Berkman Web of Ideas tonight: Truth, Objectivity and Blogs
I’m leading the first in a series of discussions at the Harvard Berkman Center tonight. You’re invited: 6pm at the Baker House on Mass. Ave in Cambridge, MA.
I’m petrified, of course. It’d be better if I knew exactly what I’m going to say in my 20-minute discussion opener. I’m thinking of something like this:
Wikipedia has frozen the page about Bush because it was being flip-flopped so fast. Instead, Wikipedia wants to come up with a non-controversial core of facts. Why? Because that can serve as an authority for all.
This reliance on facts is interesting. Some of us (including me) thought the Web would join facts and values more firmly than ever because of the dominance of voice on the Web. Instead, are facts separating out? And are facts becoming commoditized? [I wrote a draft of an article for my newsletter on this topic last night on the plane.]
Go back to the basic notion of truth: Correspondence of a proposition with the world. Truth is abstracted from individuals (and from voice?), according to this idea, since it doesn’t matter who utters the proposition. Authority comes from trust that this particular source removes his or her (and historically, of course, it’s mainly been his) interests and utters true (objective) statements.
Blogs seem to change that. They are full of voice expressing interests. Does this mean that they are only accidentally true at best? Or are we seeing the emergence of multi-subjectivity that has the authority of objectivity? Will facts become commoditized and conspicuously split off from the voices that try to find the truths that facts support?
As you can tell, I haven’t figured out how to pull this together in a coherent way. Also, I desperately need questions to stimulate the conversation if and when it flags.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
David Weinberger: “Brad Doesn’t Suck. Brad is our Future”
David Weinberger posts about Brad Sucks:On his site you can buy his CD for $5 (including shipping!) or download the very same music for free. If you buy the CD, it includes the MP3s to encourage you to share them….
… You don’t talk to many average Americans, do you…
No, “Ottawa” isn’t self explanatory. Ontario isn’t even obvious. Just about the only “obvious” Canadian cities are Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.
I’m not sure how MovableType got this comment and a trackback clearly intended for the previous article attached to this one. Maybe I confused it by backdating the Brad piece by an hour since I apparently forgot to press the Publish button when I was done with it. Anyway, it’s definitely not Jeremy’s fault. Here’s the entry he’s actually commenting on:
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003153.html
“the emergence of multi-subjectivity that has the authority of objectivity?”
Anyone who can craft a phrase like that has nothing to worry about. :-)
Well, Jeremy, this American thinks that Ottawa is self-explanatory. So are Calgary, Halifax and Quebec City. For that matter, how many towns are there named Iqaluit in the world?
I wish I could tune in tonight, and I look forward to reading about how it goes. This is all very thought provoking.
Dave:Blogs also bring out the “truth” between what a person says but actually thinks. Heres a classic example of such a blog which was actually dialogued between two people !!
Thoughts Flick’r are one thing, living them is another thing !! What you blog is what you are correct ??
/pd
FYI : heres a start point on why the previous trackback got attached to this blog !!!
MT::App::Comments=HASH(0x810b150) Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at /v/hyperorg.com/www/movabletype/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 1187
you should just open with questions from the audience: and then oprah/donahue it. more energy from the crowd with this system: i am sure you can whip the answere off the top of your head.
you go down your outline as the questions are answered…
“Facts are meaningless. They can be used to prove anything.”
H. Simpson
I agree w/Dave Rogers — case(joke?) in point:
Sami and Mo were having an argument about where the lines were drawn for the Islamic standards of male “modesty” — specifically, how men should be clothed. So they went to ask the local sheikh.
“Well, which is it?” they asked.
The sheikh responded: “Which would you prefer?”
Just a note that the article in Wikipedia’s page about Bush has remained largely unprotected recently, to let people update it in the run-up to the election… and that many of the active flip-flops are about very specific disputes over fact and wording.
And the general idea of providing ‘neutral facts’ rather than opinion is not that one can remove opinion from articles. Rather, one can remove oneself from the opinions (and from one’s own), saying “Joho the Blog says Bush is a duck on wheels, while Blogmania says Bush is the cat’s pyjamas” instead of taking one stance or the other.
sj, last night the Bush page was frozen again. The Kerry isn’t, though. I wonder what the sociology is behind the difference.
As for removing oneself from opinions: Deciding to include a reference to joho and blogmania is itself a non-neutral act, isn’t it?
Checking the protection logs, GWB’s page *has* been protected a lot — nine times in the last five months. This is more than most controversial pages. But it is also an exception; there have only been a few hundred pages protected over the same period of time, out of a collection of 350,000.
(GWBush and JFKerry are the two articles with the largest number of distinct edits, btw, over twice the number of the third-place article.)
As to opinions and neutrality, a useful rule of thumb is that a neutral statement of an opinion is one which both supporters and opponents of the opinion can agree is true. Of course choosing /which/ neutral statements to include in a given article is still difficult; there is selection involved in any description or research.
Facts and the Blogosphere
Do the web and blogs help disseminate facts, or prop up a person’s pre-existing belief system? David Weinberger is working on an article on this topic:
Wikipedia has frozen the page about Bush because it was being flip-flopped so fast. Instead, Wi…