The last year's worth of financial news nonsense has got me thinking again about the divergent roles individuals and groups play in our lives. I'm torn between what, or whom, I'm supposed to trust.
It seems like the more broad and robust my access to the world gets, the less I know or believe. I rely more on what is immediate and personal, and the things that I know are true get more simple and basic...just as the credibility of larger, more complicated subjects becomes hazy and elusive.
All of us might live in a networked, ubiquitous net of information, wherein communication is as instantaneous as it's incomplete, but I also live in an ever-smaller, walled community of knowledge, in which people still speak in complete sentences. I've got loads of Facebook "friends," but my friends on whom I rely for insight or counsel are a much smaller, tighter community, defined by lots of criteria that groups don't provide, let alone require.
I can't decide if I'm a cranky Luddite, or one of disparate number of real-life Hari Seldons.
When it comes to financial news, was the authority of content simply a ruse of intermediated distribution? A quirk of technology history? Was it opinion elevated to the status of truth because we just didn't know better?
Between cable television and the blogosphere, we now know that there aren't just two sides to every story, but a limitless number of perspectives. So none of us have to agree on which version of reality we choose to believe; in fact, because there are multiple versions available to us, we can pick one, and then organize (limit) our subsequent content consumption to support that choice.
Or we can entertain a few simultaneously, reminded that an understanding of reality is never more than an opinion, and not a reflection of fact.
Can we crowdsource truth? I know there's been lots written about it, and companies are spending mucho dollars betting that throwing marketing content into various online services will result in consumers separating fact from fiction. I'm certain we can crowdsource cynicism, disbelief, and impatience. And I know crowds tend to utz people to harden their positions and beliefs, so a lot of social media is less revelatory, and more an echo-chamber for prior-held thoughts.
When I think about individuals and crowds, I see that we're now living through our first disintermediated economic crisis. The Iraq war could have been our first geopolitical version, only battlefield reporting was/is tightly controlled, many of the would-be bloggers don’t write in English, and lots of people don't really care about something unless it impacts them directly (a la a loved one in the conflict, or in the case of the economy, less money in a 401(k) plan).
And guess what?
For all of our access to information, we're getting no real insight or certitude from the crowd, and I bet if you're like me, you're turning to people in your immediate sphere of experience -- real-world family and friends -- for information. It's funny that so many calls are being made for more transparency in, say, how the TARP funds were spent, yet our problem isn't that we don't have enought information...
...it's that we don't have the tools to decipher, correlate, and complete all the information the crowd is giving us. What a crappy time for traditional journalism to be evaporating, eh?
And, as the roles of individuals and crowds continue to diverge within the mediasphere, knowledge is disappearing in the gap.
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