When I was a college teacher, I was an early adopter of Internet technology in the classroom, inspired by Al Gore’s Scientific American article. At the time, most academic writing consisted of gathering quotes from books and journal articles and stitching them together into a research paper. Networked computing, I hoped, would allow students to construct information rather than merely cutting and pasting data. And when this approach worked, it worked well. In the pre-Mosaic days, I had my students participate in USENET for their research. I showed them how they could find a poster’s email address to contact them for further research. One student writing a paper about the the 1991 Haitian coup d’etat incorporated contemporary soc.haiti posts from actual freedom fighters — a perspective she couldn’t have found in any book or journal at the time.
We also used the Web in the early days (with the CERN line mode browser), but the Web’s document retrieval heritage means that even today, it is more suitable for finding data than creating information.
Social media, hypothetically, should remedy this problem, but as we’ve learned from Russia’s orchestrated intrusion into the 2016 election, it’s easy to create disinformation, and even easier to spread it, and a piece of cake to deny it ever existed.
I think the key to combating falsehoods in the Trumpian post-truth age is to encourage active (i.e. critical) participation rather than passive responses such as Likes and Shares of fraudulent memes. The WWW Foundation’s Contract for the Web includes the principle of “being active citizens of the Web” with the following steps:
a. Creating awareness amongst peers regarding threats to the open Web.
b. Opposing the Web’s weaponization by nation states or any other entity.
c. Supporting organizations, processes and people who promote the open Web.
d. Supporting startups and established companies that espouse the Web’s future as a basic right and public good.
e. Engaging political representatives and companies to ensure support and compliance with this Contract and support for the open Web. https://contractfortheweb.org/principles/principle-9-fight-for-the-web/
I’m not an expert on infrastructure, but it seems to me that we should address the issue of disinformation as soon and as thoroughly as possible before we reach a point of no return.
