In the context of the Wikipedia debate, Clay asserted that trust and authority are social facts. What is worth your attention is increasingly a social fact as well.
Part of the debate is really just media literacy in an evolving landscape, but it also centers on the institutionalization of authority. Institutionalism in sociology holds, as the name implies, that institutions shape our social fabric greater than any other factor. What may be new is the pace at which greater connectivity develops and challenges institutions.
The curious thing about trust, though, is that it is a social fact, a fact that is only true when people think it is true. Social facts are real facts, and have considerable weight in the world….Ebay has become trustworthy over time because the social fact of its trustworthiness grew with the number of successful transactions and with its ability to find and rectify bad actors…Like trustworthiness, authority is a social fact, though authorities often want to obscure this. A PhD is an authority figure because we all agree that the work that goes into getting a doctorate (itself a social fact) is a legitimate source of authority.
So, under what conditions might the Wikipedia become a kind of authority, based on something other than authorship or brand? And the answer to that question, I think, is when enough people regard it as trustworthy, where the trust is derived from the fact that many eyes have viewed a particular article.
Perhaps the neutral point of view ethic of Wikipedia may make attention a viable indicator, but as Clay goes on to explore, other dimensions such as edits and longevity may be better proxies for trust. Andrew Lih revealed edits are the most reliable metric (pdf). But as Wikipedia is increasingly cited, putting aside if it should be or not, metrics for citation networks will have increasing relevancy.
Wikis and blogspace have different approaches for determining what is important. In blogspace, links guide attention which can accrete authority. But controversy and error draws attention and can disinflate authority. This is in stark contrast with wikis, where the goal of your writing is to be ignored — to write for permanence in future edits rather than attention to your Permalink.
Like trust and authority, importance is a social fact. What I think is important (like this post) really does not make it so, but when others do it becomes a social fact. Not fact as in true, but as in worth other’s time and attention.
Mary Hodder muses on information overload and attention management:
One thing I observe is how people who are younger seem to take in smaller, more granular bits of information, as though they are rocks skimming across a lake, touching down briefly for a bit of information before the next lift off to the next dip for something…. Kind of like a statistical survey where a study of 30 random items is conducted from a much larger corpus of data.
In a survey of 30, because of statistics theory and study, it is assumed that samples of that size give a decent portrayal of what the larger group is doing, even if that group is in the thousands. So those I see who are more immersed in the internet, tending to be younger though they all are not, who are breathing it, with far less anxiety than those who tend to be older, seem to do so by just skimming and surveying…
She is absolutely right that one of the better tactics for dealing with information overload is not fully processing every message you come across. It used to be you could, because message volume was lower. It used to be you had to, because of social norms. Perhaps today what is important is less of a personal decision, a collective reponse to overload.
One of the virtues of messages in your aggregator over your inbox is that there is less risk of skimming over something important. Someone else will write and link to it to bring it to your/our attention. All with a pull-model of attention management.
Email norms have changed from correspondance to negotiating attention. Its more common to resend a message when you do not receive an anticipated reply. When you can’t fully process a message, you can cop-out by responding with a partial reply that begs the sender to ping you again. Meanwhile, you can’t opt-out of occupational spam without feeding an unsubscribe war. Strong search decreases initial processing requirements, making email even more asynchronous to save us time.
IM’s attention demanding qualities, interruption tax and poor presence are in the short term being hailed as an attention-getter above the overload. The strength of this approach is they synchonous negotiation of attention (on phone, brb), but while its easy to escalate to real-time, de-escalation is not a feature. IRC at least enables group signaling of attention and more passive participation.
Wiki collaboration, the most asynchronous of modalities, enables a shared Outbox approach where all attention is a social negotiation. Messages of merit rise to the top of Recent Changes with each edit. As people organize the space for their own benefit, the links they create guide the group. Because it is a shared resource, group memory aids message discovery. With email integration, a message can be effortlessly shared with a group for processing. When coupled with RSS and user-controlled email notifications, a pull-model of attention further fights overload.
Both media selection theory (where old modalities don’t die) and the institutionalization of modalities may not take hold because of the cost of information overload. Soon every employee may have mandated feeds to consume, but the norm that prevails is the ability to skip a message in personal processing and rely on groups to merit attention. Messages are by definition social. The difference is that more modalities afford many-to-many interaction, tag and elicit metadata as byproduct of use and provide signaling and indexes for attention.
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