"How to stop worrying and love the internet" is a prescient essay on how the web has evolved since, because it gets to the heart of the transition back to interactivity from mass media. It touches on the nature of trust and how that is realised on the net, and how the net makes clear that the institutional shortcuts to trust no longer hold.
What we need is to connect what is said on the net to people. If we see a face next to a comment that we recognise, we can apply the trust models in our brain to it, which is far more subtle than anything a computer can decide for us, and is also unique to each of us.
"Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is.
We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what
we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that
it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read
on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear
on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web
anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or
in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why
is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.
For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things
in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which
we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence
‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we
read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking
– but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in
the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual
journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from
the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of
‘us’."
- DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (view on Google Sidewiki)
4 comments:
So true. Adams was a brilliant thinker and writer. He is missed.
Adams is talking about John Humphrys in the original article, isn't he?
"There are some things that should be dismissed out of hand", said Humphreys recently - about Twitter.
Plus ça change eh?
Thanks for this post. Good stuff. I've been burned by people I've known face-to-face for years. Thought I knew them, turns out I didn't. If people are intent on cons and schemes, the medium really has nothing to do with it.
People constantly say that other "people believe everything they read online" yet no one has actually run a survey, or at least one that I've heard about, to test this out.
People are naturally skeptical about everything is my experience. Which is a very good thing.
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