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What Do We Do When the Internet Mob Is Wrong?
New submitter cornicefire writes "By now most people have heard the news and seen the picture of the boy who was killed over the new Nike sneakers. There are Facebook pages devoted to fist-shaking protests about materialism and greed. Yada yada yada. But while the scuffles over the shoes were real, the death was not. The photo was just a stock photo of some kid in a lab. We know this because of some old school reporters — Steve Earley and Justin Fentin of the Baltimore Sun. In the rush to celebrate crowdsourcing, many of us pooh-pooh the old media as 'gatekeepers,' but there are times when keeping that gate locked is a good idea. After all, if one of the crowd discovered the error, the signal would barely rise above the noise. There are people claiming that anyone questioning the facts is being disrespectful. Is there something we can do about the mobocracy? How can we support the best traditions of journalism while fixing the worst? How can we nurture accuracy?"
Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
You should be out selling them hot dogs. That's what mobs are for.
Deleted
Wouldn't a call to the "dead teen" set things straight?
We had a similar event earlier this year near where I live. A kid, in that case, did die. Everyone thought the lad had over-dosed and died and the followed two weeks were a blur of cries for tougher drug control, better drug programs, editorials on how irresponsible youth are, etc etc etc. But a few of us, having read the report, noted the cause of death probably wasn't really drug related and the autopsy confirmed this. However no one wanted to hear it. Any comment about what really happened was shouted down in the anti-drug fervor.
There isn't much you can do against a mob, even one which is obviously wrong. Just wait it out and quietly try to educate people one at a time I suppose.
Be really outspoken against them and post your personal information every chance you get...
the people who immerse themselves in social media, who believe rumors without question, who only worry about other's opinions and so are easily swayed, are just dumber than sack of shit regardless of how high their IQ. Over half the populace is like that, very scary
Your local newspaper is regulated by law to check it's sources and it's facts before printing.
Looks very much like a PR stunt from Nike to me, to get out the message "our shoes are so good that people are fighting and killing each other to get them".
Take the OWIES, who committed acts of terrorism because they thought the 1% weren't paying their fair share...
http://visualizingeconomics.com/2010/02/12/how-much-taxes-are-paid-by-the-poor-middle-class-and-rich/
The top 1% may make 18% of the wealth, but they pay 27% of the taxes!!!
Yet this lie has persisted, despite overwhelming facts. Why? Because of idiots like PK and Obama. Though idiot may be too strong a word. They know what they are doing, and they lie and cheat to lure helpless fools into their plans and machinations.
The real issue is whether Nike was behind the hype. Nike isn't that cool any more, and Michael Jordan is a has-been jock. They're the parties that would benefit from this. Follow the money.
...reputable editors distil information.
In case it's not obvious, the Internet mob is a "crowd", not an "editor".
Rustle up an internet mob to punish this despicable lack of accuracy!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
run if they are armed with pitchforks and torches. We try to reason if they are equipped with long range weaponry and ignore otherwise. This is about responsibility of those that create or publish the information. The mob got it wrong because someone told them something wrong. That is about people checking one source and taking that as absolute true. That's comfortable and easy. To think we must search and digest new information based on what we already know. Never take info for granted, mainly when it is too good to be true. The less people joining the mob (meaning you can avoid joining having a mind by yourself) the lesser the problem will be.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
People who have been proven right time after time, such as Snopes or the Bad Astronomy guy, are frequently cited as rebuttals.
Having an internet-wide identity, such as Open ID (and specifically not FaceBook or a government supplied ID), allowing people to gain reputation, and override other peoples' posts, or at least be placed higher, is really the only way to do this everywhere.
Just as with slashdot moderation, it will be possible to game the system, if you respond rationally everywhere except one issue where you feel strongly about. And it would be nice if your reputation could be classified so that you can have a good reputation on some subjects, but automatically junkpiled on other topics.
As it stands, fact checkers who don't have an axe to grind are the only voices of reason, and you basically have to educate people about the fact checker being cited, but not so much that it looks like you are unquestioning of their lack of bias.
