DIGITAL DEMOCRACY
Does Web 2.0 herald a new era in human development or in human ignorance? 
 
We are on the cusp of the world’s third great economic revolution.  The agrarian and industrial revolutions are being followed by today’s information revolution, pioneered by the internet.  We are so early in the history of this period that we can no more foretell its digital future than those who owned or worked in the cotton mills of East Lancashire could have predicted the shape of industry in the two centuries that followed their endeavour.  However, this has not stopped people trying.

Two observers of the internet, a digital entrepreneur and a management consultant, have recently constructed opposing theses on the emergence of Web 2.0.  Web 2.0 is the means by which people can both publish and amend content on the internet.

My own website is an example of this, but the sites that tower above the landscape are YouTube and Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia whose content can be created and altered by anyone.
I have found it a helpful resource when wanting to unearth quick information about a topic but like most, do not stop to think about who might have constructed it. 
Tim Berners Lee
Tim Berners Lee:
thoughtful British inventor of the internet

Was it a leading expert in nuclear physics who wrote the entry on centrifuges or a teenage blogger using unsourced third-hand information?  This gets to the heart of the difference of opinion between those two internet gurus I referred to.

In We-Think (Profile Book 2008) Charles Leadbeater argues the case for the wisdom of crowds popularised by James Surowiecki in the book of the same title.  In his view the aggregated intelligence of the group gets closer to the truth than the lone thinker.  There is some evidence to support this thesis although it is prone to the failing of group-think where people can overlook facts which point in another direction because the group inhibits independent thought.  By contrast Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur (Nicholas Brealey, 2007) believes Web 2.0 is unleashing a torrent of ignorant and opinionated drivel where the loudest and most sensational will drown out the more considered and understated.

As with most inventions, the internet has the power of good and evil and the human race will make use of both.  There is something beguiling about the way people will be able to come together to solve problems online using their pooled intelligence yet our biblical sources inform us of the importance of the lone thinker in the shape of the prophet.  Will we be able to distil the emerging digital cacophony of voices to preserve the purity of truth?  There is something very post-modern about the internet’s casually subjective approach to truth.  If the internet had been around in the early church, would the collective witness of those who met or heard about Jesus have produced clear and reliable online sources for future generations or a mish-mash of rumour, speculation and conspiracy theory?  We can see the dilemma even while clinging to God’s capacity to reveal truth to us.

One of the greatest risks the information age poses to the Gospel is the way people allow themselves to be buried under a weight of daily information without sharpening their critical faculties to distinguish the essential from the trivial.  As T.S. Eliot asks in “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

This couplet could be the health warning of the internet generation.

   
 
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