Edge devotes its latest symposium to how humans will process information in the current era. Tyler Cowen’s latest book speaks to that issue, but he is nowhere to be found on the symposium. Still, I believe that Nick Bilton does a pretty fair Tyler imitation.
I, feel the same comfort from a pack of informavores rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show…
Every moment of our day revolves around the idea of telling stories. So why should a select group of people in the world be the only ones with a soapbox or the keys to the printing press to tell their stories? Let everyone share their information, build their communities, and contribute to the conversation.
READER COMMENTS
agnostic
Nov 2 2009 at 2:47pm
It doesn’t seem so much a problem of who gets to tell the stories — though more people is certainly better (with rapidly diminishing returns) — but what incentives the story-tellers have to get it right.
Without proper incentives, we have 2 million rather than 2 hundred clowns passing on what their crystal ball reveals.
There has to be some way to turn this into a betting market. Or at least make it costly to vote on an idea, webpage, news item, etc. — say, give the informavores a small and fixed number of votes per week. Suddenly they think twice about voting for a webpage because they’re forced to think about the opportunity cost of that vote.
(Split the group of informavores into 7 equal sub-groups, and renew each one’s vote basket on separate days of the week. This avoids people voting too much on items that appear earlier in the week, or being too stingy earlier in the week and holding out until the end, spending the left-overs on uninteresting stories.)
That’s fine for things that don’t have a right or wrong to them. But for things that do, we need something closer to betting markets.
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