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Seeing is believing

For most of us, The Truth is a composite of direct experience and the reports we receive from others. These "others" range in size from the individuals we see everyday (family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances) to the large organizations that speak to us through mass mediums.

Before the advent of mass mediums, like print, radio, television, the Internet, very little of the operative information of our lives came to us from outside our immediate environs. Our Realm of Daily Concern was decidedly local.

To say that we have become a global civilization is kinda vague. But whatever globalization means to you, it's clear that technology and mass mediums have a lot to do with it. At some point it became necessary for people to concern themselves with events outside their locality. Imperialism probably had a lot to do with that. Suddenly, what was going on some place thousands of miles away could affect you. People wanted to know about these things, and so was born the Industry of Information.

Organizations, companies, governments, religions stepped up to the plate and began to offer answers. Business was very good. They invested heavily in the infrastructure of mass communication, solidified the attention of their audiences and grew very, very powerful, and very, very wealthy. Let's call these collectively Mass Publishers

Given the extraordinary success of the Mass Publisher model, and the fact that they could influence our opinions, the percentage of information we received from Mass Publishers increased, and the percentage from Local Experience shrank. While the time we give to the consumption of Mass Messages has definitely increased, it's not really that the amount of local information available to us has diminished. What has shrunken is the relative importance of local information within a bigger personal information picture .
Trust is a Factor

Across the spectrum of all our Information Relationships (whether with individuals or with organizations), trust is a factor. And to each of them we assign a Trustrank... a quantitative expression of our trust.

Each of us has a fairly well-defined circle of people we engage with on a daily basis, with whom we exchange information. In these cases, their Trustrank is a function of how long we've known them and their Credibility Track Record -- whether they have ever lied to us, and if so, how often.

The information we receive from people directly carries the credibility weight of all our experiences with them, filtered through memory.

The close, inter-personal relationships we have with people are extremely important in our overall Personal Trust Landscape. In New York, where I am from, it's not uncommon for people to say things like "I'd trust him with my life!"

The problem is these relationships are limited by the very thing that makes them strong, their locality. I may trust Joe with my life, but if what I need is credible information about a particular stock or the weather in Singapore, I may have to look outside my circle of acquaintances.

Unless I'm prepared to walk around on Wall Street and whisper the ticker symbol into the ear of every pin-striped suit I see, I probably need to hit up a Mass Publisher of some sort.

The chart below illustrates the operation of Trustrank. Note that Trustrank declines dramatically as soon as you break outside your circle of familiars. And when it makes the leap from individuals to Mass Publishers (the bottom of the curve), Trustrank increases precipitously for the Mass Publisher in proportion with their number of subscribers.

2nd Hand Truth

As soon as we become concerned with obtaining information from sources beyond our direct personal relationships, we become reliant on Mass Publishers. Unlike the way we give (or deny) our trust to individuals, the Trustrank we calculate for Mass Publishers is a function of the number of people who "subscribe" to (buy into, believe in, consume) the messages of that Mass Publisher. Subscribers (or "constituents") are what give Mass Publishers their power. This much seems fair and democratic, except that in practice it has proven difficult for constituents to withdraw power when that has suited them. Abuse of power is commonplace, and the first casualty is always the Truth.

It may be too much to expect that Mass Publishers disclose information detrimental to themselves objectively (or at all). But, when the Third Party Mass Publishers whom we have charged with oversight have shown us that they can be bought, it's obvious the present system is broken.

The reason the give-and-take of power between Mass Publishers and their constituents doesn't work is constituents can't take power away when they feel like taking it away. There are terms of office and formal elections, etc. to contend with. And even these vaunted civic institutions have proven vulnerable to the agency of greed and corruption.

It doesn't make it any easier that encamped Administrations will exert partisan influence over the relay of information the moment they feel their popularity begin to wane.

Mass Publishers lie... for all kinds of reasons, not least of which is perpetuating their own power.
Cutting out the Middleman

I put the word "theory" in the title on purpose, because I haven't tried this yet. But I think it's entirely possible for bloggers to take control of the global flow of information. We would do this, essentially, by cutting out the middleman. From a network topology standpoint, Mass Publishers are information bottlenecks. What we'll do is we'll allow the Internet to operate as it was designed to do in the case of "damaged areas" permitting of no flow. We will circumvent them.

The big problem with the Mass Publisher model is we can't trust the system that grants Mass Publishers their Trustrank, because Mass Publishers have the power to manipulate their own Trustrank and the Trustrank of other Mass Publishers. Mostly this is because Mass Publishers are in control of the technologies through which they mass communicate with us.

From the very beginning, Mass Publishers have used technology to their advantage. Mass Publisher models generate revenue, and that revenue is usually re-invested in things that allow for even more effect. In this regard, there is absolutely no difference between the money collected in church pews, the money paid by advertisers to impress teenage girls on the pages of Vogue and the taxes we pay to Uncle Sam. All reward the publisher for his views.

