Transparency alone does not create objectivity; instead, transparency shifts the onus of analysis from the filter to the end-reader. The role of the “credentialed commentator” changes, but it doesn’t die: and it’s the opportunity that “journalism” has yet to understand or leverage.

Why? Attention, not information, is the scarce resource. Greater transparency inundates us with information and content, leading to declining marginal benefits from increased information. Individuals and organizations that create context and relevance will be the real arbiters of authority and attention.

Alan Patrick, in Transparency is the new social media Panacea?, points to a post by David Weinberger, Transparency is the new objectivity:

In the Age of Links, we still use credentials and rely on authorities. Those are indispensible ways of scaling knowledge, that is, letting us know more than any one of us could authenticate on our own. But, increasingly, credentials and authority work best for vouchsafing commoditized knowledge, the stuff that’s settled and not worth arguing about. At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did.

But as Alan points out, transparency does not necessarily create objectivity:

What is true is that Transparency reduces the transaction costs of getting the data, and in theory then allows more resources to be spent on the analysis – but it does not in and of itself create objective information. In order to create Information from Data, what is still required is energy and effort input into the system, and to be objective that energy and effort has to come from an objective source, and it needs to be rewarded for objectivity.

My concern with this model is that it makes the implicit assumption that the Social Media cycle – links to 3rd parties, wisdom of crowds and/or friends, whatever – provides that input of energy and effort. But, as Procter implies above, the people inputting the effort into such a system have (not necessarily transparent) agendas of their own, and are thus systemically unlikely to be objective.

Thus the onus is thrust on the end-reader – who in most cases does not have the time or interest to read every commentator, follow back every link etc. Thus they will still need the role of the “Trusted Editor” – the function that aggregates the inputs, prunes the cr*p, simplifies and structures the data to provide information, and then distributes it in a trusted form. That function does not disappear. Transparency and Social Media systems just move it along the value chain a bit.

So far the “New Media” has not exactly set the world ablaze with its increased objectivity – all we seem to have got is a massively increased number of mutually contradictory non-objective sources. The credentialed commentator role may shift, but still retains importance as they take the load off the end reader.

Spot on. My comment:

And it’s not just about social media: for example, what did we learn from the SEC regulations in the USA requiring more disclosure of corporate financial information to the public? More information, more details, thousands and thousands of pages of raw data, unstructured, unmonitored, unread. The signs of collapse lost in the clutter, the sea of data making it too hard for anyone to truly understand and piece together. Transparency killed analysis.

Will the call for transparency evolve into the demand for “structured transparency”?
Transparency creates context, but context is expensive: hard to create, hard to learn, hard to distribute.

Me, from Nov 2008, about information, interactions, and creating context:

Content [information] is expensive to filter: false positives add to the noise as we simultaneously mistakenly discard valuable signals. Strict rules-based systems for managing interaction can be expensive to manage. We have to listen to both sides to balance out the debate, to understand the biases, to pick out what people are actually saying. Education takes time.

… Transparency does not create context on its own: it increases the amount of available meta-information, but processing transparency and the intentions behind our biases and actions remains an art, not a science.

This is the reality we face today. But can technology and society evolve to deliver on the promise of social media, transparency and the power of context?

Or put another way, can nuanced discourse compete against “strategy by soundbite”?

Simplified strategies that can be condensed and packaged into soundbites spread into society’s collective conscious and accepted wisdom far faster than nuanced, complex ideas under the economics of today’s media.

… It’s impossible for everyone to understand every part of every debate: heuristics and stereotypes are a fundamental necessity for people to process information and create knowledge. Information overload is not a new issue; in fact, as individuals we have always lived in a state of information overload even though as a society we find ways to adapt to higher levels of data and increased rates of transmission throughout the world. Supply and demand change to establish new equilibriums between content and context.

Back to David:

Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness. Why should we trust what one person — with the best of intentions — insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?

Which makes me think: can a shift in demand reshape the economics of media?

While the clamor for heuristics, stereotypes and easy answers isn’t new, if we demand thoughtful discourse and nuanced answers can we reshape the economics of media?

… When easy answers sell, polarized positions become good business strategies and nuanced thought loses out.

But need these always be dominant strategies?

Social relevance is the arbiter of authority.
Mere transparency soon won’t be enough to prove objectivity, grant authority and allocate attention, instead, we will come to demand “structured transparency” and social relevance.

In a world where we all know that it is possible to hide information in the web, mere transparency could be perceived as an attempt to hide something, to make it too expensive for the public to dig through the readily available public information to find the needles in the haystack. Perhaps we will demand “structured transparency” (i.e. structured data) as proof of our objectivity and intentions.

But it won’t stop there: as we are inundated with information, we will be forced to create methods for filtering and consuming information. We will demand context that we can trust.

Algorithms alone won’t be enough; “abdicating aggregation” by depending solely on people won’t be enough; combining the two to create personal social relevancy will be an absolute necessity for us to efficiently allocate our online and offline attention, time and resources and deal with the cultural and economic pressures of the real-time web. Social relevance will grant (and revoke) authority and credentials and direct resources and attention in a more fluid, natural and powerful way than the filters of yesterday.

The traditional media industry, one beholden to the idea of “Journalism”, has yet to truly understand this shift and develop methods to leverage this opportunity. Information is no longer scare; in a world where attention is the scare resource, over-abundance of information is the pressure that will force us to adjust, to innovate, to develop multiple models for creating and disseminating information to fit our variety of cultures, styles, methods and use cases.

Noise is inevitable; give up on the false hope for a solution that “ends” the problem of filtering the overabundance of content.

Instead, accept the noise, test different approaches and how much time you want to spend, judge their impact on your life and career, find your equilibrium, refine your sources and approaches as the mediums evolve, and be happy.

Accept this as the latest example of how humans create and stress systems to their breaking points, forcing us to innovate, creating new systems for us to stress to new breaking points through the never-ending cycles of creative destruction and construction.

How will we move forward? Call me naively hopeful, but I believe that more humanity in capitalism is a step in the right direction.

—

(links in this post via Alan Patrick, Ethan Bauley and Diana Kimball)

—

Updated 7/20
A friend of mine replied via email with a strongly worded, but spot on, reply, taking me to task for the original title “Social relevance will be the arbiter of authority and attention” and the impression it creates that “social relevance” is anything new.

In fact, it’s not, as my friend rightly pointed out. I expressed it poorly, but “social relevance” is not a new concept, and it’s not limited to online social networks, or online tools, or even the Internet; instead, it refers to the broader online and offline connections in our worlds. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don’t, but they both matter in their own way, used for different needs, different decisions, different sources of information and judgment.

Updated 8/10
I often write overly-confusing titles, thus I find I often need to return to the scene of the crime to clear up my ideas; replaced the title “Social relevance is the arbiter of authority and attention.” with “Transparency isn’t enough; Social relevance is the true arbiter of authority and objectivity.”