Jamison Foser, ‘nuff said…

And still, reporters and pundits and progressive activists and Democratic leaders — people who should have known better — chalked it all up to Gore being a lousy candidate. Sure, they said, the media exaggerated about Gore’s exaggerations, but they wouldn’t have if he wasn’t such an exaggerator. Never mind that every example given fell apart under scrutiny: each lie told about Gore being a liar reinforced the others. It was Gore’s fault the media went overboard, just as it had been Clinton’s. And his consultants’ fault, too — there were too many of them, or too few, or too inside, or they weren’t good enough. And so people who should have known better thought it wouldn’t happen again; not when there was a new candidate with new consultants.

Then Howard Dean emerged as the front-runner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. And the media depicted him as a crazy man, a wild-eyed hippie liberal freak — despite the fact that he had won the endorsement of the National Rifle Association during his career as governor of Vermont, during which time he was widely regarded as a moderate.

And still, reporters and pundits and progressive activists and Democratic leaders — people who should have known better — chalked it all up to Dean being a little crazy: How could he not be a little crazy: Remember that scream in Iowa? Sure, some reporters eventually acknowledged that they overplayed it. Sure, some eventually reported that audio and video clips of the “scream” were wildly misleading. Still: he must have brought the ridiculous coverage on himself. The same press corps that swoons daily over the notoriously ill-tempered John McCain relentlessly attacked Howard Dean for being “angry.” And people who should have known better blamed Dean. And his staff — they were too young, too inexperienced, too outside, too liberal.

Jaron Lanier, at the stunningly self-satisfied Edge.org, writes a very good piece titled “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” that tries to bring some common sense into the discussion of the “collective wisdom of the masses” triumphalism that I myself engage in…

Using Wikipedia as an example, and embracing a bit of the Tyranny of the Or, his main thesis rests on the subtle straw man that the hive mentality of the Web is often kind of stupid…

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

There was a well-publicized study in Nature last year comparing the accuracy of the Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica. The results were a toss up. While there is a lingering debate about the validity of the study. The items selected for the comparison were just the sort that Wikipedia would do well on: Science topics that the collective at large doesn’t care much about. “Kinetic isotope effect” or “Vesalius, Andreas” are examples of topics that make the Britannica hard to maintain, because it takes work to find the right authors to research and review a multitude of diverse topics. But they are perfect for the Wikipedia. There is little controversy around these items, plus the Net provides ready access to a reasonably small number of competent specialist graduate student types possessing the manic motivation of youth.

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don’t. Often we don’t live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I’ll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it’s important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.

[via Clicked, a very useful almost daily run-down of what’s interesting in the Web, for those of us too obsessed with politics to find it on our own.]