One case in point.
It's an old story (by internet standards). I don't know if it was the first of
its kind, though I'm sure than since this particular incident numerous others
have occurred. Back in 1999 Jane's Intelligence
Review, a respected journal on numerous defense and intelligence issues, was
preparing an article on cyberterrorism. The editors at Jane's decided to solicit
some reactions before publication, and in order to do so posted the article to
Slashdot, where it was known that numerous readers/contributors
were well informed on the issue.
The response was overwhelming, and overwhelmingly critical. So critical that the
editors at Jane's decided to pull the story and rewrite it completely, incorporating
numerous points that the Slashdot readers had raised. Andrew Leonard wrote a
short but very informative piece on the incident in Salon. His review seemed
primarily concerned with the extent to which the communities of expertise that
were then taking shape on the internet were exerting
influence, even though they didn't necessarily have any official authority.
And this was, of course, before blogging became a recognized phenomenon.
Among other things, Leonard quotes some negative comments on the issue by Robert
X. Cringely in what turns out to be a
fascinating article itself. Cringely informs us, for instance that:
The Associated Press came into being in the 19th century as a way of leveraging
that Internet of its own era, the telegraph. The AP was a news service — literally
a "wire service," it was so tied to telegraphy — that supplied news
from out of town to newspapers all over America and the world. As a business
(the AP was paid only for those stories actually used by its member papers),
the wire service had to maximize the popularity of its content. This was done
in two very different fashions. First, the AP invented objectivity. The concept
that the press was unbiased came from nothing so much as the AP's need to sell
the same story to both Republican and Democratic newspapers. An objective story
being the least objectionable was the easiest sell.
And this suggests that perhaps our modern conception of "objectivity"
which has become so deeply ingrained in the way we relate to information, hasn't
always been such a central concept. And if that's the case, perhaps we shouldn't
weep too much if the continued success of blogs, and other tools such as wikis,
seem to be causing a deterioration of what was formerly considered a rather iron
objectivity.
Go to: How many prosumers can fit on the head
of cyberspace?