Discuss.

Two weeks ago, the Question of the Week was about books different people were reading. Pensive Ro picked up on the idea and posted the question on her own blog (which you should all visit several times a day until she reaches her 20,000 hits). In the comments section, I mentioned Wikipedia and that sparked a discussion of its own.

Personally, I love Wikipedia. I probably access it more often than any other website. I even made a game out of it which I continued to post to the blog long after it became clear that most people didn’t want to play it. Wikipedia is great for getting background information, or exploring a topic you know very little about. It’s great for learning about new topics and exploring just to see what’s out there.

I would not use Wikipedia to learn more about an area that I’m already an expert in, and I would never cite Wikipedia as a source. You never really know who the author is, and the articles are in constant flux. I wouldn’t respect any argument that relied on information from Wikipedia to make its case. This Onion article is way over the top, granted, but it does make a few valid points.

I was giving a presentation once, and said (after giving the above argument) that there had been studies done that demonstrate that Wikipedia is just as reliable of a source as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Someone asked me what my source for that was, and I couldn’t resist answering “Wikipedia” though I had heard it in legitimate news outlets as well.

Fine word, legitimate. We know that news sources have bias. Could it be that Wikipedia’s negotiated definition of reality is more objective than any one source can be? Perhaps. And perhaps this is part of a larger trend of how knowledge is now constructed.

For their part, the Wikipedia folks recognize the limitations of their medium and have launched a sister project, Citizendium, which is a Wikipedia-like online interactive encyclopedia that requires contributors to use their real names and is given “gentle expert oversight” by Ph.Ds. Full disclosure: I have a Ph.D. in Shakespeare Teachery, and I can tell you that not all Ph.Ds agree on everything. Or anything, really. You’d think it would work on the level of an encyclopedia, but even many supposed facts are in dispute.

Speaking of Ph.Ds, something interesting just happened over at Weblogg-ed. Will Richardson posted an article about a new degree in Social Computing which he thinks is worthy of ridicule. Some interpreted this as a rebuke of higher education in general, and a fierce debate was sparked. Richardson then issued a clarification. Definitely worth checking out.

What’s your opinion of Wikipedia and the changing nature of authority?

Here’s a good example of a high school English teacher using a blog to post and collect student assignments. This is one sample assignment for students in the middle of reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Your assignment now is to take this mixed-up love mess and bring it to a conclusion with a happy ending. As it stands right now, everything is messed up and needs resolution. Assume the role of a narrator and finish the story. This is your chance to predict how this all turns out in the real play.

The students can now write a response to this and read what others have written as well. It seems like a lot of this is going on at home, but as more and more schools adopt one-to-one computing environments (something I’ve personally been very active in for the past year and a half), the more this sort of thing will become commonplace classroom practice.

This presentation from Karl Fisch has been making the rounds.

Students entering kindergarten this September will graduate from high school in 2020. How will the world be run then? How old will you be in that year? It’s not really that far off, is it?

Discuss.

Fox News has a reputation for being nothing more than a right wing propaganda machine, and that may be true to a point. But it should be remembered that they do a pretty good job covering a wide range of non-partisan arenas, for example, financial news.

Of course, there will always be some that see right wing bias everywhere, but I’ll let you be the judge.

If you were a dogged – even obsessed – journalist, driven by a deeply-held passion for the truth, what present-day news story would be consuming your days and keeping you awake nights?

We live in strange times. The Dixie Chicks won five Grammys last night. Remember when they were untouchables because they dared to express doubt about the war, and the president who was bringing us to it? But now that the war is going badly, the Dixie Chicks are okay again.

Were last night’s awards all about the music? Or were the awards as much for their anti-war stance? Natalie Maines herself said “I think people are using their freedom of speech with all these awards. We get the message.”

If it was for their anti-war stance, does this mark a turning point in the nation’s conception of anti-war protesters? Or are the people who initially shunned them a different demographic than those who award the Grammys?

If this is a shift, in line with the Democratic takeover of Congress in November, what could this mean for the candidates for Democratic nominee for president in 2008? Republican? For the general election?

And where did the shift begin? I think the war going badly is certainly the main factor, but in my opinion the catalyst was Hurricane Katrina. That was botched so badly, and with such dire consequences, that even the expert spinmasters were powerless. Seasoned journalists who pride themselves on dispassionate analysis were screaming into the cameras. And that was when the people realized that the emperor had no clothes.

So where does that leave us now? With the Question of the Week:

What changes do you see in the collective national mood over the past two years and how might it affect the political landscape over the next two years.

I found this really compelling, both in form and content:

I gave my take on the long-term ramifications of this in earlier posts Beggar’s Canyon and Optimism. What really struck me about this video was the idea that HTML tags define the form, while XML tags define the content. So when text from an XML document is exported, it can be classified and formatted by any number of disparate machines. That’s why I can have a blog, because I can just fill in fields in a form, rather than having to understand what a MySQL database is, or how to create one.

I also enjoyed the idea of the users of the Internet teaching the Internet about ideas that only humans can have. What is a hyperlink if not one person’s definition of the relationship between two realms of information? And with machines powerful enough to process those definitions in the aggregate, the Internet becomes an über-democratic negotiation about the nature of meaning. It’s a step beyond Wikipedia, where anyone can visit to add or revise content. It’s Google News, which proactively aggregates news stories from thousands of sources worldwide.

