It is often taken as a given that the web is benign – that it allows the truth to emerge from an army of fact checkers.
But what if, there was an inherent tendency for it to spread infectious and dangerous ideas. From conspiracy theory discussion groups to the spread of Islamic extremist ideas via the web, there is evidence that this may be the case.
Remember the mysterious 'Piano Man' – found on a seashore, unable to speak, no identity, autistic genius who communicated only through his virtuoso piano skills?
It was a story that reverberated around the blogosphere, in particular – could the power of the web unravel the mystery?
Well, it seems that the truth is he could speak, was not autistic, could only play one note on the piano, and his identity has been revealed.
The real explanation followed Occam's razor, being the most simple and statistically likely while the blogosphere version followed the telephone game (Chinese whisper in the UK) theory of memes – that the explanation which is most likely to be passed on (reblogged or linked to) will dominate, like a game of telephone where each person whispers in multiple ears.
In fact the process of reblogging will mutate the story such that the most successful variant survives.
This has two important effects:
1. It means that weblog driven news which is many to many instead of broadcast news which is one to many will have the biggest divergence between Occam's razor and the telephone theory of memes i.e. weblog news will tend to b e inaccurate for stories where there is a strong element of seductive mystery rather than boring facts.
2. Because web reputation is based purely on link reputation successful memes and meme drivers increasingly dominate search results. An example of this that I have come across is searches for 'entropy, life' flood results with creationist attempts to challenge evolution, which look superficially plausible but are provably wrong. To read genuine research you have to do the same search on Google Scholar, where pagerank which biases towards the blind, meme driven, reputation is replaced by the better reputation system of peer review from chosen peers.
One would like to think of this as a meritocracy of ideas – and it is. But it is currently a meritocracy of memes rather than the truth.
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tags: [religion]