epic proportions
graphic from NYT
those of you who know me will know that I suffer from a sort of ideological tension. you see, I am all about democratization of the virtual space; I have a lot of faith in the internet's inexorable redistribution of power to grassroots and individuals, and feel that this global empowerment of the otherwise-voiceless masses is generally a Good Thing TM.
but here's the problem: I only want to empower the portion of these voiceless masses that is not, you know, stupid. this is uncomfortably orwellian. I have faith in democratization, but no faith in too many of the people being democratized; I want everyone to be equal, but, you know, just not everyone.
this sort of sentiment implicitly informs many analyses of the mediascape today, especially now that news, information and media are decentralizing at a pace and magnitude simply unprecedented in history. bloggers are rivalling journalists. wikipedia is shunting britannica aside. digg.com's news stories are democratically selected: one digger, one vote, and the best are meritoriously propelled to the top. google news is impersonally, algorithmically aggregated. a short film EPIC predicts that by 2015, decentralization will be complete, and internet news content will be fully customized based on the profiles, personal and intellectual interests, social networks and search histories of individual users.
watch EPIC
but the film begins with that ominously prescient line: "it is the best of times; it is the worst of times." and this is because democracy works that way: it gives a vote to the uninformed as equally as the savvy; the best as equally as the worst; manhattan as well as the bible belt. when democracy is played out in a nation of many uninformed, misled people, what you get is george bush. when information is decentralized democratically, what you get is a seething chaos of truth-claims, ranging over degrees of verisimilitude that precisely mirror the degrees of intelligence and discernment that go into its creation. garbage in, garbage out.
and so EPIC envisions a sort of 'just deserts' future in which individuals can position themselves in the information streams that mirror their interests, personalities, aptitudes and intellects, and consequently exist in the information universe they deserve:
"at its best, edited for the savviest readers," the narrator intones, "EPIC is a summary of the world -- deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational."
people who've watched EPIC take away a memory of this doom-and-gloom pronouncement, when really, EPIC is deeply optimistic. for one, it resolves my ideological tension. it says: sure, stupid people can run the internet and its content, but not MY internet and MY content. that's like the equivalent of saying that your one presidential vote gets you exactly the president you want, and that you don't ever have to put up with consequences that you might personally never have asked for. in the democratization process, in this redistribution of power to the masses, EPIC posits a future where the process of decentralization comes along with the power (and the responsibility) to craft your own center, to recentralize the world on your own terms. and if you are a smart, savvy reader, that is an optimistic vision indeed.
so until EPIC materializes, here is how I am slowly crafting my infoscape:
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