Is it just me (quite possibly) or is everyone being swamped by the information superhighway these days? The internet, smart phones, tablet computers, a couple of old tin cans and a piece of string… all seduce us further and further into the world-wide-web where all of our questions can be answered and all of our dreams will come true (okay, I just made that last bit up but I live in hope).
As a person interested in the ‘inform’ part of the information superhighway I often wonder just how much we are being informed, how much time we waste in trying to get that information and how often are we being misinformed. It seems to me that what we really, really need (and sooner rather than later) is a bit of good old fashioned housekeeping and a wee bit more honesty about where our information comes from and how accurate / reliable and, as importantly, original it really is. In the old days (remember them?) information was stored in books and journals. These were often the result of a single author or in the case of academia potentially a number of authors (with antecedents carefully cited in the bibliography). Single authors had / have the benefit of editors and publishers to vet their work. Academia had / has the discipline of peer review to keep things in check.
Today however, (in the ‘bad new’ days) anyone can put whatever they like on the internet and a) claim it to be their own work, b) claim it to be true, c) post without peer review. A recent example of this has been the now notorious “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog (bizarrely revealed to be a US man living in Edinburgh and studying at a Scottish University). His / Her blog even raised the eyebrows of the US government and was, as many blogs are, increasingly followed by journalists and activists around the globe. The cracks began to appear when a photograph, purporting to be the blogger was publicly revealed (on BBC’s NewsNight) to be that of a woman living in London whose social media ‘snap’ was re-used without her knowledge – putting not only her but her family and friends in potential harm’s way. So, this stuff really does matter!
What does this mean for internet users who increasingly use it as their reference library? Who do they trust and how can they validate that trust? I wish I knew the answer to that one… but I have an idea that might be worthy of a moment or two’s consideration…
It’s a bit geeky but… bear with me… How’s about this as a starter for ten? You’ve heard of an IQ (Intelligence Quotient)… How about a DQ (Darwin Quotient) for everything on the world-wide-web? A way of tracing the origin of the species of an idea… How would it work? Everything placed on the information superhighway would be time and date stamped (as most of it already is) and geo-tagged. It surely can’t be beyond the realms of the possible (for a race of beings that put a man on the moon in 1969 – allegedly) to invent a way of watermarking everything that is created online. A DQ of 1 would indicate an original posting. A DQ of less than 1 would be indicating how far away the post was from being original. By that I mean the ratio of other’s content to original content.
By way of example, how often have you gone onto a product review site and read exactly the same product review elsewhere (and wasted your time)? In the olden days of the early internet, attribution was done by posting a link to the source material – admittedly for the very practical reasons of not having the space to re-quote fully. Nowadays, more often than not, stuff is just lazily cut and paste into a blog, website or whatever without acknowledgement. A long time ago and far away this would have been called plagiarism. It is the bane of schoolteachers and lecturers everywhere who don’t want their students just cribbing ideas, fully formed, from the web. There are even websites that help them out by calculating the probability that a student’s text could have been copied from the web – using search engine technology. For the really geeky or mathematical amongst you there is a ‘simple’ formula that does likewise, http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/copying-from-internet.php.
Even the mighty Google might be encouraged to seek out DQ1 material and place it higher on its search engine and thereby increase its credibility. If users saw this as valuable (and let’s be honest what price an original idea?), then I’m sure they’ll find a way of monetizing it.