A couple of months back I interviewed Henry Jenkins of MIT and an “expert” on convergence, in so far as anybody can regard themselves as an expert. This is Henry’s take on what’s happening:
“The grassroots communities of fans, bloggers, and gamers are playing an active role in documenting, analyzing, predicting, and responding to media change, operating alongside of and in many cases, doing a better job than, traditional sites of learning and research.”
In other words authority is becoming diffused. What we know is passing back into uncertainty. Knowledge is in a constantly emerging condition. No bad thing.
The other effect of the web on knowledge is that a quasi-religious element enters into crowd behaviour. Though experts talk about the wisdom of the crowd, the crowd still behaves sometimes like a herd and sometimes like a congregation.
In each field of the blog arena, and in each area of web content aggregation, there are a small number of prophets and many disciples. In technology, TechCrunch, Techmeme; in the slightly wider sphere, Digg, Memeorandum and Netscape, in parenting, Dooce, in food Delicious Days. It seems in the midst of uncertainty people find apron strings to hold onto.
In terms of accurate information delivery it’s doubtful whether the emerging system cuts the mustard (though I’m a sceptic about what went before). An example, bearing in mind that TechCrunch is one of the web’s most trafficked sites.
Today Techcrunch reported on a new search product called Powerset asking if it would “pull a Google.” The author, Michael Arrington, had not seen Powerset but still felt able to speculate.
The evidence, however, is not there. CastTV has not launched and is not open to view. So we’re really talking about a sneak preview of something that must be in its early stages (or are we? It’s not clear).
In the good old days…. Well I never bought into the idea that traditional media were saintly in their use of sources but to comment when you haven’t seen a source seems to me a development we need to judge critically, using developers to describe their own product, in a relatively uncritical way, is also allowing in to the system a self-referencing judgment.
We seem too be losing the ability to make high quality demands on our information providers and, if we were, the response would be that the crowd corrects these errors and produces a better long term product.
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