Man Is The Media.
Quantity Vs. Quality. Does The Web Stupify Our Culture?
May 28th, 2009 by Martin
For years I’ve been thinking about quantity and quality on the web. There is so much fixation on quantity and anything you can put a number on. Show me the number of visitors to your site, and I’ll tell you who you are.
Seemingly the beauty of numbers is that they promise comparability across languages, industries and, of course, websites. Investors and banks gets it, newspapers gets it. Those are the two main authorities you want to satisfy to sustain your enterprise; the money and the media. So why care about anything else?
I remember the story told by an old news reporter talking about journalism before there was such a thing as audience ratings. Every time he was done with a program he’d look to his peers for feedback. I imagine he’d get highly constructive feedback from knowledgeable people who’d help him improve the quality of his work. Or maybe they’d all just be patting each others’ shoulders, who knows.
Once the ratings were introduced, the first thing he asked after a show was: How large was my audience? And from that point on his work was more focused on measurable quantity, rather than some diffuse and arguably subjective notion of quality.
Numbers, Numbers, Numbers Everywhere
Today the fixation on quantity is commonplace in almost every aspect of human life. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, they say. How many Facebook friends and Twitter followers do you have? What’s your Google Analytics growth last month? Daily polls tells you how your politicians are doing, how many people believe in God, and how many were killed in traffic. Quantity is everywhere, and without it we couldn’t understand the scope of our culture and where it’s headed. Are the curves going up, stagnant, or perhaps going down?
I had a literature professor who argued that every five years you should throw out your book collection. Because by then you would have advanced to a whole new level of understanding, ready to take on new, more complicated writings. I have great sympathy for that argument, elitist as it may be, but it resonates with the idea of life-long learning: You constantly progress, throughout your entire life.
Cumulative Advantage
Then it really scares me to read about ‘cumulative advantage‘, a phenomenon you see almost everywhere once you start looking for it. It says that…
“if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors”.
It’s also called the ‘Matthew effect’ due to this quote from The Gospel of Matthew:
“For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
Why do some people have many followers on Twitter? Because many people follow them! That’s the almost unbearable, but in part very true, consequence of accumulative advantage. Why was article X read so many times? Because a lot of people read it…
The fixations on quantity is emphasized even more with auto-generated content lists that highlights the most read items on a site. The most ‘dugg’ items on Digg are the ones on the most-dugg-list, despite the algorithms and secret editing that goes on behind the scenes. Everybody digs a success.
Every time you, and millions of connected people on the web, link to something or tweet about something, it’s electronically emphasized. The audience is the new editor. Why do we even need editors? Crowdsource your content! It’s cheaper, faster, and makes the highest number of readers sufficiently happy.
Right?
Numbers Are Not Always The Same
The truth is that numbers can be deceiving, but we use them constantly both out of convenience and habit. When I check out people on Twitter, I first look at how many followers they have. I have no time for complete newbies. Second I look for more qualitative signs: The tweets, the links, the bio, the background image. All of those take time to assess, and draw strongly on my cultural competencies to access.
If I only look at the number of followers, viewers, friends etc., a spambot and a entrepreneurial guru may be rated equal. And I guess I’ve finally arrived at the core of this excessive argument: The very assessment of quantity is as important and culturally challenging as the assessment of quality. And that’s why we should stop substituting quantity for quality by default.
It’s been said that web is making us all more stupid. Despite the access to more information than ever before, it could seem we lack the discipline to consume it all and set up structures that ultimately prevents us from getting smarter. Do you like the most viewed or highest rated videos on YouTube? Probably not, if you are reading this blog at least: your taste is more refined than that of the masses.
What we need is to make the structures smarter themselves. We need to create clever recommendation engines that tailor information for the individual–instead of just showing everyone the stuff that everyone is looking at. Clever semantics instead of dull statistics and brainless keyword matches, please.
And don’t just show me more stuff like the stuff I, and people like me, looked at yesterday. Show me something that makes me just a little bit smarter than yesterday. And yes, we need editors more than ever, although their traditional roles might be changed to what recently was called Web curators (how I like that term!). It may still be about linking, but it’s certainly linking with a mindful conscience.
Going back again to my old literature classes, I remember that quality was never discussed. I asked my professor about this and he said that after many years of studying you could simply just tell the difference: Good literature is like good music; you recognize true quality the second you see or read it.
But first we really need to train those eyes and ears, and we need all the help we can get from the systems that we set up to govern our knowledge.
PS: I do know that ‘stupify’ is not really a word… yet. But perhaps if we all start using it, then some day it’ll catch on and get listed somewhere.
Image credits: Details from Disturbed cover, makers of the hit song ‘Stupify’
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