It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
Jon hists it. Certification isn't worth doody. "Garbage in, garbage out."
and:
NYT. Friedman is just starting to get the paradox of the "global village" enabled by the Internet. He decries the potential for disharmony in emerging societies due to cacophonous messaging from the west (primarily) over the Internet and cable. His premise: the Internet and multi-channel cable makes it possible for "untrusted" news sources to gain an audience world-wide, and that people in emerging societies aren't sophisticated enough to understand that Fox news and Internet sites managed by untrusted authors aren't reliable sources of news and opinion.
>>>What's frightening him, he added, is that there is an insidious digital divide in Jogjakarta: "Internet users are only 5 percent of the population — but these 5 percent spread rumors to everyone else. They say, `He got it from the Internet.' They think it's the Bible."<<<
Thomas Friedman writing in the NY Times complains that the third world believes everything they read on the Internet. Now with all due respect, they shouldn't believe everything they read in the NY Times either. And Ed Cone reports that the US is still part of the third world. He lives in one of the Carolinas, where they're debating evolution, on the Internet, of course, where most of this day's discourse takes place. The solution is lower the barriers to participation, so more lies can spread faster, and develop in our species the introspection and skepticism it needs to survive the challenges ahead.
These posts are all of a piece inasmuch as they all deal with trust. Trust is hard to define, hence hard to discuss. Nevertheless, let me attempt to come up with one sentence that I strongly feel needs to guide all such definition and discussion:
Trust is a function, not a constant.
There's a corrolary:
By definition, you cannot centralize trust.
At best you can centralize and attempt to earn trust. That's the thinking behind "branding" in marketing. But the trust still must be earned; it can't be assigned or presumed. The reason the web is such a deeply subversive space with respect to traditional marketing is that the marketers can't drown out the "oh yeah?" voices because, for a change, their megaphone is no bigger than anyone else's.
But right now the web is a cacophony, more "bizarre" than "bazaar." Rock the Casbah, indeed. To paraphrase the late, great SRV, the Casbah's a rockin', don't come a-knockin', just come on in. But the Casbah and the bazaar are built on webs of trust. The same people buy the same produce from the same stands because there's a relationship there that has, to a first approximation, never been violated. This regular then tells their family and friends about the great kumquats they got from Sahib, you should go see him, he's there every day when he's not at prayers. Conversely, you should stay away from Zahir; his scales are rigged and I can never feed my family on what he puts in my basket. The next thing you know, Zahir is out of business for lack of customers.
Some more underpinnings-oriented stuff is an excellent site regarding Bayesian Belief Nets. BBN's help us answer the question "given a set of interrelated probabilities, how do those probabilities change in the face of new information?" Of related interest is Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web. When TBL talks about the "Oh, Yeah?" button, he's talking about an automatic query of the web of trust surrounding the page you're reading. Why should you trust what you're reading? The Semantic Web could help answer the question, which is why I consider the work in the Semantic Web foundational in the same sense that HTTP and HTML are foundational.
There's a tremendous amount of work to be done yet. An excellent, low-tech place to start is to sign your page. I expect to automate this process for Radio Userland within the next couple of months. Stay tuned.
9:50:53 PM
