Who Are You Listening To?
I blame the blasphemy of awful advice and guidance in the digital landscape on Metcalfe’s Law. The little to zero barriers of communication entry allows anyone to run their mouth, including you and me, without anyone telling us not to. This is great, but of course has its downside.
If you aren’t familiar with Metcalfe’s Law, here is a snippet to put it into perspective:
The law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines: a single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.
What’s missing? Although the intrinsic value of communicating with anyone, anywhere has increased, the value of consistent content, in its entirety, has decreased exponentially.
Internet content is fantastic and is improving with advances in web tools, platforms and social systems. But, I’d be willing to bet it’s fantastic for you because of the 10-20 gems that have you glued to your screen day-to-day. The gems are consistently improving, but the online landscape in its entirety is becoming more cluttered due to little barriers of entry, minuscule governance and little regulation (appropriately). The thing is, the clutter isn’t going anywhere.
And, ah ha!, finally we are graced with the a tool known as RSS; the ability to subscribe to only what we want, allowing us to filter out the garbage. We can now all be selfish information consumers.
But still, in my casual conversations with academics, there is a scare that the ease of knowledge gathering (i.e. Wikipedia, etc.) will bash away at our critical thinking skills, and cause a form of media “tunnel vision,” where we only see and absorb what we want to believe. Although I disagree with this statement, it’s still worth pondering what it means and how to approach it.
My old rule of thumb was to question anything I inherently disagreed with. My new rule of thumb, and promise to the above statement, is that there needs to be a culture of questioning what we inherently agree with. From my experiences, it’s when we rely on what we think we know that we run into issues of logic, incompetence, ignorance and social bias.
Like I mentioned, I’m just one of too many speaking to the crowd. Take it for what you will, but more importantly, challenge it if you must.
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