What about pictures? How can we really search for images, when computers can only see them in pixels? Some people tag their photos, but that’s just a start. Enter schemes like The ESP Game in which players log in and are randomly assigned an anonymous partner. The pair is then shown images and they have to come up with words to describe each image. Once they agree on a word, they may move on to the next image. They win if they can label a certain number of images in the pre-determined time. It’s packaged as a game, but what it’s really doing is finding humans to complete a task that computers can’t do, which is label a large quantity of images, so that they can join this network of information.

Some might be troubled by the thought of the “average” person defining the nature of information. Don’t we have specialists and experts who constitute a small minority of the population, but who can give us a much richer understanding of their field of study? Yes, and as their influence grows, we will be able to identify and access them much more easily through the shared mind of the Web. And they, in turn, will have greater access and ability to share their ideas with a wider audience. It will be a pure meritocracy.

There’s a website, FaceResearch.org, that allows you to digitally create the average of a number of different faces that you select or upload to their site. They discuss the hypothesis that the more average a face looks, the more attractive it is perceived to be. This may be partially because average faces tend to be more symmetrical and have smoother skin. But it’s a wonderfully egalitarian idea, if you think about it. The most attractive among us may not be any one of us, but may just be the average of all of us.

Web 2.0, then, may ultimately be a way of taking the average of all of our conceptions of the world and finding the most attractive face, the essential truths of human understanding, heretofore locked only within our collective unconscious. And then we may say, along with John Keats:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

When you think about it, this is really a revolutionary technology.

Before the Internet, all of the mass media of the 20th century required a great deal of wealth to buy into. Whether it was the national newspaper, the radio, the moving picture, broadcast television, or cable television, only those who were in control of vast sums of wealth could afford to get their message out, which, not surprisingly, favored the interests of wealth. So for a long time, that was the only message that most people were getting.

But with the Internet, anybody can freely post their opinions. Now we truly can move toward an open and democratic exchange of political ideas without the corporate filter defining the terms of acceptable discourse. Even I can have my little piece of real estate and post anything I choose.

I choose to post a video of some guys reenacting the Death Star trench scene from Star Wars with their hands.

I have on occasion been called unpatriotic.

This is, of course, a highly offensive charge. The integrity of one’s patriotism is a precious jewel that must be protected. Someone who is unpatriotic is a non-person. Someone who is unpatriotic is a potential terrorist. Someone who is unpatriotic should be detained for questioning.

But lately, I’ve been questioning the idea of patriotism. What is it, actually? Love for one’s country? Okay. And then what?

I believe in American values. I love the philosophy that all people are created equal. I love the idea of a melting pot of cultures. I love living in a country that is ruled by the majority will of the people, while still protecting the rights of the minority and the individual. Does that make me patriotic?

I think America sometimes does bad things in the world and I think we should stop. I think our current leadership is reckless and irresponsible when yielding American power. I think that we have made a lot of progress in securing the rights for all of our people, but we still have a considerable way to go. Does that make me unpatriotic?

I was against the Iraq War. Did that make me unpatriotic? I’m still against it. Does that make me patriotic?

Does being patriotic mean valuing American lives over lives of non-Americans? If so, is patriotism really something to be respected and admired? Does patriotism for people in other countries mean valuing the lives of their countrymen over Americans? If so, is patriotism still something to be respected and admired?

I would hate to think that something as important and cherished as patriotism was only admirable within one’s own country. That would make it shallow and meaningless, and patriotism is much too important for that. Who do we want to be patriotic? Can patriotism be criticized in those whose nations have committed horrible atrocities in the past? What about when we’ve been that nation?

Are these light and airy questions of no consequence, asked by a sheltered academic who takes for granted the comfortable freedoms provided by his country? Or do our answers to these questions affect our policies – who we allow to cross our borders, what standards we apply to the decision to go to war, how we structure international trade, how we respond to human suffering abroad – making them of the utmost importance?

And does even asking these questions make me unpatriotic? Or is asking difficult questions in a democratic society highly patriotic?

So with all of that in mind, the Question of the Week is this:

What does patriotism mean to you?

Every year, the Edge Foundation poses a question to some of the world’s top minds. This year, the question was: “What are you optimistic about?” See what leading thinkers had to say and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments section below.

I’ll go first. I am optimistic about the long-term potential that the Internet has in breaking down all kinds of barriers, but particularly those of class. For a very long time now, all mass media has come from wealth and power, and people just accepted that because there had never been any other way. But the Internet makes possible the creation of networks between people, and the construction of meaning from a variety of perspectives. Even in the infancy of the World Wide Web, we’ve seen such user-driven communication tools as message boards, peer-to-peer file sharing, weblogging, podcasting, video posting, and social networking websites. As the current generation of technology-savvy children become the developers and thinkers of the adult world, society itself will be reshaped in the image of this most democratic medium.

I’m not filing this under Predictions. As I said, I’m particularly optimistic about this one.

What are you optimistic about?