August 24, 2007
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quality on the web
In the featured article Internet Monkeys the blogger writes about an article he read that basically argues that the internet is full of too much crap.
How deluded can this author be? Is he even using the same internet that I am using? If so he has somehow completely missed the boat on the significance of the proliferation of online content. I can only guess at whether it is a sort of willful ignorance that is driving the author to write such a misleading piece. Or if the author is acting out of an ulterior motive to trying to cast doubt upon the other mediums through which information is transmitted that are not strictly controlled by rigid authorities.
Regardless, the author is clearly making several mistakes in basic reasoning. For one thing the author is looking at the internet in exactly the same way you might evaluate a book or a factual article. Say you are comparing two such books or articles and trying to decide which one is more helpful to the readers. Let’s for the sake of argument say that they are equally clear and easy to understand and circulated to the same audience. Then, probably the thing that you would be concerned about most when trying to decide which article is strictly superior to the other might well be quality to quantity ratio. That is the article that is more dense with factual information might well be the one that the audience would get more use out of, whereas the article that spends half of its length rambling on about useless anecdotes from the writer’s own life that the reader doesn’t care about is going to be somewhat less effective.
When you look at the internet using this metric of course you find it immensely lacking. It seems like the medium with a infinitesimally small quality to quantity ratio. Everywhere you look you see piles upon piles of stuff written and created that you are unlikely to care about surrounding the few gems that you actually do care about.
The problem is, this analysis is completely flawed when it comes to looking at content on the internet. Why is the anecdote riddled article ‘worse’ than the direct and to the point article? Presumably because it wastes our time. We can get the same information from reading the other article, and we can do it faster and move on to other aspects o our lives. Here’s the thing though, in the offline world in order to figure out which article is best we have to probably read them both and figure out after the fact that one was a waste of our time and then we rightly get angry at the expenditure of energy. The online world is very different for one very important reason. Just as the quantity of content is radically increased on the internet so too are our powers to sort, organize, filter, file, and search it.
This is a very very important thing to remember. Just because there is so much “more” junk on the internet does not immediately imply that you the viewer actually experience more that you would consider to be “junk” when perusing the internet. I would argue that quite the opposite happens in fact. The powerful tools made available to you on the online world make it much much easier for you to find content that you care about, ie content that is most definitely not considered “junk” by you.
Take for example, youtube. Yeah, sure, for any given observer, there’s all kinds of videos on youtube that they wouldn’t have the least bit of interest in watching and would find to be a total waste of time. It’s a good thing then that said observer doesn’t just randomly view all youtube videos until he finds one he likes. Rather, how does the youtube viewer select videos to watch? He has literally a ton of tools to choose from. First of all he likely views videos posted by the people he knows and respects the opinion of on social networking sites and blogs or emailed to him directly by his friends whose opinion he trusts. Secondly, he probably subscribes to certain channels that have only the videos relevant to the subjects he or she cares about. He may also make use of the ability youtube has to filter videos by most viewed, most discussed, and top favorites to find out which videos are more appreciated by the majority of viewers and thus more likely to be worth his time. He may also look to other sites that provide reviews and filters selecting the best and most popular videos online. Above all else there is the simple ability of the viewer to search the videos using keywords to find the videos that interest him and search within categories if need be. Once a video is found that the viewer likes, he is also given immediate access to a set of related videos that are similar to the one he likes and the ability to see other videos made by the same writer. In addition to all that, once such a viewer starts watching a video he can quickly skip through it to see if it will interest him and can easily stop watching at any time if he doesn’t like it. The videos also all have a quick summary, tags associated with them so you know what kind of content they contain, a star rating so you can see how well liked they are, comments so that you can hear what others are saying about them, and a teaser image from the video iself which sometimes might give the viewer an idea of what’s inside. All of this boils down to a gargantuan toolkit for finding exactly which videos the viewer is actually interested in seeing.
