Improving the Online Signal to Noise Ratio: Rumors of the Internet-driven Death of Culture are Highly Exaggerated

I first learned about signal to noise ratio when I was back in engineering
school.  I decided to pursue an electrical engineering education through
my love of music, which manifest itself in years of piano lessons and a
fascination with top-of-the-line audio gear.

I learned that in recorded music, "signal" is the part you want to
hear, and noise is all the other unintended stuff.  In the days of vinyl records and magnetic audio tape
this generally meant background hiss, and the snap crackle and pop sounds
caused by record scratches.   In audio technology, the goal was
always to boost signal and reduce noise, or improve S / N, ratio hence the introduction
of Dolby and DBX noise reduction systems.

I thought of this while reading an ironic post on the AlwaysOn blog.
It is ironic because the author contributes to the very issue he rants about –
excessive online noise and shrill opinion.  Moreover he voices his
opinions through the very medium that he complains about.

In an AlwaysOn blog post titled: "Mindles Crap: Blogs, Vlogs, etc." David Scott Lewis writes about a NY Times article that references a book in which the author deplores the user generated content and blogging crazes and blames these trends on nothing less than "killing our culture."

I tend not to be a flamer but this was too good to resist, and were the
information from less reputable sources I would probably let it go.

Scott Lewis writes:

It’s a great article and guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of many Web
2.0 / Second Life / Digg /YouTube /Twitter /MySpace / Facebook / StumbleUpon Jihadists —
the fanatics and extremists and self-anointed elitists of everything Web 2.0. 
"Fools" would be an appropriate synonym.

The article in the Times is titled, "The Cult of the Amateur" and is
based upon the  book by Andrew Keen with the same name and with the sub-title, "How Today’s Internet
is Killing Our Culture."

I don’t consider myself a "Web 2.0 Jihadist," although as a communications professional I am intrigued by the implications and effects (both positive and negative) of Web 2.0 on public discourse and information.

Scott Lewis continues:

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is
superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis,
shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.”  This is what happens, he
suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob
rule.”

For one thing, Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd
is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, George
W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney
Spears.” The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created
the disastrous Tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th
century.

Uh, OK – so we sometimes get it wrong.  The folly of crowds is the flip
side of the wisdom of crowds. However
tulip mania was hundreds of years ago and the dot bomb preceded Web 2.0. I am really not sure what he is trying to say
here. Why not argue against democracy
itself?  Scott Lewis derides "self appointed elitists" but this
passage smacks of elitism. It seems
obviously slanted to favor the heretofore information gatekeepers, e.g.
research organizations, historians and MSM.

Although crowds are not always necessarily wiser, Web 2.0 gives us more
dots to connect, by empowering almost anyone to contribute to a topic, and more
people to participate in connecting the dots. In this way it can perhaps even mitigate mob mentality and bubbles.

Because Web 2.0 celebrates the “noble amateur” over the expert,
and because many search engines and Web sites tout popularity rather than
reliability, Mr. Keen notes, it’s easy for misinformation and rumors to
proliferate in cyberspace.

Disinformation is the flip side of freeing up information flow. Would Scott Lewis and Keen prefer to put the lid on
free and easy exchange of info? All but
the densest of us – e.g. the ones who actually respond to email Spam – know
that you must consider the source, not just on the Web but especially there.

People turn to those whose opinions and information they have learned to
trust and respect, even if not among the traditional information gatekeepers. And the better search engines, certainly
Google included, factor credibility in their rankings. Other sites, like TechMeme do a good job of
filtering out the noise.

For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the
idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of
the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin
as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the
best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity,
and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their
“own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.

This is an absolute hoot and I am
not sure if Scott Lewis / Keen are being serious here.  It seems like the point is that history and
journalism were the bastions of pristine and unbiased information before the
blogosphere came along.

True, the new world of unmediated
media sometimes throws off more heat than light, and ill- informed opinions can
see the light of day and occasionally dominate debate.

At the same time, let’s not forget the potential of these new tools to
"out" misinformed posers and enable debate, collaboration, and the furtherance of discussion and evolution
of ideas.

The rest is a bit rambling as Lewis
expands on his analysis of the Keen and NY Times piece with some additional  own
ideas. And here we actually
find some common ground.

I started this post with a
discussion of S / N ratios and an interesting area that is ripe for further
development is how to boost the S / N ratio on the Web.  How do we filter out the noise,
evaluate information, and a source’s reputation and credibility?

Scott discusses some of the
techniques used by scholarly research databases, for example ISI’s Web of Science makes it
possible to consider the influence and credibility of a source by allowing
users to track and analyze author citation histories (I mentioned this in
my post Power Searching for PR Professionals). There are some other ideas worth consideration presented as well.

And then there are times when,
absolutely, you just need to put that mouse down and go and get a professional
opinion. David Carr relates in a June NY Times piece (Call the Doctor) in a much less bombastic way his own experiences with illness, and how in trying to do some research about a controversial drug online, threw in the towel and went back to his doctors, because he found "everything, except insight" online.  He closes: "This Wednesday, I will see my endocrinologist. We will chat for a few
minutes… and no doubt he’ll smile when I entertain him
with all that I have learned on the Web. Then after he tells me what he thinks, I will follow my doctor’s order."