TechTruth by risa
Notes on the Truth and the Web2.0 Revolution in 5 Movements.
by Risa Dickens
I
“Journalists have a responsibility to dig for the truth, not to blindly report what both sides are saying. Just because people disagree doesn’t mean the truth lies somewhere in the middle.”
Recently Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and CrunchNotes had his writing plagiarized. Under the conditions of his Creative Commons license his work may be reproduced so long as he is cited as the author, the usage is noncommercial, and the person using his work “shares alike” by keeping the CC license in tact. The plagiarist clearly did not cite Arrington.
In response to a vaguely insulting summary of what had gone down, published on Plagiarism Today, Arrington made the above bold claim about journalism and the truth.
Interestingly, in an article published in the December ‘05 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Academic Cross Dressing, How Intelligent Design gets its arguments from the left“, Stanley Fish talks about this same issue: truth and the way it can be obfuscated by rhetorical slight of hand.
In this case Fish shows how some proponents of the teaching of Intelligent Design, and some other people who claim there was no Holocaust, …
“recite the mantras of ‘teach the controversy’ or ‘keep the debate open’ whenever they find it convenient. They do so not out of a commitment to scrupulous scholarship (although that will be what is asserted) but in an effort to accomplish through misdirection and displacement what they cannot accomplish through evidence and argument.”
Calls for open debate are dangerous, suggests Fish, when they are coupled with a disregard for the process of determining the comparative integrity of differing truth claims.
“When any claim has a right to be heard and taught just because it is one, judgment falls by the wayside”
says Fish, and then he points to the Maoist slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”. His point is that the argument in favor of open discussion and new truths has been used to cause confusion, and to put new authoritative truths in the place of the disruptive chaos, and that the pattern that plays out after this recklessness with Truth is Mao-sized catastrophic.
‘Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom’ refers to a period of so called democratic reform in 1956 China. Critics of Mao and the Communist Party were encouraged to come forward after the first stirrings of resistance to Mao & Co. since the Communist victory of 1949. (…)
By 1957 the criticism had gotten way out of hand so the party cracked down and did not let up until the rise of Deng twenty years later. All critics were made to suffer for ‘betraying the revolution’ – at best this meant a long sentence in a labor camp and at the worst summary execution. The fake reform heralded the late 1950s man made famine that claimed tens of millions during the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.
After encouraging a thousand schools of thought to contend, the competing truths got too complicated, too challenging, too out of control. It became apparent that other people, intelligent people, didn’t see the same things Mao did and so his truth was enforced.
(btw- No one is equating plagiarism, or journalism about plagiarism, with fascism. We’re looking at the ethics and fitness of different tactics, and the range of dangerous things that happen when you play fast and loose with the truth. )
II
In a comment to the CrunchNotes post about plagiarism, someone named Jennifer wrote that:
“The currency of Web 2.0 is the ability to freely share information with proper attribution–it provides a level playing field for conversations and exchange of ideas.”
With this, Jennifer explains the ethical foundations of the large collective wavefront that is Web2.0. A level playing field for the exchange of ideas is a lofty goal. In this kind of commons, equal access to the debate would hopefully mean that the truth could be recognized by being held up against truth-claims that do not validate.
On the other hand, the commons itself is susceptible to distortion if some participants are privileged. If the ability to control the popular spaces for communication and exchange are in the hands of a few, or even if the majority do not know that the conversation is taking place, then what seems to be a level playing field is only a mirage. At worst, a distraction from real inequality.
A level playing field would require technological access- the ability to build new spaces- as well as access to the histories and conceptual frameworks of debates, as well as the possibility of access to an audience.
We’re far from this perfect scenario, but it’s worth theorizing it out so we can continue to move towards it. Because in a true commons it might be possible to live with less violence then in other systems.
III
In an intricately networked, highly visible society there can be big backlash from victims. Unlike a mob lynching, public truth-telling by victims in a networked commons can skip the physical violence and maybe even cause cascading positive change. With the possibility of having your bad choices widely publicized, criminal behavior (large and small) has a powerful deterrent. And because we are all likely to make mistakes, the public gaze has a shared interest in valuing forgiveness. (See the Update at the end of Arrington’s original post on this.)
In a commons, even in the awesome but incomplete one we have now, reputations are of great value and memories are long. And so it’s best to not get caught whining that you cheated because you just didn’t have enough time. (Or caught trying to buy drugs off of other kids (ie me) in the (McGill) library because they “looked too focused to not be on something”. )
IIII
The commons finds one route to reality, I think, in the pragmatic and willing-to-wait ethics of open source. A complex ecosystem arises out of the fundamental cultural twist of open source code. Differing opinions and tactics get tested and tossed around, but the approaches (technical and interpersonal) that fit are chosen and disseminated. And if they are sustainable then they last over time and are improved by open contributions.
In our daily lives in our non-ideal commons we already get our tactics and pet theories refined by seeing how they play out in practice. So in a way, this question, about truth and our responsibility to it, is about code: personal, cultural and political code’s of behavior.
Personal code can be sloppy, show bad time management, or inadequate care. The effects of a personal code can demonstrate diligence, or a disregard for others; thoroughness, or a lack of depth.
Too often journalists, and bloggers- and all kinds of other people, including myself when i’m being lazy- seem to simplify their thought-work by turning a question into a distorted binary. Some journalists balance a diligent pursuit of the truth with an open mind, and an honesty about when they’ve been wrong; some work hard to give their readers the necessary information to decide for themselves who is right. But the kind of rhetorical twistiness that Arrington dislikes, and that blog con planners wrote about way back in 2003, is not that kind of journalism. Instead, it’s a bad bit of code.
IIIII
The truth is daunting. It’s huge and often relative. Cheating (on small and large scales) seems to come down to a belief that it’s necessary because there’s ‘not enough time’. There are acres of subtle laws and civilizations worth of knowledge that can be drawn into each moment of our encounter with the truth. Manipulative, lazy or sloppy choices can be used to assert a biased truth or to justify what we want to do. But this works only for so long as you can keep people looking at a question in the way you want them too- by distorting other people’s truth to suit you, or by enforcing it. With a longer view of time it becomes clear that a positon of power (in the blogosphere or in politics) that is attained by these means is not sustainable.
Other people are always out there, always looking at things in their own way, always making their own choices about how they’ll view you and how they’ll use the time that seems to be speeding by. If the web2.0 commons can bring with it a longer and wider view of time by increasing our access to those other perspectives, then perhaps we will be able to come closer to a more honest dealing with the truth.
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