“The New Front Page” session at Mesh 08 was perhaps the most entertaining talk I attended while there. Featuring Daniel Burka of Digg, Pema Hagen of GigPark and Candice Faktor of Ourfaves and Toronto.com, the panel talk largely focused on what I suppose you could call ‘crowd-sourced information gathering’, whether that information is the news or about products, services or locations. Now, there has been no end of virtual ink spilled about how the web is reshaping information and perhaps the clearest topic to arise was that of filtering: what are the limits, both positive and negative, of the democratisation of editing what information we are exposed to?
It was Daniel Burka – who is a funny, entertaining guy – who had to field most of the questions from an audience who, while not aggressive, was perhaps a little sceptical. Moderator Mathew Ingram asked whether or not Digg functioned as an echo chamber and Burka’s response was essentially based on both the wisdom and diversity of crowds – i.e. that having a divergent community like Digg means that a number of different interests and perspectives will constantly be represented. I think this tended to gloss over the criticisms of Digg as being both too tech-focused and too sympathetic to left-of-centre politics, but Burka also stated that there is continual work being done on Digg’s algorithms that is meant not only to diversify perspective but also to prevent the system being gamed. Ultimately, Burka made a convincing case that the multiplicity of topics and perspectives on Digg was indicative of its democratisation of information.
The one thing that did nag at me during entire thing, however, was the conception of democracy at work. In the model used, an individual has interests and inclinations and then, through the conscious activity of ‘digging’ or something similar, expresses these opinions and beliefs. The aggregation of these individual actions results in Digg being an accurate representation of what its community is feeling. My problem with this is the simple question of where an individual’s interests and inclinations come from. There is a solid case to be made that our interests are as produced by our immersion in mass culture as they are a reflection of ‘what is inside us’. Indeed, what is ‘inside’ has to come from ‘outside’ – i.e. is it ‘natural’ for me to want an iPhone or does my desire work in relation to a cultural context that values technology, aesthetics, conspicuous consumption etc. That’s not to say that I have no choice; but it does suggest that there is a force exerted on me by my cultural context.
To be frank, people don’t like it when you argue this. The reaction is generally that you are either extremely naive or just a conspiracy theorist. But the point is not to suggest that we are being indoctrinated by a group of old men hidden in a room somewhere. Instead, it is to argue that what we value is at best a combination of our beliefs and the information we are given. When part of that information is deliberately persuasive – i.e. advertising, both explicit and implied and our immersion in an ideological context – to argue that online crowds reflect their own interests is to suggest that those interests are produced in a vacuum, in relation to ‘purely internal’ needs. They are not. Instead, they work in relation to the ebb and flow of information that exists in the public sphere, to the production of individuals by the social and cultural contexts in which we live. So yes, Digg is an accurate representation of its community – the key point to keep in mind is that this does not necessarily defend it against the charge of being an echo chamber, if the chamber we consider is not just Digg, but its social context too.
