http://internetcredibility.org/articles … eople.html
This is a great little article and it really makes em think. Although the question might should be more like 'what can we do to make users want to make credibility mandatory' which we may be able to do by showing them how much better the internet could be.
Written by Brett
Over the last 15 years or so, I've watched the internet explode from nerdy obscurity into the every day life of billions of people all around the world. This has been a growth spurt of unprecedented proportions, changing our lives and culture in such a manner as to be incomprehensible just a few decades ago. This makes me wonder who is in control of this phenomenon?
Simply put, no one person or organization literally controls the internet. It's simply too big to be controlled. Which leads me to ask what is in control of the internet? Is it regulatory organizations? Is it the government? No, not really. Again, the internet is simply too big to be controlled by these entities. But something has to be giving the internet direction in evolving from simple HTML websites ten years ago to the much more sophisticated social media sites of today, right?
I submit the internet is controlled by the will of its users. It's fairly obvious, actually. The websites or services on the internet that people like thrive and ones they have no use for simply fade away into stagnate digital nothingness.
My question is, how can we make evaluating the credibility of resources on the internet be at the forefront of the internet user's mind? How can we make demanding high credibility the will of the people? Can we show them how the internet would evolve if its users demanded that its information be credible? What would this do to the fraudulent, corrupt or criminal websites? Wouldn't it vastly improve the usefulness of the internet?
So I ask you: How can we get a credible internet to become the will of the people?
Well, I don't think there's any real need to make internet credibility the will of the people; I think it's already there. Rather, in order to make the internet more credible, I think that there needs to be more tools available to make the evaluation of credibility easier.
Don't you think that if we're forcing internet credibility onto the will of the people then we may be doing something wrong? You say that the internet is given direction by the will of the people, well then shouldn't we allow the will of the people to naturally continue to evolve? If we ram internet credibility down the internet users' throats, isn't that perverting the natural course of the internet?
Not at all. I don't propose forcing any thing onto any one. In fact, I'm a firm believer in a free, open internet. I do propose showing the average internet user the importance of establishing the credibility of any resource on the internet. How this ultimately affects the will of the people, I cannot say. I do believe that internet credibility is in fact immensely important and am confident that allowing internet users to see this will eventually alter the will of the people to demand higher credibility from internet resources.BJM wrote:
Don't you think that if we're forcing internet credibility onto the will of the people then we may be doing something wrong? You say that the internet is given direction by the will of the people, well then shouldn't we allow the will of the people to naturally continue to evolve? If we ram internet credibility down the internet users' throats, isn't that perverting the natural course of the internet?
Well this is what I was getting at in my original post. Showing is great. Forcing is very bad.BJM wrote:
Don't you think that if we're forcing internet credibility onto the will of the people then we may be doing something wrong? You say that the internet is given direction by the will of the people, well then shouldn't we allow the will of the people to naturally continue to evolve? If we ram internet credibility down the internet users' throats, isn't that perverting the natural course of the internet?
Obviously showing is better than forcing. I'm fairly confident that the author didn't mean force and I think he clearly conveyed that in the article. This doesn't seem to be the tyoe of site that forces anything on folks. In fact, it seems like a reasonably open forum, just needs more participation.Star Chaser wrote:
Well this is what I was getting at in my original post. Showing is great. Forcing is very bad.BJM wrote:
Don't you think that if we're forcing internet credibility onto the will of the people then we may be doing something wrong? You say that the internet is given direction by the will of the people, well then shouldn't we allow the will of the people to naturally continue to evolve? If we ram internet credibility down the internet users' throats, isn't that perverting the natural course of the internet?