A recent article in Wired laments the state of Wikipedia‘s decreasing number of contributors and asserts that social media is endangering knowledge. It’s a relatively well-written article and has some interesting history about knowledge accumulation throughout the ages but is, I think, too one-sided and narrow in its representation of social media and its impact upon knowledge for me to buy the simplistic conclusion it makes. Or, indeed, that Facebook and Instagram are responsible for all the failings of the world.
The author argues that knowledge itself is “in danger”. He draws some clever comparisons between text-based knowledge (books and history) and image-based (TV and Facebook) but, whilst he mentions the value of blogs in the early days of the internet, he fails to mention them in making the contemporary argument: “Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television’s values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals—‘like’ buttons—over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciouly (sic) performing. (It’s telling that, while Google began life as a PhD thesis, Facebook started as a tool to judge classmates’ appearances.) It reduces our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences.”
Really? Facebook and Instagram are the medium? Here’s an alternative list from Messrs Thomas Aichner and Frank Jacob (as quoted in Wikipedia itself): “Social media technologies take many different forms including blogs, business networks, enterprise social networks, forums, microblogs, photo sharing, products/services review, social bookmarking, social gaming, social networks, video sharing, and virtual worlds.” See what I mean by a little too narrow for my liking?
Of course, his argument is probably true for some social media, but I would argue that knowledge and its availability has never been better in the history of humankind, and that reports of the blogosphere’s death are an exaggeration.
An example of there being life in the old blogosphere yet is the technology commentator Ben Thompson. He writes and runs a very successful subscription-only blog service. He wrote recently about his personal blogging experience on his blog Stratechery: “…it has been an incredible journey, especially intellectually (…) Stratechery has become in many respects a journal of my own attempts to understand technology specifically and the way in which it is changing every aspect of society broadly” and in seeking to understand, he has established himself as a thoughtful commentator on technology firms and business models. His blog forum is a lively collection of like-minded actors who respectfully and discuss aspects of Ben’s posts and build on the new thinking. This level of interaction with the author and a community of like-minded readers could only occur on social media, using social tools. And the forum is as interesting to read as the blog itself — I learn there all the time. This is a just one example amidst many I could cite. And social media is the enabler, not the destroyer. Never before have we been able to interact with others in the pursuit of knowledge in the way we can today.
Mr Thompson has quite adroitly identified that there is actually too much knowledge out there and that people who seek it are willing to pay for service that provides it. Medium is doing the same, as is The Atlantic. Navigation of the swamp of knowledge available free on the the internet today is, I think, a bigger challenge to the pursuit of it than vanity posts or user-preferences being used to serve up ads are.
Based on all the places I found that Mr Derakhshan has oft repeated this message, he seems to want to bang this particular drum repeatedly. However, a better balance of examples would demonstrate his comprehension that a evidencing ones own knowledge, at least in part, requires an ability to logically build an argument, and to provide good supporting assertions to reach a conclusion.