No Time to Blog, Running Out of Characters
Would really like to expand on the social networking accelerating phenomenon but don’t have enough space anymore to actually formulate an opinion. instead will simply post a link that summarises our position on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed et al as a source of accurate and authoritively engaged information.
Sorry, run out of charact
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Better to run out of characters than to be short on character. Belief as determinant of truth is a rat hole. Raymond Smullyan has written many books on this philosophical approach, most notably, Satan, Cantor and Infinity and Deciding the Undecidable.
We would humbly suggest that the subject of the nature of truth has been contemplated and written about well before Smullyan. What social networking represents is an attempt to present consensual truth as a substitute for authoritative or accredited truth. Obviously there’s an overlap in those gross definitions, but we believe that there’s a significant social power struggle underlying the reliance people voluntarily place on their sources of information, or what they consider to be true. The Real Time reporting of on the spot eye witnesses that can relay one to many accounts of real time happening events (usually tragedies!), long before a news camera crew with a predisposed “angle” on what the story is, can make a strong case for the democratisation of information gathering and relaying.
However, we would make the case that in as much as there is inherent bias (both conscious and unconscious) within any self-proclaimed authoritative account or analysis, that those biases are usually declared at the point of entry. Undeclared biases are easily caught by the vigilance of the equivalent of custom officials who have a vested interest in vetting the credentials and credibilities of authoritative accounts. In that sense there is a social dimension to that level of constant scrutiny by a “community of peers”.
Which characterises precisely the history of scientific methodology and paradigm evolution as well as that of modern journalism. Both are professions which are policed by the vulture like tendency of their practioners to eat their own or at least leave the limping and the weak behind to die out of our attention span while filling their holes with more accurate and up to date information.
In contrast, truth that is derived from the consensus of social networks is at best like getting precise instructions from the mob. Anyone who has ever taken a road trip in Ireland and got lost will concur with that unique and frustrating illustration of human behaviour that is revealed when one asks a stranger for directions. If you ever ask someone for directions in the Irish countryside, they will give cheerfully and politely give them to you. Sometimes elaborately, complexly, abbreviated with anecdote and personal qualification, but always comprehensively and at length. The problem is when you try and follow those very same directions because they are seldom accurate. It’s not that the Irish as a race have no sense of direction. Rather it is the custom of the provincial Irish never to admit that they don’t know where somewhere is. It’s considered downright rude not to offer a stranger some degree of orientation even if it is entirely inaccurate and bears no relationship to the territory.
This to us, precisely demonstrates the axiom “but can you count on your “Friends” to give you reliable information”. Everyone loves having an opinion almost as much as sharing it. But a mass sharing of opinions is not the same as an analysis or accountable report on an event or a phenomenon. The latter actually takes time to reflect and to harness critical faculties, which of course are an obstacle to being the first to Tweat a happening event.
To us the machismo of Real Time reporting is its own worst enemy.
We still read newspapers and scientific journals (in spite of the heralding of their demise), because we entrust a greater degree of accuracy to those who have made it their profession to account for and recount the truth of events. Never without bias or slant, obviously but with a focus on trying to reveal the truth rather than just being the first person to have an opinion on it.
“It is easy to see the truth, just rid your self of your opinions”. —Haikuin