QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Sat 21st August 2010, 3:28pm)
Problem. We need to find a way of understanding the regressive trend of crowd-sourcing that reverses the normal advance of inquiry and ultimately leads to the lowest common denominator of the most popular misconceptions in every area where it holds sway. Jon Awbrey
QUOTE(The Joy @ Sun 22nd August 2010, 3:36am)
We're living in a more narcissistic world. Web 2.0, in theory, should allow for calm conversation, the free exchange of new ideas, and the breaking down of prejudices. However, I'm finding that people seem to think their opinions are equal to all others, even when they are flat-out wrong. Web 2.0 has allowed everyone to have an equal position and platform. The physicist and the college sophomore are not equal at understanding physics, but Web 2.0 lets them have the same strength and power. If both are on Wikipedia, they both are equal and the college sophomore won't like the physicist telling him he's wrong about the Theory of Quantum Mechanics.
That’s a valuable observation, and the supporting beliefs that justify the sophomore’s intellectual ‘aggrandisement’ demand investigation – however your analysis fails with your choice of historical analogy:
QUOTE(The Joy @ Sun 22nd August 2010, 3:36am)
The social dynamics have changed. Traditionally, the wrong and stupid were pushed out by academia and the mainstream. Now all the stupid can gather in their Internet fiefdoms and carry on their campaigns to all Web 2.0 sites. It's like the Visigoths, Vandals, and Mongols roaming around unopposed and burning down the Roman Empire.
Coming back to my original point, the only way to stop the barbarians at the gate is for Web 2.0 sites to establish a culture that rejects the stupidity and prejudice in order to create an inquiring environment. I suppose that means that every member of a successful, welcoming, and knowledgeable Web 2.0 site with high academic standards is like a member of a village militia that must muster when the barbarians come with their stupid ideas and "LOLs." I have seen projects that are the antithesis of the standard Web 2.0 "UZ SO SUTPID" crowd-sourcing, so I know they are out there. Unfortunately, they are solitary islands of sanity in an archipelago of anarchy.
By Mongols, perhaps you meant Huns, but that aside the whole notion of “Barbarians at the Gates†is a false depiction of Europe in the early Medieval period. Once the misnomer of ‘Dark Age’ has been disposed of it becomes possible to proceed to remove the 19thC fiction of the ‘Fall of Rome’ and the ‘uncivilisation’ of non Roman peoples. The Roman Empire didn’t fall – it split in two, East and West, because of internal dynamics, the Eastern part continuing as a distinct culture for hundreds of years as Byzantium. The Western Empire was simply not strong enough to continue the oppressive management of the peoples on its borders and having failed to develop any substantive non militaristic basis for negotiation between cultures eventually succumbed to a more effective military culture led by a Byzantine educated elite which actually reinvigorated Western Roman culture rather than destroying it.
The ‘Barbarians at the Gate’ meme has a long and disreputable usage, justifying prejudice on multiple grounds, and even if it were an accurate depiction of a social condition, its elitist conclusion provides a self fulfilling prophecy with the ‘great unwashed’ telling the ‘Patronae’ to go screw themselves.
There is a great irony in using Rome as a metaphor when dealing with questions about ‘crowd sourcing’; Rome was the ultimate ‘crow sourced’ system, fundamentally reliant on the will of ‘the mob’ to define direction of the culture, it was ‘crowd sourcing’ that led to the central ‘purposing’ of “bread and circuses†around which the whole central economy of the Empire came to revolve. Additionally a paradox arises from the use of the ‘Barbarians at the Gate’ (BATG) metaphor in relation to ‘crowd sourcing and issues of inquiry, scepticism and authority. At base BATG invokes the idea of ultimate questioning, scepticism and rejection of existing authority, of course BATG is usually invoked to show how such questioning, scepticism and rejection was wrong, or at least wrongly applied, but it can’t be argued the ‘Barbarians’ are lacking a capacity to question, unless there is resort to the elitist position that the ‘Barbarians’ are essential ‘Unter mensch’.
And, I would locate part of the difficulty in answering
“a way of understanding the regressive trend of crowd-sourcing that reverses the normal advance of inquiry ……..â€. is the failure of the ‘inquiry’ disciplines, Sciences, Philosphy etc to engage with audiences outside of academic Institutions. Of course schools could better equip students to engage in and with ‘enquiry’ but if the professional ‘enquirers’ want to have their authority in enquiry accepted by ‘the crowd’ they are going to have to better engage with ‘the crowd’. There is something of a cultural division which should give us some hope that change is possible, France for instance has a greater ‘tolerance’ for intellectualism in public life, something which is consistently rejected in English speaking cultures (well maybe excluding New Zealand). But change will require ‘outspeakers’. Richard Dawkins, although muddled in his God obsession, is the only current ‘poster boy’ of note for scientific ‘outspeaking’ in the English language, realistically we need many more if the forces of anti intellectualism (Fox News et al) are not going to control the mob for decades to come.
A.virosa