Why the Web Has Updated Overarching Reithian Philosophy
By Andrew Sparrow
The wisdom of crowds is the new educator for society. Discuss. In the 1920s John Reith, the BBC’s founding father had a vision for an independent public broadcast service to educate, inform and entertain the whole nation.
In many ways paternalism has been the overarching theme for the media and for 80 years that philosophy has remained largely unchallenged. It was easy to maintain control since the means of media distribution was exclusively in the hands of the broadcasters.
So what’s changed? The internet, that’s what.
Terms like User Generated Content have crept into the language. Online video and blogs now pervade available bandwidth. If you want to access the world the broadsheets and highly professional television-radio news media, have an ever diminishing grasp on the role of communicators.
If you desire information which might safely be relied upon in terms of veracity your choice is more and more restricted. You’d have to really make an effort to limit your exposure only to the quality press. One can gain insight into lands and political struggles far away on world service channels like CNN but the numbers of viewers of such programmes is a fraction of the online community.
Is it so bad that elitism has been brutally pushed aside by the individual empowering force of online networks. Democracy is surely served by the freedom to participate and voice opinion on any subject of your choosing. Publishing in its widest sense should not be the sole preserve of the intelligentsia.
Individuals act selfishly but in fact as a collective society we’re all unwitting instruments of a greater force in human affairs – change and the era’s which define a generation. If we take as our lead the wisdom of masses displayed on a million websites will that more accurately reflect an epoch or simply quell progress through a want of insight?
If you use the web today you can find information on every experience.
The problem is an increasing amount of it is the meandering thought of the naive. There is no proportionate weight given to the statements so freely expressed.
You’ll find more content on the web perpetuated by the conspiracy theorists and fantasists than can ever be matched by the responsible media. You’d conclude that Diana was murdered by security forces rather than losing her life for lack of a seatbelt.
United Flight 93 was a drone and not a passenger aircraft containing ordinary people caught up in a terrifying ordeal. No amount of logic can assuage the beliefs of the unreasoned online protagonists who are afforded huge influence because of the internet.
The risk is if that becomes the predominant message then it’s entirely possible that the next generation will be characterised by an inability to distinguish between what is credible and what is crazed.
The wisdom of crowds or Reith’s stated duty to inform? You choose.
Andrew Sparrow is founder and principal lawyer with Lecote Solicitors, the new media, internet and IT niche law firm. He can be contacted at andrewsparrow@lecote.com
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