Now contrast all that to the rigidity of trying to find valuable content on television. Let’s say there’s a television show on that you want to know if it is any good. What can you do to find out if it is something you will like? Not much really except watch it and see. The television provides you with very few tools to see if the show you are watching is something you should bother to watch. You basically have to commit a significant amount of time to watching shows to figure out what is worth watching, or you have to look outside of the medium for filters that can point you in the direction of a show you might want to see. Sure there are commercials that might provide some clues, and newer digital systems sometimes show you a brief summary of the show you are watching, and there’s always the tv guide channel. But these are very poor tools compared to the vast array of tools available on sites like youtube. Your best bet is to happen to be subscribed to other media like newspapers and magazines that you like and are likely to recommend to you content that you will also like. And of course there’s always the water cooler conversation that might indicate to you that this or that particular show is well liked amongst the social group that you happen to hang out with and so is probably more likely to appeal to you. Surely we can see how all of this is slow and inefectual compared to the tools that youtube and the likes provide.
The author of this article might object to my argument by saying that just because you can quickly and easily find content that you like online, doesn’t mean that it isn’t still the case that most of that content you are experiencing whether you like it or not is still crap. But that line of argument makes me wonder where the author’s concept of quality comes from. The author seems to have some sort of idea that there exists some objective measure of what constitutes ‘quality’ and that it isn’t all just subjective. The author no doubt believes that for example if Shakespeare’s plays were hated by everyone in the world, they’d still be Shakespeare and hence amongst the greatest literary works of all time.
Now we can wax philosophically about whether that’s true or not if we really want to. I’m game. I’ve always loved philosophy. But with respect to the value of the internet, I really don’t think it matters whether it is true or not. So what if there are less Shakespearean quality works on the internet than there are in the print world? That’s a natural consequence of there being a heck of a lot MORE works on the internet than there are in the print world. I don’t know why you would ever expect it to be otherwise. The thing that matters is that your tools to be able to find the Shakespearean quality works on the internet are much enhanced by the same mechanisms I have described above. A Google search is just far more effective than digging through a card catalog.
The thing that perhaps is really bothering this author is not the proliferation of works that he would deem low-quality on the internet. Rather, I think it is that the author is upset that these low-quality works are getting so much attention by internet dwellers. But the truth is people really really like reading and watching stuff on the internet that doesn’t usually get the level of praise or critical acclaim that things generated in the offline world generally do.
And what’s wrong with that really? Remember that the internet magnifies what is called “The Long Tail” phenomenon. That means that content that would usually be filtered out of the commercial world because it does not have a critical audience sufficient to justify its inclusion, finds a niche audience on the internet that finds the content worthwhile to it. So basically, things that others would consider crap are quite valuable to someone out there and that someone can find it and appreciate it and have their quality of life fundamentally improved by the experience. So just because a random blog entry is crappy and uninteresting to me does not mean that there aren’t a few people for whom that blog entry is the most important thing in the world for them to read. And isn’t that just a good thing all around? People get to share a part of themselves with people who appreciate it.What’s so dangerous about that?
The author makes one other general mistake in that he juxtaposes the question of factual accuracy on the internet with this idea of general “quality”. “Quality” is a very different thing when discussing creative works like Shakespeare than when you are talking about dictionaries and encyclopedias. And so the questions of whether Wikipedia is accurate and how quickly unsubstantiated rumors can spread through the web are very different questions than the question of how worthwhile the random life stories and interesting anecdoes and silly videos people post online are.
But the author is pretty wrong about Wikipedia too. Sure Wikipedia has inaccuracies but not nearly so much that it is useless or dangerous. Wikipedia has expanded the access to knowledge of a lot of people who just wouldn’t have any way to find out a lot of the stuff they can learn through it, or just couldn’t be bothered to go through the extra trouble to get access to that information. I guarantee you that there are a lot of people learning a great deal on Wikipedia today who never would have, had it not existed, been willing to go to the trouble of traveling to their local library to find out the same. And that doesn’t even take into account the many places in the world where Wikipedia provides an alternative resource to the heavily censored and controlled native press.
