My main point of reflection from Wesch’s Youtube video, Information R/evolution, are digital “shelves.” Even here in this blog I find myself sorting information into categories: Activities, Reading Reflections, and Tasks. Although I can (and frequently) provide hyperlinks between categories to link them, fundamentally I still use the category system. This can extend to other places of the internet, such as Reddit with its various subreddits.
That said, I also look at Youtube. Rather than categories/themes of videos, its main page is now uncategorized videos (for example, the most recent version of my front page is a mixture of the following themes: Taiwanese politics, Taiwanese variety shows, anime, video games, science, and videos on the printing press. The last item on the list was most likely due to my recent interactions with videos associated with this course causing the Youtube algorithm to push similar videos to me. The lack of “shelves,” combined with an algorithm designed to maximize engagement that pushes a constant stream of different videos that one might be interested in, is also a major issue, with major negative consequences outlined in documentary videos such as The Great Hack of The Social Dilemma.
One quote in the video at around the 3:24 mark, “together we create more information than the experts,” is also a major issue in the current internet landscape. Previous fringe groups such as flat earthers and moon landing conspiracists are creating content on the internet, gaining more followers that end up with alternative concepts in areas of knowledge such as science and history. As another example with unvetted contributions to the internet, a study done in 2018 shows that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” “it took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1500 people,” and ” falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.”
Along the same vein, having more contributors to things such as Wikipedia is problematic as well. While typically Wikipedia editors are quick to catch and edit falsehoods, there is that instance of a Chinese woman posing as someone with a Ph. D. in world history and created 200 Chinese Wikipedia articles that provided fictional accounts of Russian history over a decade.