Riddles in the dark
I'm continuing my series of essays on the future of news; this essay may look like a serious digression, but trust me, it's not. The future of news, in my opinion, is about cooperation; it's about allowing multiple voices to work together on the same story; it's about allowing users to critically evaluate different versions of the story to evaluate which is more trustworthy. This essay introduces some of the technical underpinnings that may make that possible.
In January 2015, I ran a workshop in Birnam on Land Reform. While planning the workshop, I realised I would need a mechanism for people who had attended the workshop to work cooperatively on the document which was the output of the event. So, obviously, I needed a Wiki. I could have put the wiki on a commercial Wiki site like Wikia, but if I wanted to control who could edit it I'd have to pay, and in any case it would be plastered with advertising.
Trust me
Reality is contested, and it is an essential part of reality that reality is contested. There are two reasons that reality is contested: one is, obviously, that people mendaciously misreport reality in order to deceive. That's a problem, and it's quite a big one; but (in my opinion) it pales into insignificance beside another. Honest people honestly perceive reality differently.
If you interview three witnesses to some real life event, you'll get three accounts; and its highly likely that those accounts will be — possibly sharply — different. That doesn't mean that any of them are lying or are untrustworthy, it's just that people perceive things differently. They perceive things differently partly because they have different viewpoints, but also because they have different understandings of the world.
Challenges in the news environment
Two days ago I reposted my CollabPRES essay, written twelve years ago, which addressed problems of the news publishing environment that I was aware of then: centrally, the collapse of revenue which, at that point, affected local media most harshly.
Time moves on; there are other problems in the news publishing environment which existed then but which are much more starkly apparent to me now; and there are some issues which are authentically new.
How do we pay for search?
[This is taken from a Twitter thread I posted on June 27th. I'm reposting it here now because it's part of supporting argument for a larger project I'm working on about the future of news publishing]
Seriously, folks, how do we want to pay for search? It's a major public service of the Internet age. We all use it. Google (and Bing, and others) provide us with search for free and fund it by showing us adverts and links to their own services.
Signposts, not weathercocks
Last night, Jeremy Corbyn whipped Labour MPs not to vote for continued membership of the Single Market. This is why he was wrong.
Corbyn enthused a lot of young people to vote at the last election. People who don't usually vote, many of them for the first time.