Making the internet personal again, so you are talking with actual people (virtually, not their real identities necessarily). Not arguing with text on a page.
Journal organizations need to practice credibility. Credibility is built over time with trustworthy news reporting. The problem is most organizations have fallen to the dark side of profit and tabloidism and can never come back. Their credibility is lost for good.
Individuals need to practice skepticism and critical thought. Then they can identify credible news sources by paying attention. Alternatively, by recognizing logical fallacies an individual can read between the lines and extract newsworthy data embedded in the half truths and agenda driven news we see today.
There is no legal solution to this problem. Principled individuals have to stand up and decide to make things better.
-- Mean People Suck
moderated by the community. Believe it.
Even if this story is false, the sheer amount of violence over Air Jordan's over the years has been staggering. I remember as a kid living in a rust belted inner city and there were people shot and robbed of their Shoes.
Astroturfers are easy to spot... they have a high follow count but a low follower count. Nike needs to get better advertising staff... just jamming twitter/facebook updates with their ad may lose more customers than it gains.
The rush to get a story out first is hardly anything new, nor is the inevitable occasional false reporting. "Dewey Defeats Truman", Chicago Tribune, 1948. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman.
What do we do about this? Wrong idea. Each one of us does something about it individually. You think for yourself; you vet things yourself; you don't worry about the rest of the "crowd" and how they might be deceived. Evolution only has you socially rigged up to truly affect about 150 people, max, anyway.
But, if everyone carries out that solemn responsibility, things will be fine. Problem is, because of a lingering reliance on big media, most people don't. And it was a serious problem back in the days before crowdsourcing too, because the "gatekeepers" have told some whoppers over the last century or so. This was especially true around the time of Goebbels and WW II, and it has never recovered since, despite all the best intentions of journalistic integrity. The journalists did their best to hold the lie machines at bay, but that time has long since passed. A few decades ago, by my reckoning.
So, the horse has been out of the barn for at least that long, and we are talking about shutting the gate? Now? What the hell, folks? Mass media is a lie machine, and it functions because it is a lie machine, and all we've done is given the keys to the lie machine to everyone, instead of only the "gatekeepers." That, by my yardstick, is a profoundly good thing, although it will take a period of adjustment to become used to it.
Personal responsibility and a ready supply of grains of salt is all we have left. Don't believe everything you read. Since CGI advances, don't believe everything you see either. Welcome to the Brave New World. IMHO, it's a "good thing," but you have to be careful what you choose to believe these days.
When the mob latches onto some bit of propaganda that satisfies their ideological slant, the truth cannot break through. Willing dupes will raise an unholy clamor against anybody who dares to point out that their emperor is naked. And the ignorant crowd will join in the chorus in order not to be singled out for vilification themselves.
Flip side of the coin is the "old guard" burying stories because it doesn't serve their corporate masters and/or because the truth about a news story isn't sensational or lurid enough. Old journalism used to be relatively honest, because lets face it, there's always been plenty of corrupt/stupid/greedy corporations/politicians/public figures, and exposing them was sensational enough to sell copy without sacrificing integrity. That integrity can no longer be assumed and so "old" journalism has just as much upside & downside as "new" journalism. It's up to us to learn to separate the signal from noise when the name of the game is to bury us in noise.
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
Wrong? WRONG?!? Teh Intarnets are never wrong! Reality changes to suit US! That's the power of crowdsourcing and distributed news gathering! If we say you died, REALITY WILL CHANGE. We will make it change if need be. That's what makes us better than mass media! The only difference between us is that they could eventually be stopped from fabricating news! We will not make the same mistake of allowing that to happen to us.
How can newspapers prioritise accuracy and fairness when its patrons prioritise sensationalism and shock? The fact that nuances in the lives of celebrities can, at times, be more valuable to people than current events around them pronounces this. This element of our society needs to change first before we can begin talking about ways of nurturing accuracy.
