations what you hear is more like Wikipedia or Digg or Google than it is the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Associated Press, or a Librarian. These tools are the people’s tools, because they are built on the relationships of millions of people, not the expertise of a few. Most people aren’t experts, and most people don’t need no stinkin’ experts.
There is something great in thinking that on the Web we are free to pursue our own reputation. If we write well, help others, continue learning, and link to valuable resources we can carve out a niche where there was none. Is this an egalitarian pipe-dream? I don’t know. Perhaps it is, perhaps not.
Hmmm … Josh, methinks it is.
In spite of that viciously stupid article on how the Internet teh sucks, it does make a point about one thing: human nature, when left to its devices is both noble and sophomoric, virtuous and dirty (Christina Aguilera dirty), or perhaps, charitable and pervy.
While there will always be people like the Wikipedia nation, there will always be an equal an opposite population of individuals who are happy and willing to vandalize the status quo, pollute a community into irrelevance at the expense of a buck (did anyone hear AllAdvantage is back?), and pervert a system for its own gains — sometimes for no other reason than they can.
Authority, in some form, plays an important role in regulating all those undesirable elements now that the whole world has been invited to the party. In an ideal webtopia, no one would need anyone to control anything; we would all be working towards creating valuable, worthwhile content, with each shred of that content getting noticed based on its merits alone.
Sadly, malcontents have tossed garbage into the stew, continue to do so, and likely will continue to do so until something better than the Internet comes along.
Until that happens, everyone has to grapple with the pollution of real content — both in terms of the signal to noise ratio, and the deliberate swaying of opinion and fact by individuals and groups with unbalanced agendas.
Sometimes, the community is enough to police itself — sometimes not.
And when its not — as it is often not — the role of the “expert” comes in. People who have “credentials”. And have proved that they can “do” stuff and “know” stuff.
They’re able to to guide people through the sewage to find what they’re looking for.
I’d like to believe that a day and time will exist when experts aren’t necessary. But sometimes, like when links are have been laid down and are growing into rich splogiferous spammy networks, “better” and “more reputable” link systems won’t be enough.
Oh sure, you’ll have your haven, your niche of interweb nirvana – but is that enough?
For all the old and young and everyone inbetween who are n00bs in any sense of the word (and weren’t we all — and continue to be in different things?) … I’m not sure if it is.
In the mean time, if you’re able to pierce the future with those pipe dreams — I would love some of those mushrooms, thanks. ;)