Wikipedia is nothing but a subset of the extraordinary amount of knowledge and information available on the web that is not controlled or validated by any of the typical corridors of power that usually serve as gatekeepers on the knowledge viewers can obtain. It’s just one of the best of those resources because of its internal culture that prides itself on a dedication to accuracy and neutrality and the siting of sources. Even if Wikipedia weren’t so very careful about trying to be professional and accurate it wold still be an extraordinary resource just because of the shear quantity of information it is making available all in one place for the regular layman to experience.
But speaking of other fact based resources online, let me offer one personal testimonial of the effectiveness of the internet for providing factual resources. I used to be a programmer and constantly while I was working I would get into situations where there’d be some thing I don’t know how to program or can’t figure out how to do in a particular language I was working with. What I found though was that at least as often as I would find the answer in the documentation, or some professional programming journal or in some book I happen to keep around as a reference, I would find the answer instead on some random person’s website or blog or some random wiki. And the hardest to find answers were almost always ones I found through that way. It was always some user generated content, some individual who figured something out and decided to out of their kindness and devotion to knowledge share it with the world. I was able to achieve a lot more that way then I ever would have been able to achieve had I been bound to having to search through ‘official’ resources. Really I would take the ability to do a web search over a subscription to any and all print programming magazines any day.
The author does mention that he is worried about the quick proliferation of ‘unsubstatiated’ rumors. I have to admit. That is an important concern. The internet can serve as a really big echo chamber where the same idea can quickly float around through the wikis and the blogs and the social networks all before anyone has ever gotten a chance to verify its veracity. But here’s my question, is this phenomenon really worse online than it is in the offline world? Witness the madness of the prelude to the Iraq war, where you had editorials in virtually every major newspaper in the country basically lying to their audience to their face. And the ‘news’ sections of these papers weren’t much better. And it isn’t much better right now. How quickly do ideas go straight from the administration’s mouth to our ears without even temporary stop where the truth of the words are checked and confirmed. If you think this is more reliable than the internet, I think you are just delusional. I’ve come to trust Wikipedia about a thousand times more than every major newspaper including the New York Times. A least with Wikipedia I have some insight into the process through which the information is being selected. I can read the discussion and figure out what was taken out and what was added and why. I can also immediately read the sources posted right there on the Wikipedia page to confirm the data posted in the article, and when in doubt it is easy enough to do a google or yahoo or msn search for more information on the subject. Sure, sometimes I’ll hit an unsubstantiated rumor that I can’t easily refute because all or most online sources are just repeating the same rumor without verification, but like I said it’s just exactly the same as the oligopoly of the news media, only the mistakes made online are made democratically by the community as a whole and are not necessarily the product of the interests of a few agenda setting elites.
I am not saying that there isn’t a place for these big news media companies or that we don’t need reporters who base there career upon the journalistic profession. We do need those people if only because some truths really are easier to expose and verify when you have the money and resources to be able to mount an effective investigation. But not all do. We all know the stories of the random bloggers who expose truths that the major newspapers missed. It happens and it will continue to happen more and more. Our best bet is to have a symbiotic relationship where online and off-line media serve as checks and balances for one another keeping each other honest and resulting in the public being as informed as possible.
But I want to know what the author of this article is trying to advocate instead? Does he want to see us go be in a world where the only movies and videos we see are Hollywood approved, and the only music we listen to is generated by the businesses in the RIAA, and the only creative writing we read is that which the major publishing companies foist upon us, and the only source of factual information we have is that which appears in major newspapers and magazines? Would that be a better world? One in which content does not proliferate rapidly based on the opinions of the populace, but is rather controlled by the few, who tell the many what is high quality enough to be worthy of their consumption?
I have to tell you such a world sounds so sickening to me that I want to throw up just thinking about it. Having experienced the extraordinary freedom that is provided by the internet, I won’t ever voluntarily go back to a world without it. I’d rather die.
