I wonder if the internet is dumbing down our expectations, or whether the expectations placed upon web properties is unrealistic, or both.

I am increasingly seeing examples of Internet phenomenon being unfairly compared to an offline “equivalents”. Bloggers being compared to journalists, Wikipedia being compared to an outdated notion of an encyclopaedia and comments compared to formalized civil meetings.

Is blogging filling a new niche, or is it poor jounalism? Is wikipedia filling an information void, or dumbing downb our expectations of accuracy? Are comments a rude, impersonal, untraceable form of public discourse that is bad for society?

Leaving aside that many times the commenter’s have a vested interest when they make such accusations (journalists commenting on Bloggers is a bit rich), I think I may have worked out why this is and, I hate to admit, in some cases the criticisms have some merit.

While it is self evident that the Internet is a massive change, our expectations haven’t adjusted. We hold many views that were shaped by constraints we no longer have, making offline comparisons to the Internet innaccurate, and sometimes missing the true brevity of a situation.

Take permanence.

Back a few posts ago, I made the case that anonymous comments are good for the Internet, in response to this comment, comparing comments on blogs to a formal civil meeting:

…In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process

At the time, I thought this notion was silly. How on Earth could anyone equate a Blog comment to a formal civil meeting? I argued it was like a pub.

But thinking about it again, there is some merit, as an anlogy alone, to the formal meeting position. Unlike a Pub, conversations on the Internet last forever and a day, unless the page goes down or the site dies. This permanent record does, and should, change things.

I still don’t agree that the Internet is a formal civil meeting, but neither do I think arguing it is a form of virtual pub is right, because last time I got drunk, the Pub didn’t record my conversations verbatim, and preserve them for posterity (bad idea as well).

Permanence is a problem that Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s “Useful Void” proposal (PDF), talks about, in which he states:

We seem to have accepted that our digital society may forgive, but no longer forgets.

Mayer-Schönberger then goes on to outline some of the issues with never forgetting, and why it is a problem. His solution is a proposal that all software have built in “forgetfulness”, i.e. after some set date, all data is erased. This is in my view a good idea, but one we don’t currently have the luxury of. Without built in forgetfulness, the permanent record we currently have is a rather challenging position without historical parallel, and puts comments, forum posts and other permanent records in an historically unique position.

Combining permanence to skew analogies is past expectation shaped by the shortcomings of print material. The fact is that, once sent to the printing press, paper is destroyable but unchangeable. That puts tremendous pre-publication pressure on print, a pressure that is totally irrelevant online, where content can be changed in a heartbeat. But we still hold a preconceived notion that public equals infallible, accurate and “right”, and I think this is a strong factor in people’s criticisms of sites like Wikipedia and, in a slightly different way, Blogs.

We simply are not used to seeing a piece of writing unfold and evolve. Instead, we are used to textbooks with a temporal finality, a “setting in stone” of a specific iteration of knowledge that, due to printing costs, required pre-publishing editing, spelling and grammar checking, rather than wikipedia’s post-publishing editing. What we are seeing is the shift of the “rough draft” from back of house and private to public, without a corresponding resetting of our expectations.

We are also conditioned, by our education system, to think of “right” as momentary. Essays, POP quizzes and other moment in time ways of testing our fortitude are the norm, and school children are marked down for not being right on a specific due date, with no ability to change or improive a mark. An evolving piece of work, like Wikipedia, breaks this notion completely and utterly, in a way that print media never did or could.

Blogs, too, suffer from this pre-conceived notion. Unlike the “letter to the editor” sections in print, a comment can be changed deleted or censored at a moments notice. This has changed the paradigm from pre-moderation to post-moderation, as the fear that a mistake will be recorder forever is eliminated.

If I am arguing that expectations should change, and I am, what should the expectation on Internet properties and phenomenon be?

IMHO our expectation of Internet sources needs to move from an expectation of momentary accuracy and long term inaccuracy, to an expectation that the evolution of a page, document or site will be positive. This both gives, in that it allows short-term inaccuracy, as well as takes, as it doesn’t forgive long-term stagnation.

If a site can demonstrate a positive evolution, as Wikipedia and many Blogs do, they should get a pass mark. If not, all the fury that can be directed to such sites is totally justified.

I want to stress that none of the above should give the WWW a free pass, and excuse any momentary problems and inaccuracies the Internet has by merely stating that a site isn’t “finished”. Errors should be fixed, and in a timely fashion, it is just that their mere existence shouldn’t be a reason in and of itself to criticise.

Long-term, not short-term, accuracy is the “best fit” for a medium that can be editted on the fly, and for human knowledge generally. Positive evolution is the standard to which the Internet’s gatekeeper’s of knowledge, from Blogs to forums and Wikipedia, should be judged by.