There is an unprecedented and rapidly growing ocean of data, information and digitally reproduced materials from the past, available to anyone who has the requisite time, education and internet access. It has taken much human skill to enable us to navigate rapidly online from a superabundance of raw data and information towards knowledge and understanding, and the means chosen will inevitably highlight some things and obscure others.
Those determinants of what we find when we seek online are seldom apparent at first glance. We do not see what we do not see. Moreover, this giant leap forward in the availability of data, information and knowledge (draw the dividing lines where you will) poses large questions about what should be made accessible when, how, to whom, and at what cost.
Knowledge is a public good that is often supplied by private powers. That is, in itself, nothing new. What is new, however, is the scale, global reach and small number of the dominant private powers now performing this function. As we have seen, they create ‘privately owned public spaces’ (POPS).
In many Western languages the most frequent first call people make in the search for knowledge is via a Google search to a Wikipedia article.
Google’s official statement of its company mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Wikipedia wants us to imagine, in the words of its founder, Jimmy Wales, ‘a world in which every single person is given access to the sum of all human knowledge’.
Google Search is a fantastic, transformative tool in the quest for knowledge. But at least three distinct causes for concern emerge as we consider the world’s largest example of public good delivered by private power. The first is that, to a greater extent than the wizard-weasel word ‘algorithms’ implies, Google Search reflects the underlying values of those who run it. The second is that one private power has such a dominant position as the information gatekeeper in so much of the world. Where it isn’t dominant, that position is held by another gatekeeper, such as Baidu, which is deeply entangled with censorship by the Chinese party-state.) The third is that this giant corporation’s desire to maximize profit from advertising increasingly shapes what we find when we ‘google it’.
In 2001, Jimmy Jimbo’ Wales, an entrepreneurial libertarian, and Larry Sanger, a recent philosophy graduate, had the crazy idea of starting a free online encyclopedia, to which anyone could contribute articles which anyone else could then edit at will. To their own and everyone else’s surprise, it took off like a rocket. Fourteen years later, there were editions in more than go different languages with a grand total of some 35 million articles. The largest was English-language Wikipedia, with nearly 5 million entries, followed by the German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Swedish ones, all of which contained over 1 million.
In 2003, Jimbo had an even crazier idea: he would vest ownership of the whole thing in a not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation. There are few if any examples in recent history of an individual, apparently in full possession of his faculties, voluntarily surrendering such a vast potential fortune.
Wikipedia has a balance of democracy and authority. Huge emphasis is placed on open, deliberative democracy, and all editorial policy choices are the subject of exhaustive online debate. Unlike most of the commercial private powers, Wikipedia has a high level of transparency about itself. You can see the whole editing history of every article online, including some ‘edit wars’ that make Europe’s Thirty Years’ War look like a coffee break. (One of the most ridiculous was a battle on the English-language Wikipedia about the correct spelling of the Voßstrasse in Berlin. Should it be Voßstrasse, Vossstrasse, Voss strasse or Voss-strasse?)
Yet beside all this open democracy there is authority. Experienced editors are gien more extensive editing rights than novices. Hovering over them are a few thousand Administrators, with the power to delete articles for good and to ban problematic contributors. Above them are super-administrators called Bureaucrats, armed with still greater powers. There is an Arbitration Committee, to resolve major disputes, and the board of the Foundation. If a volunteer-driven Wikipedia in any language were to go really wild, the Foundation could take it down.
If we say ‘free speech’, two associations that will immediately come to many minds are ‘a free press in a free country’ and journalists battling state censorship in unfree countries. From the seventeenth century to our own, this has been one of the central struggles for freedom of expression. In a letter penned in 1787, Thomas Jefferson declared: ‘were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter’” Put most simply: a free press is a defining feature of a free country while censorship became feature of a dictatorship. A democracy cannot long survive without the former, a dictatorship without the latter.
To some extent, this is counterbalanced by the unprecedented amount online video coverage, blogs, tweets and ‘citizen journalism’ available on platforms such as You Tube. But these platforms are themselves an extreme example d simultaneous fragmentation and concentration. On the one hand, a platform like Facebook allows is billion people to speak directly to each other and in that sense can be described as radically open. On the other hand, near-monopoly concentration of ownership power is an extreme example of a powerless curve. Arguably, this is a double power-law curve, first of the platforms then selves, then of prices on those platforms, with the result that a very few read very many, and very many reach very few.
Good journalism tries to get at the truth, or at least at some important part of it. It goes after all possible sources, including ones that are hard and dangerous to reach. It checks its facts and makes explicit judgements about the quality of its evidence. One of its purest forms is that of the eyewitness to important events. Then good journalism attempts to tell the story, to describe, show, explain and analyze, as clearly and vividly as possible, making the subject accessible to audiences that would not otherwise learn about it.
Source : Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27220690-free-speech
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