" During the 2008 presidential debates, CNN unveiled their latest onscreen gimmick: A real-time graph depicting the averaged reactions of 32 supposedly undecided voters, who expressed favor or disfavor by turning handheld dials as they watched. "

" In an experiment described March 31 in PLoS One, British psychologists secretly manipulated a similar onscreen graph broadcast during a Prime Ministerial debate. The results confirmed their fears. “We were able to influence their perception of who won the debate, their choice of preferred prime minister and their voting intentions,” wrote the researchers, "

"currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community who believe that they have been exposed to uninteresting stories and or who have been or are the subject of dull and anonymous postings online anywhere."

"you can’t expose him from the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard. He created the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard. Fresco maintains strict control over the Prem Rawat article & countless related articles, keeping criticism of his guru to a bare minimum."

"Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes th individual’s action th necessary condition of the cultural product... By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot & do not exist unless th individual intervenes physically in them."

"The US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has been caught conducting covert propaganda... deleting detainee ID numbers from Wikipedia, the systematic posting of unattributed "self praise" comments on news organization web sites..."

A college course in which Herbert's _The Dosadi Experiment_ is required reading? Fantastic.

"f we do not tell the truth, if we do not strive for accuracy in our spoken and written words, we will be held accountable. If we are not willing to accept correction or admit to our mistakes and immediately correct them, we lose credibility."

"Edelman has acquired the Silicon Valley PR company A&R Partners... many of the company's clients are already blogging. Edelman leadership appears focused on bringing corporate communications into the new world of social media"

"PR 2.0 firm Edelman Inc. has announced that it will fund the creation of localized versions of Technorati in German, Korean, Italian, French and Chinese."

"The wrong way, he said, is to create fake blogs (or "flogs") to create the illusion of positive sentiment. That was the approach Wal-Mart took with Edelman Public Relations last year. Edelman set up blogs ..."

"all this home-made content... is an inadequate replacement for mainstream media. It may be a harmless, even occasionally enriching addition, but we can't have both, because the former is swiftly killing off the latter."

" "The political brain is an emotional brain," he said. "It prefers conclusions that are emotionally satisfying rather than conclusions that match the data."... Westen writes that it doesn't make sense to argue an issue using facts and figures"

"The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers, in many ways, from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise."

"The aggregation of the opinions of the informed and the uninformed (ranging from the ignorant to the crazy) is decidedly and emphatically not “what is known about any given topic.” "

"walk outside your door and try to find a Twitter user... We could do great things if we weren't so segregated into a small group of people punch drunk on Kool Aid and a great deal of people who've never even heard of Kool Aid."

Kudos to Richard Schickel for noticing - and sticking his neck out to point out - the difference between having the means to comment and having insightful comments to make. N.B. the viciousness of the condemnations from promoters of participatory hype.

"But as rating systems have become more popular - and, as Resnick shows, valuable - there has been what some would say is a predictable response: the emergence of scammers, spammers, and thieves bent on manipulating the mob. Call it crowdhacking."

"That’s what’s so wonderful about user generated content sites; it keeps all those fixated males at home with their computers, instead of having them out and about, freaking out the rest of us."

"It was a catastrophic performance, mainly because the blogger required continual correction on points of fact. He thereby illustrated blogging's central characteristic danger. ... You need no competence to join in."

"when a lot of people talk about the wisdom of crowds, they’re thinking of some kind of mystical collective intelligence... some sort of trust that somehow the averaging out of lots of ideas will end up being correct. And I’m a lot more skeptical"

"Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better--teach us--and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys."

"But in practice this equalization is often profoundly anti-democratic, because the assumption is that the man on the street will never be capable of appreciating a Mondrian--or a Poussin--for what it is, on its own terms."

"The glorious thing about the Internet, however, is that it allows us to aggregate the combined stupidity of literally millions of people. ... - now you can actually have the lowest common denominator build your site for you."

"The problem with the anonymous Internet is that services... fail to exercise any of the accountability of traditional news sources, and are happy to be used to spread false information if it results in ad clicks."

Skip all the D.B. and start with the Duncan Watts part: "Things that are popular tend to become more popular still, so that small, possibly random, fluctuations early on can get ‘locked in’ and generate a large difference in popularity over time."

"a political system without the state or bureaucracies, and based instead on randomly selected groups of decision makers. ... These groups,... would deliberate and make decisions about public policies in much the same way that juries reach verdicts"

"The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. ... And recently, there's been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting your children for death. ..."

"Smith-Lovin's research, for example, shows that homophily is on the rise in the United States on nearly every dimension of social identity. Ever larger numbers of people seem to be sealing themselves off in worlds where everyone thinks the way they do."

Leadbeater: "My argument is that these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work."

"Whether as mere conversation starter, discussion referee or assessor of others positions and policies, the editorialist fulfills a function that is even more important as the parties to the public policy discussions expand in number and volume."

"If your visits to the web look like a random selection from an information slag heap or like the pages were chosen by a marketing department, visit your nearest library -- online or offline, the best place for information."

Vacuous; see the StrayPackets post for a damning critique. See comment 11 for effort biases (and compare, say, the Naruto entries with the Sociology entries), and see comment 12 for profound ignorance of what knowledge means.

An all-too common problem, not unique to Wikipedia: "it’s apparent that many of Wikipedia’s supporters value the dynamics of its community more than the credibility of the product they deliver."

"Any news channel that didn't cover JMK 24/7 would have seen its audience defect en masse to a channel that did. Any media star that ignored the story would have seen the public stampede to a competitor who was covering it."

"If I had to offer a philosophy of Networkism, it is that the participation of domain experts in creating articles and debating their deletion increases the quality of the process, and most domain experts will not become core members of the community."

"many defenders... aggressively reject any suggestion that projects like Wikipedia give special rights to expertise... It beggars belief that anyone could seriously think [experts] are no more credible or reliable a source of information than anyone else"

"Even at its best and most ambitious, citizen journalism reads like a decent Op-Ed page, and not one that offers daring, brilliant, forbidden opinions that would otherwise be unavailable. Most citizen journalism ... is proudly minor in its concerns."

"...a view that is echoed by many academics and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions."

"Business owners sometimes gripe that Yelpers ... don't fully explain what bothered them ... or complain about something that's out of the proprietor's control" ... "readers don't know whether a positive posting was encouraged by special treatment."

"The blogosphere gathers together atypical fans and brings them together in what quickly becomes a broadband echo chamber. The louder and more intense the online community gets, the farther it's likely drifting from what is happening offline."

"the bloggers are basing their comments on photos posted on the Web in compressed jpeg form, with little true detail possible." ... "Many bloggers appear ignorant of time-stamping and the fact that photos are often posted on Web sites out of sequence. "

Mass media and blogs are equally prone to hype.

"His hero is the guy without any expertise who can see through the palaver of elites. There's no need to accumulate expertise through years of study or experience, because the Internet has become the great repository of knowledge and experience."

[Critic Kenneth Turan:] "If you wanted to go to a restaurant for a special occasion and someone said, 'Why not go to McDonald's? More people go there than any other place.' Would that really be enough to convince you?"

"It’s currently less important than the death of Pink Floyd guitarist Syd Barrett, or coverage of Zidane’s press coverage, but more important than Bob Novak and the big dig. Where we see a distressing lack of coverage most clearly is amongst political