>So has this been peer reviewed yet or is being published in American
>Psychologist part of that process?
American Psychologist is a peer reviewed journal.
>On Science Friday (NPR) they were
>talking about how the WWW is making it easier to bypass peer review. One
>case they cited was about a scientist who posted on his web page that a
>meteor was going to hit the earth in 20 years or something like that (I'm
>paraphrasing here). It was really intended for other scientists to check it
>out but instead got picked up by the press as "fact" and was widely
>disseminated.
As I see it its up to us, as the users of it, to instill within the Culture
of the Internet both a healthy skepticism and a self-conscious awareness of
the manners in which ideas propigate through human social systems. Stories
in the media like the one you mentioned on NPR or the one Tina noted last
week debunking the Disneyworld Beta Tracking chain e-mail, may help foster
this awareness in the general public.
But news outlets are no longer the primary distributers of information in
this electronic age of ours. With e-mail and the `Net the widespread
dissemination of "facts" and/or "stories", an area once the exclusive domain
of the media, is undergoing a rapid and unplanned decentralization. It is
now not only within the power of each of us, through the choices we make, to
serve as a relay in a network of information spanning the globe, moreover,
that responsiblity has been thrust upon us whether we have a desire for it
or not. By the very act of clicking on the Forward button we cease to be
_passive receivers_ of data and become _active distributers_ of
information--each one of us a micro-news broadcaster operating out of our
own desktop. Like a neuron firing in the great ephemeral brain that we call
"Culture", we each dictate through our actions which information is to be
passed on and which is discarded. It is a weighty task.
Over the last several hundred years there have evolved within the
established media a set of protocols governing which stories are newsworthy
and which are not. These criteria, considered staples in every newsroom
(such as the independent verification of a story by multiple sources), have
served up until this point to dictate the minimum requirements a that story
must posses in order to achieve a widespread distribution throughout our
culture.[1] Even at that, I would expect a great many of us are less than
satisfied by the level of news reporting that we see coming out of the
established media channels.
And yet no similar set of minimum criteria of any sort are at work
throughout the vast desktop micro-broadcast network to which each of us are
affiliates. The decision of what to "publish" is made not on considered
judgements of merit or relevance--or even based on demographic data or
circulation rates for that matter--but rather is often based simply on what
titilates, amuses, or shocks.
As each of us becomes increasingly aware of the role we as individuals
directly play in creating our culture--a culture to which we will be either
the benificiaries or the victims, to be sure--there must emerge in all of us
a self-conscious consideration of the impact of our actions. We must each
create for ourselves a standard to be met before we choose propigate any
idea. Whether this means that we will need to become investigative
reporters checking and confirming sources, or simply limit our distibution
and attach warnings to things we are unsure about, a conscious choice will
need to be made by each individual. For the realization that hitting the
"Forward" button is an action--an action with subtle and profound
consiquences--brings forth with it responsiblities. Responsiblities that
are in our best interest, and the best interests of our world, to be
ceaselessly attentive to.
Another neuron firing in the great ephemeral brain of culture-
-Tim
[1] There is an obvious analogy here, Mike, with the minimum voltages
necessary for making switches in an electronic circut. I'll leave it to you
to theorize on the ramifications to a given circut of replacing a small
number of switches having set voltages with an exponetionally larger set of
switches all with random setpoints spanning widely varied ranges. Would the
result be chaos or a neural net? And how to edge the new circut towards one
condition over the other?