Welcome to sociopolitical science 101. This behavior is called tyranny of the majority, and it so worried Thomas Jefferson and others who founded the United States that they crafted a new variant of democracy intended to discourage it. At least in politics....
Simply track down and kill or mame the folks that spread intentional misinformation that causes death, injury, and property damage, until the courts catch up with this sort of tort. That could take a few years.
Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
Perhaps it is more important to teach not believing everything that you read. Especially on the internet where there is little barrier to being published.
To instill some sort of ability to judge credibility. For example, two people make conflicting medical claims. One is an unknown but licensed medical doctor who trained at a well regarded university and the other is a famous and popular actress. That the actress' lack of relative credibility would require extraordinary evidence of her claims.
... and what do we do when the traditional gatekeepers fail us? Same damned thing. Read critically. Read multiple points of view, including those who disagree with you, and draw your own conclusions. Nobody can do that for you, and no system will do that for you.
The problem lies not with the "internet mob", nor traditional media reporting, but with the viewership. People are been conditioned to guzzle up any oversensationalized content. It's like when you're used to beating off to increasingly shameful porn, regular old T&A doesn't do it anymore. Well the average "news" consumer has been flooded with the equivalent of japanese torture scat, and barely notices when something perfectly reasonable occurs, or in this case: when a loaded prank gets shoved down their gullible throats. This steady diet of hype and hyperbole is ruining the frail mind of the common imbecile, and since those imbeciles are now all over the internet via Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, they are empowered to spread their unchecked bullshit in geometric fashion.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
...and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
That level of dumbfuckery is normal. Too bad for the rest of us.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The fact is mainstream media has been on spiraling downhill slope. Today news and tv focus more on entertaining and less on informing. Whatever is entertaining (regardless of how tastless or ethical it seems to prevail for our entertainment!). As long as they get viewers and ratings from this type of coverage they will continue to report the same crap.
Righteousness.
Set up a paypal account with the title "Parents against Nike violence against small children."
Deleted
You should be out selling them pepper spray. It's a food product essentially.
That seems to be the new export of the US. The question is, after clearing the obfuscations and outright lies what do we have left to offer? Whatever it is, wear high boots and don't count on it boosting the GDP long after the hot air escapes. Tech IPOs, Real Estate Bubbles, rigged markets and shiny baubles built on 40 year old sweat equity. The future's so bright, I gotta wear blinders.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
On "Linux = Secure" (lmao - NOT)? For years that's all you heard here but lately, that's become the stuff of laughter online (android, a linux variant, shows that much easily in 2011 as do the 5 CA's broken into (bad for SSL/ecommerce/banking etc.) that run Linux, as well as the Linux sourcecode repository being busted into also (very bad)). I predict entire flocks of "penguins" will rush this post and downmod it, facts or not. That's even funnier watching them trying to bury the truth versus their years of lies/fud/fictions.
I'm a bit puzzled as to why this is a story. Old media isn't any better as a whole at gatekeeping than the internet mob is. For example, most news articles are reprints with absolutely no effort to check that the reprint was accurate. And some "old media" are so biased and/or incompetent that I don't consider them a news source such as CNN or Fox News.
And for the old media sources that do real news reporting, such as the Washington Post, BBC, etc, we also have people in the internet mob doing their own fact checking as well.
For example, Slashdot does a fair job of real time fact-checking. If you're depending on You Tube (and You Tube comments!) for your news, then there is something very wrong with you.
It's just something that comes with freedom of information. I don't want other people deciding what I get to know about, so if I have to endure some falsities so be it.
Bad information will also correct itself on the Internet. (like, umm, now) because anyone can refute that too and not everyone subscribes to the mob mentality.
I never want to go back to gatekeepers like Rupert Fucking Murdoch controlling information, thank you.
Here is that people don't actually give a shit about a kid that may or may not have died they just want something they can point at to say "this is why I am better then x group of people" or "see this, this the evidence of how and why society is terrible" to prop up their world view that everyone else is wrong and they are right
This steady diet of hype and hyperbole is ruining the frail mind of the common imbecile, and since those imbeciles are now all over the internet via Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, they are empowered to spread their unchecked bullshit in geometric fashion.
