Optimism

"The colours red, blue, and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody" (Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

I've decided that I'm pretty optimistic about the future of the Inter Net, and I'm basing this optimism almost entirely on Wikipedia and its cohorts and similar projects. While print and broadcast media scream and wail about the overly political "blogosphere" (don't get me started on how much I hate that word) and blogs respond by insisting that they are the real people's opinion, and look forward to a future in which all news comes from untrained amateurs updating from internet cafes in global hotspots, I look at the internet's big collaborative projects and note how, instead of being politicized and full of errors or outright lies, these vast collections of information are self-editing and become surprisingly neutral- the true moderates of the internet. Stoppard wrote "A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until- 'My God,' says a second man, 'I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.' At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience. . . . 'Look, look!' recites the crowd. 'A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.'" In the same way, the more people involved with the writing of something, the fewer politics and other fancies enter it- one person can recognize another's bias and remove it, and his bias can be removed by yet another, until the article or story or what have you is void of all red, blue, and green thought, and reflects the yellow of everyday experience. I have hope for the future, provided collaboration remains at a high rate and individual contributions are subject to the critical eye of the masses.

(Addendum 3:18 pm) As I've thought about this, I've also realized that anonymity is pretty important, too- what makes Wikis work is that no one gets credit for a specific contribution, so there's no hubris or whatever to deal with- people see something that's left out, they add it, and they move on. With the world of blogs and message boards, there's a sense of competition- have the highest post count or number of hits, start the trend, etc. People want to attach themselves to the latest thing, and any higher calling is ignored.

One of these days I'm going to do actual interesting stuff, and stop all these philosophizing meta posts.

I went to my middle school reunion yesterday. Geeky as it sounds (and it was), I had fun and I'm glad to have seen so many people that I'd lost touch with. My life's pretty sweet sometimes.

Gender: 74% male (enough words, but a good chunk of this is Tom Stoppard quotes)