Web 2.0 is an epidemic
That cool cool label every startup wanted to have 10 years ago.
What did it even mean? The web would now make it really easy for anyone to publish and be heard. Content was community driven. Youtube, Twitter, Blogs, the Facebook wall and more. Everyone is a publisher.
The entire movement was transformational. It toppled governments, made the the opaque transparent and the unheard heard.
But…
It also gave a voice to so many ‘pseudo-experts’. Many who assume supreme knowledge of a subject by googling 2 biased blog posts. Many of who have very strong opinions and assume having strong opinions is the same as knowing something.
Making this worse is the interpretation of democracy to be,
My opinion no matter how ridiculous and factually wrong should get the same RESPECT as anyone else's
And unsurprisingly, these people yell the loudest. They make it a mission to start a movement. And such movements have lead to things from parents who don’t vaccinate their children to continued and unapologetic global warming.
It also breeds places for religious extremists. The one guy who had a freaky interpretation of the holy text can find followers, build a movement, take over a country, kill thousands and start world war 3.
Epidemic?
Yes.
Fixing it
Fixing this is really important. So important that our collective futures depend on it.
This really wouldn’t have happened if everything was moderated and reviewed. Like how scientific publications are or even published newspapers. What do they do? They Fact Check. Of course now that we’ve opened the pandoras box, there’s no going back to the moderated world of pre 2000 AD.
Traditional thinking leads governments to censor, filter and moderate which is just not practical. No one wants this.
Fixing this with more advanced tech however IS possible.
A grander and a more pervasive version of IBM’s Jeopardy playing Watson or similar. Implemented by each social platform like Facebook and Twitter, reading every post and showing a relevant factual article below the post.
Would this happen? I don’t know.
Should this happen? Yes.
In fact, I think it should become a publishing platforms moral responsibility and will also determine their long term sustainability.
Yes this approach is not perfect, but it’s a start. Unless the web does not evolve into building a page rank kind of system for filtering the facts from fiction, we’ll start seeing worse societal problems driven by pettiness, hate and misinformation.
We are at the nasty end of web 2.0. Time for 3.0.