I can hear some drums beating and a chant of "Fox News lies" in the background.
When you figure it out let me know. I've shown my dad Snopes many, many times, but I keep getting stupid email forwarded to me.
... As with a lot of problems we face, it's due to a general lack of intelligence among the populace which breeds a culture hostile toward critical thinking, reasoning and logic.
They're fat because the cheapest food available is also some of the most fattening and unhealthy. Eating good, healthy food is actually more expensive. (I say this as a poor person trying to eat healthy. It's tough to manage if your budget gets too tight.)
This is all about rumours and mobs and gossip. It is not about crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing is when lots of people apply their knowledge and expertise to a problem, such as Wikipedia.
In the case that was reported, nobody had any knowledge and expertise except the two Baltimore reporters. It was just a bunch of rabbler-rousers voicing their OPINIONS. Nothing more than an opinion poll on the Internet.
There isn't much you can do against a mob, even one which is obviously wrong. Just wait it out and quietly try to educate people one at a time I suppose.
Doesn't work.
I shut up. Let folks stay ignorant - they won't believe you otherwise. And use their ignorance to manipulate them.
I'm not alone. Just look at what's happening in the Republican primaries. Here you have relatively well educated people spewing non-sense, lies and misinformation to pander to the ignorant masses. Does anyone really think Newt Gingrich is as stupid as he appears? Or Bachman? Cain? Perry (- Ok, maybe Perry is that stupid.)
I don't.
I see them as manipulating the public , using the public's own ignorance and contempt of facts and rational thinking and praying on their emotions.
That's what it has come to: emotional indulgence and the inability or lack of desire to gather the facts and look at an issue rationally. Careful study and self-education is out of the question. People want to be told what to believe. They don't want ugly truth - truth that's always a shade of gray and never black and white - right or wrong - good or evil - or any other childish binary thought.
Emotion and ego are like a drug. "I'm right - you're wrong and there's no two ways about it!" has become our society's mantra and it's leading us to a downfall. And some, Rupert Murdoch for one, have become quite rich and powerful taking advantage of this.
This has always been a balancing act, the same questions were raised about allowing non-landholders to vote, allowing women to vote, etc. There need to be editors and judges. But in just as many cases, we need the twittering mob to correct editors who get it wrong.
Gently reply
Yup, crowdsourcing gets it wrong a lot. However, traditional media has a long history of not only getting the facts wrong as well, but also for manipulating the facts to generate ratings.
If the mob is wrong, but their argument supports Ron Paul, we tell them to go post on slashdot.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The original post asked, "What can we do when the internet mob is wrong?" Forget it; most people don't care. Thi8s discussion about the kid who got killed over new Nike shoes came up at work last night. some of the talkers were so outraged that they ranted for over half an hour. When I tell them today that it was a hoax, they will just go, "oops" and continue on as if they didn't waste their time and emotional energy for nothing. Five years from now they will be saying, "Do your remember that time the kid got killed...?" and will have forgotten that it wasn't true.
In the long term it will mean nothing. What matters is when there are consequences in the short term. Crowds have beaten and killed people when they mistakenly thought a person ran over a little kid, or was a molester, or robbed someplace etc., etc,.. Some sociologists are claiming that Obama go elected on the basis of crowd think and internet mob-ism. (This is not scientific, but I've asked lots of people over the years why they voted for Obama, and NOT ONE of them could tell me anything about his voting record in Illinois or Washington.) Cultural biases are affecting our lives. Friends tell me it was very uncomfortable being a middle eastern person in the USA after 9/11. This type of bias may fade, but when? And how much harm does it do in the meantime?
Bryan Caplan, and Economist, wrote a book called, "The Myth of the Rational Voter" http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691129428 , in which he points out that cultural biases against free markets and foreigners, and toward make-work and pessimism are exploited by politicians everywhere.
I doubt that there is anything we can do to offset the influence of sensationalism and propaganda except expose the facts as well as we can. (Ooops! Pessimism, right?)
