A few weeks ago, I was a panelist at the 10th Annual Symposium on Communication, The Future of Communication, held at Bernard Baruch College, City University of New York, in the Big Apple. The panel’s topic, “More than Friending: Social Media and Communication in Business and Education,” provided for a lively discussion about social media and its impact on business and education and how the two institutions overlap and complement each other.
In one section of the discussion, one of the panelists brought up the topic of crowd sourcing and alluded to its reliability in determining “truth.” And to recall a line from that American “classic” film about the absurdities of modern business, Office Space, I said to him that “I was going to have to sort of go ahead and kind of disagree with him there,” or words to that effect. (To make for an interesting and entertaining discussion, all the panelists had agreed ahead of time to be somewhat “feisty” in the panel discussion. Although, now that I think about it, this lead-in was a lot more silly than feisty. Well, perhaps at least it was entertaining.)
To make my point that crowd sourcing was not as reliable as many propose that it is, I drew upon an example from the offline world. I said to test the validity of the crowd sourcing theory, one could simply ask liberals how valid crowd sourcing was during the elections that gave the United States the presidency of George W. Bush or, conversely, one could ask conservatives how valid crowd sourcing was in the most recent presidential election that has given us Barack Obama. The other panelist countered with the theory that in the “long-run” crowd sourcing was a more accurate representation of “truth” than crowd sourcing in the “short-run.” Until now, I hadn’t remembered this quote by John Maynard Keynes, the early 20th century British economist, “In the long-run, we’re all dead.” Had I recalled this quote during the panel discussion, it might have been even more “feisty,” or entertaining, for the audience.
The Keynes quote points out that, yes, perhaps everything “evens” out fairly in the long-run, but the long-run may be too long. Specific to our panel discussion about truth in social media, if in the long-run the truth will out, crowd sourcing may be a valid approach to arriving at the “truth.” But, what’s the long-run? Is social media old enough to even have a “long-run?” We may need to wait too long for the truth to win within Web 2.0. By that time, we’d all be dead, and the truth wouldn’t matter.
An idea to keep in mind for the next time we’re perusing the world of Web 2.0.