So, how are we supposed to seize power over our own information?

Thirty years ago, an insane news anchorman (played by Peter Finch) dared Americans to get up from their couches, run over to their windows and shout "I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Sydney Lumet's brilliant 1976 satire, Network, delivered a great and timely message. But looking back, it's hard to ignore what little difference people shouting from their windows would have made. The message was correct, but it was a weak and hopeless message.

What is already a pretty pathetic scenario (an over-the-hill anchorman committing suicide on the air for -- of ALL things -- RATINGS) is made even more pathetic today. We know that anyone who broke into a network broadcast booth, today, and seized the airwaves would be declared a terrorist and shot long before he ever uttered a syllable on the air. What weakened the message to the point of near-uselessness was the fact that it offered Americans no course of action, no hope for reforming any of the causes of their outrage.

Even if every single American had gone over to his window and shouted, once their shouts had faded back into silence, things would be pretty much the same as before. The mere act of shouting at the same moment as millions of other Americans would not have formed them into a medium. But for their momentary share in the aggregate noise, the individual would be no more empowered to "speak" than he was before. Howard Beale is gunned down on stage by armed men sent by his Mass Publisher employer (the Network). That sort of ending hardly encourages followers.

For bloggers to appreciate the opportunity they have today, we need a better example from history
Seizing the Technology

In 1517, Martin Luther famously tacked a sheet of paper to the door of a church. As a result, he changed the course of history. To print his 95 Theses he used a printing press, which had only been invented about 60 years before by a certain Mr. Gutenberg. For nearly all those 60 years, the most important communications technology ever invented was in the hands of the Church. You might say the Church was the first Mass Publisher.

But Martin Luther had some issues with the Church and with the whole Papal Power Establishment. One of his gripes was with the sale of indulgences. An indulgence was basically a payoff you could make to the church in exchange for not having to "pay for your sins" in the usual ways, like spending a few thousand years in Purgatory.

As you can imagine, this was a tidy business and a large source of income for the Church.

As you would expect, the Church used every tool at its disposal to perpetuate its power and its income.

Gutenberg may have invented the printing press, but it was the Church that invented the medium of print. The Church invented the first Mass Communications Medium to serve its own objectives and deliver its own Mass Messages. Yet, even as the Church enjoyed its success and exploited the medium it invented, it failed to realize that the medium -- once created -- could be used by others. It was a critical vulnerability.
The Blogger Mandate

Where Martin Luther succeeded (and Howard Beale failed) is he provided an example people could actually follow. Unlike Beale, who never wrested power from the Network nor took any meaningful amount into his own hands, Martin Luther did. He used the medium to deliver his message. He showed us you could use a medium against even an entrenched Mass Publisher. He showed us that an individual in command of the right medium at the right moment can defeat even the largest and wealthiest of Powers.

I believe individual bloggers have the same opportunity today.

This incredible opportunity exists today for the efforts of companies like Google. What Google and others have done is turned the conventional broadcast (one-to-many) information distribution scheme inside out. The blogosphere provides for the inclusion of all voices, but it does not aggregate them at any central point. It is the opposite of a bottleneck. The blogosphere is a near-perfect democracy. It not only shows us concensus, it permits for that concensus to change (very quickly!), in response to new information.

Even beyond the trust issues, one of the problems with the information output of Mass Publishers is it is rather static, once created. Mass Publishers output new information at a regular and frequent rate, but the bulk of "current" information is always in a tiny minority, against the total information footprint of the Publisher's archive. The only thing that keeps that quite small number of pages at the forefront of visibility on the Web is their Trustrank. In many cases, this trust is deserved. But in many other cases, what keeps us typing in those URLs and giving links to Mass Publishers is the expectation that their information is credible. This needn't be so. Who says there is any reason to trust the New York Times or the CBS Evening News? Remember that we are, all of us, as a culture, still under the influence of the Mass Messages that pervade the other mediums. We're all still making judgements about brands and companies based on their marketing.

What is very important for all you bloggers to understand is that we have the power now to exert influence over Information, and therefore over the Truth. The other mass mediums are becoming less important. There's no denying we've been on that path for a few years already. But what is different today... and this is the clincher... is we (the little guys) have enormous power behind us. That power is coming from the likes of Google and other Architects of the Global Information Infrastructure.

For its success in harnessing the collective intelligence of the World Wide Web for all our benefit, Google has emerged as the most important Information Power in all Human history.

But Google is not a Mass Publisher in the old-fashioned sense. They don't pretend to listen to constitituents and then gather the Will of the People into a digest for them.

No, they don't do that at all.

Together with a coalition of like-minded, companies, organizations and influencers, what they're doing is sorta like... this