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Parenthetically, I'm a little surprised that this didn't solve itself, and I suspect it would have eventually. There are those of us who deal with stock photos daily, recognize them, and can follow them to their source. That a news story is a hoax is news, in and of itself, and in lots of cases the reveal travels faster than the original hoax.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"How do you nurture accuracy?"
???
I find this a bizarre juxtaposition, to say the least.
Accuracy is like a knife. It cuts, and it cuts deep. "The truth? You want the truth? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!" And so on. "Nurturance", to use a modernism, well, now here one thinks of Mom, apple pie, and, oh, drama. Over actual injury, that is. Not really compatible concepts, you see.
Not to worry. On the whole, accuracy will handle itself. You want to NOT nurture crap by fighting the "intellectual property" larceny guilds and the advertising and marketing industries that serve them, or their whoreocracies in DC and the state houses, though, well, then by all means be my guest.
"Anonymous friend of H.L. Mencken"
Wikipedia is a mobocracy, but if even its own members fail to live up to their own policies, what hope is there for any other mobocracy? They are good at gathering information, but have yet to discover a basic mechanism with which to achieve accuracy by automatically weeding out errors...
Migrate all major news and news aggregation sites to slashcode.
If you need me for anything else, I'll be playing Edgeworld.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks for weeks the large corporate media reported that over six thousand died in the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers. Even after smaller news outlets and shows noted it was less than three thousand.
After the Katrina hurricane the media reported on the uncontrolled violent chaos within the Superdome, and reported that for days and weeks after smaller outlets and crowd sourcing reported that was, correctly, a complete lie.
So pick you poison, my friend, the world is not a perfect place.
Its Christmas Eve and I am really busy, so I only had time to skim the summary, but thats horrible that some kid got killed for his Nikes!!! Especially during this season its important we honor those killed so needlessly - even tho I am very busy, I am taking the time out to tweet in his honor, and post on Facebook my outrage at this kind of senseless violence! You all should do it too.
Word game?
I like the ambiguity of the parsing in that sentence. "This just in: parents who are against Nike violence have been found to also be against small children!"
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I seriously, seriously hope that someone out there isn't taking Jennifer Government for an instruction manual.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
In the book "Ender's Game", Orson Scott Card envisioned Internet forums that are invitation-only. One gets to belong to the more respected forums only by being invited, and that only happens if one proves one's worthiness by contributing quality ideas and information.
Things sure have not turned out that way. Indeed, today we have a kind of mobocracy. Things are too flat. It is good that the old gatekeepers can be sidestepped, but it is not good that there is so much noise that it is hard to decide what to trust.
Even worse, the old gatekeepers are back: paid promotion is alive and well on the Internet.
They were all minority thugs. No really, look at the pictures of where this happened.
Thug blacks
Thug latinos
Thug pacific islanders
It's fine to say all cultures are equal, but we have savages living amongst us and events like these bring them to the forefront.
Turning information into entertainment is a genius move for crowd monitoring/control. Further exacerbation of the situation occurs when profit motives encourage and contribute to the misinformations.
Bad information is worse than no information at all, IMO.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Traditional media is about on-par with the new media, in terms of accuracy-> "Locking the gate" serves no purpose, about as useful as pushing the 'close door' button on an elevator.
And if you consider the current traditional media's accuracy, which in my humble opinion, is producing lies so transparent even their staff have trouble stomaching it, you realize just how bad things are.
For some odd reason, people look back to the past as the golden era of journalism, when they reported 'the truth.' History reminds us otherwise: "yellow journalism" is a well-known term from a former era, worth reading about if you have the time. People are just nostalgic about their childhood, when they were brainless, spineless automatons who believed anything they were told; they're having trouble coming to grips with reality -> people lie, often and for no discernible reason; and even the good reasons are pretty terrible, but tradition outweighs common sense, and the people who employ lying the most tend to be the people with the least qualms about murdering people that disagree with them.
