all triangulate across a range of other writers to produce an argument, or a report, that adds something new. The ethic of this space is linking — of pointing, and commenting. And while this linking is not “fair and balanced”, it does produce a vigorous exchange of ideas.
These blogs are ranked. Services such as Technorati constantly count the blog space, watching who links to whom, and which blogs produce the greatest credibility. And these rankings contribute to an economy of ideas that builds a discipline around them. Bloggers get authority from the citation others give them; that authority attracts attention. It is a new reputation system, established not by editors or CEOs of media companies, but by an extraordinarily diverse range of contributors.
And in the end, these amateur journalists have an effect. When TWA flight 800 fell from the sky, there were theories about conspiracies that were filtered through no structure of credibility. Today, there are more structure s of credibility. So when Dan Rather produced a letter on CBS’s 60 Minutes purporting to establish a certain fraud by the President, it took the blogosphere 24 hours to establish this media company’s evidence was faked. More incredibly, it took CBS almost two weeks to acknowledge what blogs had established[27]. The collaborative work of the blogs uncovered the truth, and in the process embarrassed a very powerful media company. But by contrast to the behavior of that media company, they demonstrated something important about how the Net had matured.
This collaboration comes with no guarantees, except the guarantee of a process. The most extraordinary collaborative process in the context of content is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, created solely by volunteers. Launched at the beginning of 2001, these (literally thousands of) volunteers have now created over 2 million articles. There are nine major language versions (not including the Klingon version), with about half of the total articles in English.
The aim of the Wikipedia is neutrality. The contributors edit, and reedit, to frame a piece neutrally. Sometimes that effort fails — particularly controversial topics can’t help but attract fierce conflict. But in the main, the work is an unbelievable success. With nothing more than the effort of volunteers, the most used, and perhaps the most useful encyclopedia ever written has been created through millions of uncoordinated instances of collaboration.
Wikipedia, however, can’t guarantee its results. It can’t guarantee that, at any particular moment, there won’t be errors in its entries. But of course, no one can make that guarantee. Indeed, in one study that randomly collected entries from Wikipedia and from Encyclopedia Britannica, there were just as many errors in Britannica as in Wikipedia[28].
But Wikipedia is open to a certain kind of risk that Britannica is not — maliciousness. In May 2005, the entry to an article about John Seigenthaler Sr. was defaced by a prankster. Because not many people were monitoring the entry, it took four months before the error was noticed and corrected. Seigenthaler wasn’t happy about this. He, understandably, complained that it was the architecture of Wikipedia that was to blame.
Wikipedia’s architecture could be different. But the lesson here is not its failures. It is instead the extraordinary surprise of Wikipedia’s success. There is an unprecedented collaboration of people from around the world working to converge upon truth across a wide range of topics. That, in a sense, is what science does as well. It uses a different kind of “peer review” to police its results. That “peer review” is no guarantee either — South Koreans, for example, were quite convinced that one of their leading scientists, Hwang Woo-Suk, had discovered a technique to clone human stem cells. They believed it because peer-reviewed journals had reported it. But whether right to believe it or not, the journals were wrong. Woo-Suk was a fraud, and he hadn’t cloned stem cells, or anything else worth the attention of the world.
Blogs don’t coordinate any collaborative process to truth in the way Wikipedia does. In a sense, the votes for any particular position at any particular moment are always uncounted, while at every moment they are always tallied on Wikipedia. But even if they’re untallied, readers of blogs learn to triangulate on the truth. Just as with witnesses at an accident (though better, since these witnesses have reputations), the reader constructs what must be true from a range of views. Cass Sunstein rightly worries that the norms among bloggers have not evolved enough to include internal diversity of citation[29]. That may well be true. But whatever the normal reading practice is for ordinary issues, the diversity of the blogosphere gives readers an extremely wide range of views to consider when any major issue — such as that which stung Salinger — emerges. When tied to the maturing reputation system that constantly tempers influence, this means that it is easier to balance extreme views with the correction that many voices can build.
A credibility can thus emerge, that, while not perfect, is at least differently encumbered. NBC News must worry about its bottom line, because its reporting increasingly responds to it. Blogs don’t have a bottom line. They are — in the main — amateurs. Reputation constrains both, and the competition between the two forms of journalism has increasingly improved each. We have a richer environment for free speech today than five years ago — a commercial press tempered by blogs regulated by a technology of reputation that guides the reader as much as the writer.
Errors will remain. Everyone has a favorite example — mine is the ridiculous story about Al Gore claiming to have “invented the Internet.” The story originated with a CNN interview on March 9, 1999. In that interview, in response to a question about what was different about Gore over Bradley, Gore said the following:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system[30].
As is clear from the context, Gore is stating not that he invented the technology of the Internet, but that he “took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives” that have been important to the country. But the story was retold as the claim that Gore “invented the Internet.” That’s how the Internet journalist Declan McCullagh repeated it two weeks later: “The vice president offered up a whopper of a tall tale in which he claimed to have invented the Internet. ” That characterization — plainly false — stuck. In a 2003 study of the media’s handling of the story, Chip Health and Jonathan Bendor conclude, “We show that the false version of Gore’s statement dominated the true one in mainstream political discourse by a wide margin. This is a clear failure in the marketplace of ideas, which we document in detail[31]”.
The only redeeming part of this story is that it’s simple to document the falsity — because of the Internet. Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and anti-censorware activist, has created a page on the Internet collecting the original interview and the subsequent reports about it[32]. His is the model of the very best the Internet could be. That virtue, however, didn’t carry too far beyond the Internet.
Regulations of Speech: Spam and Porn
For all our talk about loving free speech, most of us, deep down, wouldn’t mind a bit of healthy speech regulation, at least in some contexts. Or at least, more of us would be eager for speech regulation today than would
