Internet and the issue of time
Internet is a fantastic medium when it comes to publishing. The deadline is further away than a printed publication or campaign and if you make any mistakes you just have to update the information, hopefully before anybody notice it.
But this also makes internet an unreliable source to refer to, compared to say books or newspapers where you always have a physical copy to refer to. In the digital world of worldspread servers information is dynamic but relative, information can change in the blink of an eye and nothing is really reliable.
All of this corresponds well to the postmodernity society and many would probably see it as a natural development in history, that finally information is as uncertain as life and reality itself.
However, lately people seem to have realized this lack of stability, and the reaction is a renewed respect for time. Since a few years the wayback machine registers all the text and html-based information on the internet on a monthly basis, which works as a historical archive of internet.
People also seem to respect that if they change information after they've published it on the internet it might seem like they've got something to hide (like Soviet in it's haydays) and has begun to actually mark with overlined text or a small message within asterisks.
The relative nature of online text might (at best) breed a healthy sense of critical viewing of iformation in general and we cannot possibly keep track on everything on the internet anyway. But perhaps we need time as a reference point after all, at least on some level.
4 comments:
Very good points.
One place on the Internet where this has been (party) solved is in the wiki community. 99% of the wikis out there have their pages under version control, so that the visitor may step back in history to see what a page looked like at any given point in time.
For instance, this is the complete revision history for the Wikipedia article about 'medium':
I say party solved, because of course you you still have to trust the sender of the message, as with any medium. For wikis such as Wikipedia this includes trusting both the author of the article, and trusting that the Wikipedia organisation have their infrastructure set up correctly, so that article history can not be tampered with, analogous to the author of a newspaper article and the the publisher in charge of the publication.
Come to think of it, about a year ago I experimented with the weird concept of a wiki that is based on a trust metric of the visitors. The idea behind a trust metric is: "you're a friend of my friend, hence I trust you".
Applying this to wikis, my idea was to make a prototype wiki software where the content of the wiki was different depending on who the visitor trusts.
If a friend of yours write something in the wiki, you automatically trust it, likewise if a friend of yours "flags" something as correct, you trust it.
And the concept can of course be expanded to friends of friends and so on.
Naturally I never implemented this thing, and I would guess that others have had the same idea. The underlying principle is used in other areas such as secure/anonymous networking and "darknets" such as FreeNet.
Oh I forgot. An early implementation of a trust metric that is actually useful is Advogato, the blog site for software developers. For the technically inclined, they have a brief explanation of how their metric works here.
I just took the time to also look up the subject of trust metric governed wikis a bit, and indeed it has been discussed at length on the c2.com wiki. It seems that in these days of fear and uncertainty, the 'net is littered with technical articles about trust, trusting trust et.c. Look what you have done Peter, now I will spoil the rest of this reading instead of working on the translation!
Keep writing stuff like this down or I would never remember all my old abandoned projects! :)
Coincidentally I actually posted two comments before this one, but I realized they had errors in it (I used the word 'matrix' instead of the correct 'metric') and I wanted to add some stuff, so I deleted them and added a new one. See there's some history *poof* gone for you ;)
Haha, I was just wondering who'd removed their posts but what an apt way of illustrating the phenomenon!
I don't understand how I could forget such a great example as Wikipedia, after all is my main source for information. It's also a great example of the 'trust' you're talking about which is indeed a related subject.
For me Wikipedia is a statement of the will in all humans to cooperate for a better world, right in the face of all the pessimists that tend to only see the bad in human nature.
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