Consider, for your pleasure, the current holiday: Christmas. Parents lie to their kids about a guy in a big red jumpsuit, climbing down a chimney, riding around on a flying sleight with magical reindeer, and dispensing presents on the basis of a metric ("Naughty / Nice") which appears to conform with cultural norms of morality: people celebrate lies, and bury the truth. They love the lies their parents taught them so much, that many of them go on to teach them to their children. Just try telling someone else's kids that Santa is a lie; see if you aren't vilified.
That's not even touching on the holiday's origins itself. It's turtles all the way down!
I am John Hurt.
"many of us pooh-pooh the old media as 'gatekeepers,'"
Many of us don't!
And the druggies wake up from their overnight bender.
Wasn't a Nike shoe death a marketing ploy by Nike in the book Jennifer Government?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government
That the leaders of the mob are questioning it's purity.
Until or unless gene therapy goes a lot further than it has...
"You can't cure stupid."
I think what's going to happen first is sex-, service- and menial-robotics and other game-changing vehicles for technological plenty and comfort will come along and (further) pacify the crowd; they'll be no less hungry for gossip, but they'll be even less willing to disturb the status quo that is serving them up said comforts than they are today. We won't see superstition go away until or unless it becomes a form of child abuse to let your child be born and/or raised stupid, and/or gullible, and/or without critical thinking abilities. Just an IMHO.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
sheeple
Journalist have never gotten it wrong.
Admins need to elevate corrections.
For your own safety, always assume Internet mobs, mass media, marketing divisions, religious zealots, terrorists, the Iraqi information minister, and slashdot summaries are wrong.
You're talking about local gossip among fairly ignorant people who don't want their preconceived notions challenged.
Internet mobs out the lies far more quickly, witness this very case. Yes, we'll get some wrong obviously, but we amplify truth so much that lies mostly get acknowledged by the attacking communities.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
...it's not the mob, it's the internet.
In an ideal world, the mob would have smartphones and everyone would get a notification when significant news arrived.
How significant? Significant when labeled as such by some karma mechanism. The only gotcha is the moderation has to be effective and really associate karma to meaningful posts. Not like here on /. where people have means to automatically get, amass and use karma for strategic/coordinated moves.
There are invitation-only discussion forums, they're private and clearly you've not been invited to one. Sorry.
At issue is the how-dare-they notion of unpedigreed commentators exercising freedom of speech. A judge in Washington fired the first salvo of officialdom against the groundswell of unauthorized speech just this month (http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/nation/2011/12/ore-judge-rules-blogger-not-journalist/1984201). By all means, let us preserve the right-to-publish for only the anointed and approved. People like the sainted New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, who can be trusted with the Truth. Doing so prevents much harm to society, on that I'm sure we can all agree. Or else.
The internet is never wrong. Misled yes, but never wrong. "wrong" is determined by the opinion of the majority (maybe not in politics, but on the internet yes). As you defined it, the internet mob IS the majority. Even if the death was not real, there opinions are still valid.
It's probably as valid to say that the newspapers value sales, which they can get by sensationalism. If at the same time they're owned by someone who has something he doesn't want discussed critically, they can get strongly encouraged to become the "News of the World".
Conversely, if a newspaper gains a reputation for digging deeply into the facts and reporting honestly, they can make good sales on that basis.
Where I live we have three papers, one of the first type, and two of the latter. The two who nourish accuracy and fairness hold opposing political views, and so many people subscribe to both. I buy one and read the other in the coffee-shop (:-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
half? Citation please...
You are doing *exactly* what you accuse others of doing...
I just learned that this story wasn't true... Not from NBC... but here... Sure, research was done elsewhere - but that's the point of the crowd - passing information around in the most consumable manners. Some information will get sent too. But so what. The crowd will correct that quickly, and add flavor to the stuff that is true.. And call BS on the stuff that's not that NBC does decide to shovel... The crowd is awesome - not because it's always correct... but because, when it comes to truth anyway - it'll always get there....
