Sweet Spot

Can the web be used to improve the quality of ideas, or is it going to just be a world-wide shouting match of people not listening to one another?

The biggest difference between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 is the form of discourse. In Web 1, messages get put out there, but you can’t effectively respond to, critique, or engage a message on a website unless its authors enable you to, and even then they control the discourse (e.g., comments forms). I was realizing this is not a new problem when I read the new report Freedom in the Classroom by the American Association of University Professors, in many way the guardian of academic freedom. Academic debate in the classroom is really about a way of engaging ideas, while still maintaining quality and consensus building about how to vet those ideas, and it is NOT identical to some range of ‘fair and balanced’ or ‘it’s just a matter of opinion so anyone can say what they want’.

So the AAUP report has some guidelines about how to use academic freedom to help people think broadly and advance the development of knowledge.

The web needs tools for this kind of academic freedom (as opposed to our much more random freedom of the press–everyone says anything they want, and can drown each other out.) Wikipedia has had to deal with the conflict between these two models head on, trying to move from the ‘he said-she said-he deleted’ model of wikipedia to a more principled editorial policy while still allowing something akin to academic freedom.

I ran across some crazy propaganda website today, and realized how being able to manipulate message online via a thorough, well-designed site that is self-contained is really similar to being able to manipulate a message face-to-face by either 1. denying the existence of other perspectives, or denying alternate perspectives a voice, or 2. belittling the other perspectives by denying any sort of principled exchange. This website reminded me of the tactics of religious colleges that exclude speakers who conflict with their message.

In the web 0.5 days, Mosaic allowed annotation of any website. There are an assortment of web annotation tools, and commentary/rating/classification tools like digg. Do any of these tools really do anything analogous to the type of discourse the AAUP report privileges?

I think it’s a plausible design challenge to try to develop an interface that directly supports academic discourse, not free-for-all discourse. This interface would need to support commentary, question, rebuttal, and all those good-ol’ Toulminian discourse moves. But it would also need to support the structure and tone-setting functions that the teacher has in the classroom–empowerment of either individuals or the community to flag, filter, and if necessary police annotation that might be perfectly good free speech but doesn’t fit within an academic freedom model. All the while protecting the ability of all to propose and debate well-founded ideas.

I realize this posting is a little rambling and needs some concrete examples, but I’ve got to run right now. I’ll try to edit this up a bit later.