The Garden

Whether scrambling to find last-minute information for term papers or satisfying some obscure curiosity about pop-culture, most college students have already discovered the web-based encyclopedia Wikipedia as a potential source for information.

Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia, with its collection of over 2 million articles available for free over the Internet, has established a considerable presence within the electronic community. Most Google searches almost always match a Wikipedia link to the searched item, which is suggestive of how prevalent the site has become.

What separates Wikipedia from other encyclopedias is that it allows any registered user to create and edit content on the site. It is primarily this feature that, despite its novelty, has resulted in a number of criticisms from potential users concerning the reliability of the site’s information. Without the benefit of some kind of authoritative check, how can the information be trusted? This concern is a valid one of course because there is no mechanism that guarantees the truth of the site’s content. However, even though this criticism is a good one, it is not necessarily fatal to the site.

In my view, Wikipedia exposes a very interesting question about the relationship between information and its consumers. While it is true that consumers of information desire accuracy from their informational sources, to what extent should the consumer himself be responsible for choosing his information wisely?

The average person acquires his information from a myriad of sources throughout his life and it is questionable how many of those sources are actually reliable. For example, people often believe what their family members and friends tell them without going through the trouble of verifying what was said by some rigorous means. This consequently runs the risk of their being misinformed. In these cases, it is expected that the consumer of the information be shrewd enough to hold their beliefs tentatively. However, when authoritative sources are involved, like large news corporations or prestigious publishers for example, should the level of scrutiny on the part of the consumer be allowed to diminish? Are authoritative sources of information reliable enough to render consumer scrutiny unnecessary? I think the answer here is no.

Even though many individuals and organizations go to great lengths to verify the information they present, there is always a chance of error or bias present that can contaminate the quality of the information. Sometimes the contamination is slight and insignificant, but sometimes it can be quite extreme. As an illustration of the latter, consider the behavior of the Bush administration over the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This was an instance where an authoritative body presented misleading information to the public over a matter of incredible importance. Despite the number of prestigious organizations monitoring the actions of the executive branch, the dubious information nevertheless reached the public and generated support for the administration’s cause. It is in cases such as these that scrutiny over informational sources is most needed.

The greatest danger for consumers of information is the assumption that a source of information can be foolproof. It is in these instances that consumers let their guard down and risk investing too much faith in the prestige and authority of the source. Wikipedia does an interesting service for the consumers of information—it reminds them that the merits of a piece of factual information should always be taken with a grain of salt. This is not say that every source of information is as good as any other, but is to suggest is that the responsibility of information consumption belongs at least as much, if not more so, to the consumer himself as it does the source. The fact that Wikipedia candidly publicizes its potential inaccuracies warrants a high degree of skepticism over the site’s information, but it also reminds us that the same amount of skepticism (maybe more) is warranted for those authoritative sources that claim infallibility.

There’s no doubt about the idea that our physical senses are powerful. We are incredibly adept at interpreting our environment through the five dominant sense organs of our bodies. But, should we take these powerful senses to be the very definition of reality?

The philosophical positions of “materialism” or “physicalism” are strong indicators of the logical extent to which these sense organs can dominate our world-views. These philosophical positions hold that all of reality only includes that which is physically extended in time and space. In other words, what is real is only what we can sensationally detect.

On what basis, though, are we justified in wholly negating the existence of a realm of non-physical reality? Surely it cannot be simply on the assumption that our sense organs are wholly complete “reality-observing” mechanisms. The mere existence of other animals with sense organs far surpassing the range of human perception demonstrates how insufficient our sensory apparatuses are at accounting for the whole of our reality. Why, then, is it nevertheless taken to be self-evident by the majority of the intellectual mainstream that considerations of non-physical realities are unimportant?

The more we seek wholly material explanations for apparently material events, the more we limit ourselves to the entire range of possibilities. What is wanted is a comprehensive understanding about the whole of reality; we want to interact with our realities as fully as possibly. To do this, I suggest we explore more seriously the possibility that there are non-physical realities in existence with which we interact. This theme will be further explored and clarified on this site in the near future. Stay tuned…

Is personal privacy something the general person values today? If the social networking website ‘Facebook’ is any indication, privacy might not be all that important to many people.

According to Facebook’s own website statistics, the site has more than 57 million active users, with an average of 250,000 new registrations per day since January of 2007. With so many people using the site, I believe it is worthwhile to consider what impact Facebook might have on the perception of privacy.

As most college students already know, Facebook is a networking program that allows users to create and share personal profiles over the internet. These profiles can include information such as demographics, educational background, interests, sexual orientation, political views, religious beliefs and photographs. This information is voluntarily disclosed by the site’s users and can be viewed anonymously by other Facebook users.

In addition to the basic profile features, Facebook also offers communication applications such as “The Wall” that make it possible to send and receive messages from others that are publicly displayed on the user’s profile page. In this way, not only does Facebook publicize a person’s individual characteristics, it also publicizes that person’s interpersonal relationships for other users to view anonymously.

On the face of it, the use of these features may seem innocuous because, for the most part, only people who know each other will be viewing each others’ profiles. In fact, Facebook offers privacy controls that allow users to limit both their viewable content and who can see their complete profiles. However, since the primary purpose of the site is to share personal information, most users are likely to keep their privacy settings low—especially since the low settings are the default (requiring user’s to take the initiative to protect their privacy). My opinion is that, regardless of who actually ends up viewing a person’s profile, there are psychological consequences to the voluntary disclosure of personal information within a medium whose primary purpose is to share that information publicly.

The central psychological consequence of concern to me is that individuals might become accustomed to living their private lives publicly. Instead of valuing their individual thoughts, beliefs and feelings as part of their private personal property, these psychological commodities, when donated to the public sphere so readily, lose their element of personal significance to the individual. Even though the volunteering of personal information on Facebook is for entertainment reasons, the feeling of knowingly being monitored by anonymous viewers can still erode one’s appreciation for privacy in other areas.

For example, in recent years the concern over terrorism has given rise to many aggressive acts by intelligence and security agencies to probe increasingly deeper into the personal spheres of citizens’ lives. Without a strong appreciation for personal privacy, the general public is less likely to challenge such invasive attempts by authorities and will likely relinquish the details of their personal lives without concern.

Additionally, surveillance technologies such as phone tapping and video recording have made the issue of privacy even more pressing because the act of monitoring has become more ubiquitous and anonymous. Even when the average citizen is aware that they are likely being monitored, they do not necessarily know where, how or by whom. This sort of situation, at its most extreme, can be compared to the Big Brother apparatus described in the novel 1984 where personal privacy is completely annihilated.

As a person who happens to value personal privacy, I believe Facebook users ought to be more careful about how much information they communicate through their profile pages. As surveillance technology evolves (along with the motivation to use it) individual privacy will be continually challenged. The first step in preserving privacy is to resist voluntarily disclosing it in public forums. And nowhere is this more pronounced than in the internet forum Facebook.