I went right to the facebook page dedicated to perpetuating the story and posted a comment for that lil bwa R. I. P. son!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
There was research published this year on the "wisdom of the crowds". The idea being that if you ask enough people a question with a numerical answer, and average their results it gets pretty accurate at over 100 people, unless those people are allowed to communicate. While the research was done specifically on numerical questions/knowledge (quantitative), I suspect the same might be true of non-numeric/qualitative information. Certainly anyone who uses the internet as a news source (qualitative information) needs to especially careful about this, because the one huge advantage 'old media' has over the internet is slower feedback mechanisms, which means a wider and more diverse sample set for each unit of information ("fact").
Gatekeepers who control the information, so we only see accurate, to-the-point data. You know, like they have in North Korea.
One of the biggest problems with the "new" media today is that bloggers and news sites will just pick up stories from other bloggers and news sites, rephrase them, and pass them off as the truth. The problem is, once you track down the original news story, you see their sources are fake, they misinterpreted the sources, or they're speculating about the implications of their sources. There is no professional sourcing going on here, no investigative journalism. All that's left is hype and hearsay. In this way, false news stories spread like wild fire and everybody believes they're true because they can read them on many news sites and blogs. I think this is incredibly dangerous, as it colors public opinion with falsehoods. Sure, there are the same kinds of problems in traditional media, but at the largest news organizations, you at least get source verification most of the time, and original writing some of the time. With the "new" media, it's much less clear where the information is coming from.
Apologies if this has been said before, but it's worth repeating: if you value the objectivity and research of the best of the 'old' journalism, consider subscribing to an organization that still practices it.
Then you should post something about that, in response to the question, "What do we do when the Internet Mob is Wrong?" - unless these private forums are too few and insignificant that they don't really matter.
invite-only forums like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal?
They exist, and a lot of the time they're full of shit. And Politifact, which had a good run, ended up calling the claim that the Red Team voted to end Medicare the "Lie of the Year" because they wanted to replace it with a program that they also called Medicare.
Tell them to read https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Casteism
http://xkcd.com/386/
This is EXACTLY the plot of a 2003 novel called "Jennifer Government" by Max Barry, the novel literally opens with a Nike executive arranging for the deaths of some kids to drum up hype for a new sneaker brand.
It's so crazily bang-on I did a double take when learning about this story. Talk about life imitating art.
GREAT book too, highly recommended. Time called it an "ad-world version of Dr Strangelove" and that is an apt description. He even did a pretty good job with the tech jargon.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
as soon as I read 'yada, yada, yada' I stopped reading. What terrible writing. Stop this dreadful descent into Seinfeldism.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
[quote]A family of four can go to McDonald's and eat dinner for $15. They're consuming 2,000 empty calories in a single sitting. A 2-liter of Coke is $1.29. A gallon of orange juice is $6. See the problem?[/quote]
Is this actually reality in the US? I get the feeling you're intentionally misrepresenting prices. I am far from rich by any means, but I manage to save by relentlessly cutting the costs of food (my biggest expense after rent, easily.)
I can buy four chicken breasts for £4 UK, ($6.20). Those are fresh, not frozen chicken breasts, so you can do cheaper.
To cook them you throw them in the oven and watch TV for 25 minutes.
Buy some random vegetables for £1-2 max. The vegetables you drop into a pan and go and watch TV for 15 minutes.
There is your meal for 4 for £6, I'm not even trying, and those prices are without even making an effort to find cheaper.
On juice:
Coca-Cola £2/2L
http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=254857167
Orange Juice £1.24/2L
http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=255595820
The OJ works out at $3.66 per US gallon. I would be very surprised if the US has more expensive groceries than the UK.
I am shocked --SHOCKED!-- to learn that I something on the internet might be incorrect.
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
As its written, "By the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established”
There's nothing wrong with crowd sourcing. What's wrong is accepting facts based on a single, hitherto unknown, source of evidence, as your only witness (instead of two or three independent and distinct sources of evidence.)
