I think that we are already starting to see adjustments to the “millions of tiny campfires” of opinions available on the internet. The new normal is emerging, albeit slowly, too slowly perhaps for the true experts. Some examples:
- Success of paywalled information sources like news gathering organizations. There was a real worry that newspapers will not survive the digital age, but those with foresight and resources have adjusted successfully and have gained readership. People are re-discovering the value of refereed news rather than listening to rants of the friends or family.
- Increasing disengagement from social platforms, especially by younger generations, who are becoming very well aware of the dangers of “wall postings” being totally divorced from reality. There’s value in social media, but it’s not in news gathering and companies like Facebook and Google are increasing scared of getting themselves regulated like real media companies, if they don’t bring order to the chaos they’ve created. News aggregation is fine, but people are increasingly adept at blocking opinionated blowhards.
- Emergence (and success) of refereed and/or moderated sources of information not related to news. I see it very much in the technical fields (try the stackoverflow.com site for any heavy duty software development issue). The best answers are not only validated by experts, but voted up by users confirming them, thus increasing confidence of the next person facing the same question and looking for a solution. Bee-L, while in a different business, attests to the same hunger for informed discussion. What I think Bee-L is missing is a referred How To reference zone where new beekeepers would be able to either a) find answers to basic questions about beekeeping or b) to confront information gathered from other sources that they might have doubts about or even more questions.
While political and social common grounds leave a lot to be desired, I’m much less pessimistic than James Fisher regarding the internet - there are plenty of internet users gravitating to well-presented, vetted and refereed expert opinions. For every moron spouting about vaccine dangers, there are millions getting themselves and their children vaccinated. The thought of a losing a child to a preventable disease has a way of making people think. And lest we think that such attitudes are limited to those without the means - let’s remember that Steve Jobs dismissed medical science for too long and by the time he embraced it, it was too late even for science to save him. But those are exceptions and examples that will be repeated as cautionary gateposts in our evolution with the internet.
Przemek
> On Jun 1, 2018, at 9:33 PM, Anne Bennett <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I definitely see more questions than answers with respect to how a
> "group" as large as everyone on the planet (or even, everyone rich
> enough to have access to the net) can meaningfully interact!
>
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