Ryan Anderson dot ca

As a technophile and PR guy, I talk a lot about the benefits of social media, consumer generated news and things of that nature.  Recently, however, I’ve seen a lot of the down-side to user-generated news and "the conversation" that we’re so fond of referring to.

Malcolm Gladwell, makes a very salient point in his blog when he complains that the problem with blogging is that it almost necessarily requires less thought than any other medium.  The immediacy, combined with the hobby nature for most bloggers means that each post is probably not researched or fact-checked.  Sometimes, it will rely on one or two sources, but most of the time (like this one) it will be comprised solely of opinion – which is fine, until you realize that most people count their own opinions as solid fact.

Take Yahoo! Answers.  I’ve tried to read through any of these questions, but I actually can’t do it without feeling nauseous or enraged.  The basic premise behind this service is that anyone can ask a question to uninformed morons, and the uninformed morons post uninformed opinions, and we all vote on who is least wrong.  Sure, every once in a while you get a gem, but in reading a post about "is aspartame bad for you?" we got everything from "no." to "yes it is terrible you’re going to get cancer."  In reality, I don’t know the answer to that question, but I saw so much misinformation in that single thread that it brought to light everything that is wrong with social media.

The experience reminded me of a conversation on a forum between two women who didn’t know each other.  The first had a baby.  The second asked how much she was feeding it.  When she told her, the second was aghast and told her that was too much.  When the first explained that her doctor had told her exactly how much to feed her, the second insisted that she was right.  When I interjected to ask what medical training she had, she replied, "well, I have two kids, so I should know!"

This is the power of conviction in one’s own opinion.  To them, their own anecdotal experience means more than a doctor with years of medical training and experience who has actually seen the child in real life.  Granted, doctors can be wrong from time to time, but I’m pretty sure that "what to feed a baby" comes in the first few chapters of "Being a Doctor for Dummies," and the opinion of a professional to me will always override the opinion of a random anonymous person on the internet.

As one of my engineer friends is fond of saying, "the plural of anecdote is not ‘data.’"

The problem that Yahoo! Answers has is the same problem that any popular community with a feedback mechanism has.  People, by and large, are stupid – multiply that by 1000 when they’re also anonymous.  I hate to say it so bluntly, but it’s true.  I forget it sometimes because my circle of friends is exclusively intelligent, and if you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing yours probably is too.  There’s a reason that the House of Commons has a body of elected officials to represent the people yelling at one another – because if it were the actual people yelling at one another, it would devolve into name-calling and nothing would ever happen.

Okay, bad example, but you get my point.

As we see social media and the conversation grow to include everyone instead of just the early-adopting, professional, more-intelligent-than-the-average thought leaders (and people talking about their cat), the conversation is going to get polluted. Citizen media will be come more riddled with libel and misinformation. There will be more people taking reactionary stances based on little more than opinion or their own limited experience.  Filtering the wheat from the piles of chaff will get harder and harder. 

Feel free to disagree with me on this – it is, afterall, just an unresearched opinion based on anecdote.