The problem with crowd-sourcing is its medium is the Internet. And its easy to be anonymous on the internet (so you cannot identify a witness). The corollary to this is its easy for one person to simulate multiple witnesses (so you don't know the number of witness.) So crowd-sourcing over the internet has a problem.
Lets consider a simple case:
1. Person 'P' asserts 'A'
2. Person 'Q' asserts 'A'
If (1) and (2) are true, we can accept 'A' as true.
Before this happens however, four facts that need confirmation:
1. P's identity
2. P's authorship of 'A'
3. Q's identity
4. Q's authorship of 'A'
Each fact needs confirmation by two or three witnesses (i.e. a minimum of 8 assertions to backup one assertion: 'A').
Some ways this can be done (taking P and A as example): .... at ...)
1. Trusted website 'W1' charges P's credit card a small amount (a rupee, a cent...) to digitally sign a hash of 'P wrote A'
2. Trusted website 'W2' assigns P a digital identity that uniquely identifies him as a person (e.g. "P, son of M and N, born on
3. Trusted user 'U1' digitally asserts 'P wrote A'
4. Trusted user 'U2' digitally asserts P's digital identity (as W2 did)
(where "Trusted' has the same '2-or-3 witnesses' evidentiary requirements)
Why did you use appeal to sympathy" instead of ad misericordiam?
May I remind the readers of the famously fake plastic turkey of President Bush? Which was a real turkey, not fake, and which reverberates to this day among supposedly edited journalists? Gatekeepers my hiney.
The problem with that in reality is that it's too easy to create sock puppets.
For a good discussion forum, you'd need to use your real name, and proof that you are you.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I don't think it's all that hard to determine what sources to trust and which not. At the moment the much-reviled mainstream media uses actual journalistic standards -- the reports have sources for the information, where they can they identify the sources. Where they can't, they ID them as anonymous, but there's actually someone who served as a source and several editors who trust the reporter to have accurately reported and represented that source. There are usually two levels of editor who guide the writing and make sure of the sources. Large publications employ a fact checker who makes sure the names are spelled right and other factoids. Those standards developed slowly (compared to journalism of, say, the 1700s -- a kind of Fox news for journalism (heh, heh, heh -- OK, that shows my bias...). Which is all to say that, with some experience of comparing the reading of articles, magazines & newspapers over time, we come to know who we can trust and that standards are in place to back the information given. We may not agree with the slant or bias, but the facts are generally agreed upon. In spite of standards and protocols being in place, the vast information output of the Internet is not at that stage yet. I can think of only a few Internet-only publications that meet those standards (and even then I'm not sure -- but let's say Slate, Wired and perhaps a few others). The rest is caveat emptor. Because they don't have the revenue, they can't afford the levels of experienced editing, fact checking etc. So I tend to use these two information sources for very different things. The print world for news and analysis of events. The Internet world for crowd sourced type stuff: reviews of books, gizmoes, very fast reporting of events (but with the full knowledge I'm only seeing raw footage which may have its own bias and who's source I don't know if I can trust to be a representation of events). Still, very often dramatic, compelling and worth watching. Just not useful for considered analysis of events. That may change with time but Internet reporting will require more money to support the infrastructure to ensure reliable information. George
IMHO it seems that uniformity of opinion (discounting knee jerk reaction-ism ) is the bane of modern online debate. Why not reward diversity of opinion: create a system that mods up novel comments?
I'm sure "traditional media" can get a story about a dead kid and his shoes right; there is, after all, little at stake and it isn't exactly complicated.
That doesn't mean reporters or "traditional media" are qualified, unbiased, or helpful when it comes to reporting on politics or economics.
What'll really bake your noodle is when you realize that they're both lying to you.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That's an interesting post. I've written a paper on exactly this subject, which was released last year called Truth Lies and the Internet: www.demos.co.uk/publications/truthliesandtheinternet Ultimately I think the problem is that the education system has not - understandably given the speed of change - kept apace with the information revolution over the last decade. We need an entirely new discipline in schools about applying traditional critical thinking skills to the peculiarities of an age of mass, participatory, information production. Jamie