Was the web good for knowledge management?

Hearing many voices, many ideas

Those are the positives. But overall, is the web itself a positive development for human ideas? That’s a crucial question to which there is only one right answer: It depends. I did not foresee the havoc that would be created once today’s social media took off with the creation of Facebook. Links have eroded the power of experts, enabling misinformation to run amok. But that power came at the cost of enduring the old cultural elite of experts, which traditionally was a white male elite that too often excluded views from less privileged groups. We still have that problem, but at least many more voices can now be heard.

Reducing the influence of genuine experts is far from the only problem with what social media has done to the web, of course. How did I miss it?

After all, most of what I wrote about the web, starting in the mid–1990s, was aimed at convincing readers that the web should be understood as a conversational social medium, not as a new form of publishing: Its power came from its ability to connect people around the issues that matter to them. In 2001, when I was writing Small Pieces, we were in the early days of the blogging era, which we understood as a way of building communities of fellow bloggers. Blogging, of course, favored the privileged, who had the leisure to blog and who liked writing. It obviously did not meet the yearning to connect more dynamically, more casually, in looser-edged networks.

An unseen dynamic

And then Facebook launched a less authorial, more conversational way for people to connect, unleashing (instigating?) a dynamic that I had not foreseen, one that leads people to commit ever more resolutely to ever more extreme and implausible ideas. Of course, no one who says that thinks it applies to them. And that’s fair enough, because most of us do find niches where we can discuss and expand our knowledge of a topic that matters to us, while not “wasting time” with people who disagree with our fundamental values and premises. One person’s echo chamber is another person’s enlightened group of fellow thinkers. This leads me to think that the problem isn’t echo chambers: It’s that some echo chambers are based around wrong ideas. The for-profit architects of the social web enable wrong ideas to circulate and be amplified faster the more extreme and extremely wrong they are.

So, yes, the web enables everyone with an internet connection and the freedom to use it to contribute to our new, global, contentious, and contradictory knowledge space. We have collectively spent the last 25 years posting and linking ideas and creative expressions into a worldwide, contentious, contradictory knowledge space that is inseparable from the worldwide creative and social free-for-all—an unlimited, traversable, free space for ideas and expression. But I did not foresee the dark side because of an optimism born of privilege.

Thanks for the reality check, @Patty, and for your perceptive comments on a draft of this column.