Like It and It Becomes True. Or Not
A real-life example: Milan, spring 2012, a social media event with 200 participants from the city and its surroundings. The issue discussed is very current: social media are threats or opportunities for companies? The speakers start their rounds. A slide is immediately striking. It's an infographic showing what happens on the web every 60 seconds: more than 600 videos uploaded on YouTube, for more than 25 hours of viewing; more than 98,000 tweets; over 695,000 status updates on Facebook; more than 1,500 posts on blogs and the like. An image that keeps the listener glued to the speaker. But there is one crucial detail: there is no source listed. From the audience comes the question: "Where did you get this image?". After an embarassed clearing of the throat, the speaker replies: "From the web, I don't recall exactly where, but I can send you the link later".
This is a concrete example of bad usage of the web and social media. An experienced online marketer, while trying to give a captivating angle to his presentation, overlooked substance for effect. He resorted to catchy infographics without previously investigating on the quality of the information shown. The image in question is very popular and those who deal with social media are bound to stumble on it. But in none of the 160,000 online citations are the data sources made explicit.
The message that this episode conveys is very simple: when we speak about user-generated content, quality does not always match quantity. To the contrary, it's the high quantity that increases the likelihood of running into low-quality content. This kind of risk is effectively described by US essayist Nicholas Carr, according to whom user-generated content and its diffusion on the web have but consolidated and spread a sort of mass ignorance.
To avoid stumbling upon mass ignorance when searching online content, two aspects must be considered. Firstly, although all users have the possibility to participate in the diffusion of information, only a small share of Internet users actually contribute to the creation of online content. This empirical phenomenon is defined as participation inequality. Secondly, those same tools that enable users to publish low-quality content give also the possibility of enabling a sort of collective control on web information.
As we highlight in our recent book Comunicare 2.0. Lavorare con gli strumenti del nuovo Web [Communication 2.0: Working with new web tools], the principle of participation inequality stiputlates that we can focus on a tiny slice of users when searching for quality information, among the mass of 2 billion Internet users. Once these sources of information and knowledge are located, search should always be geared towards them, be they blogs or corporate websites. What's important is that standards of accuracy, reasonableness, credibility and confirmability are met.
The principle of social control counters mass ignorance because it limits the diffusion of low-quality content. The number of likes and feedback grades are proxies of the credibility of a given post, but you need to delve in more deeply, if the intended use of the informational resource is for professional or scientific purposes. That way, at least you can avoid uncomfortable questions.