Sweet irony. Here comes Oliver Kamm (above), he of the world’s most punchable face, to lecture us on truth, of all things. In a week when corporate agents have been exposed lurking among the crowdsourced editors of Wikipedia, he takes the News Corporation shilling, not to celebrate the ingenuity of the young man wielding the spotlight, nor to express concern at the meddling of the corporate flacks, but to turn out a characteristically lazy, ignorant and pooterish condemnation of Wikipedia itself:
The development of technology that exposes such shenanigans could be taken as evidence of the self-correcting nature of cyberspace. It ought to be seen instead as a lesson in how easily information can be manipulated in a culture that prizes “user-generated content”.
Echoing, in his inimitable way, the similarly partial but far more articulate views of Andrew Keen, little Ollie also reflects the amusing, if belated, awakening of the Right to the fact, as it were, that all is not as it seems. Remember last summer’s confected outrage by supporters of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, when a Reuters photographer was found to have doctored images of an IDF airstrike of Beirut? Or the recent, equally contrived horror of the right-wing newspaper press over UK broadcasters, notably the BBC, and such weighty matters as telephone competitions and promotion of documentaries? Where have these people been for the past hundred years?
As for Wikipedia, Kamm’s tired little attempt to kick the enterprise when it’s down rests on “ideas” which have long been discredited by those far better placed than he to pronounce on its worth when compared to the supposed gold standard, Encyclopedia Britannica. Nature reported back in 2005:
an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science…revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.
The point is not that Wikipedia and its ilk represent some aberrant descent into user-generated cacophony, but that corporate media are just as subject to manipulation and undue influence – but without the transparency that inheres among distributed, commons-based media. Once, just once, it would be good to see self-described members of the “liberal left” – even those as incoherent as Oliver – attack those sources of concentrated power.
