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Dean's message: Truth in the age of the Internet
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BART NAGEL PHOTO
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I recently heard about a couple shopping through consumer magazines for a clothes washer. They selected a top-rated national brand but changed their minds after finding Internet pages full of complaints about a mildew problem with the door seal. While at the store to make their purchase, they ran into a salesman representing the maligned brand and asked about the problem. “You know,” he said, “we had a problem with that model a few years ago. But we recalled all the units, fixed it, and haven’t had one complaint since. We just can’t get those pages off the Web!”
The Internet has given new meaning to the words caveat emptor.
By a wide range of estimates, the one billion pages brought to you by the World Wide Web increase by one new page every four seconds. Recent studies show that only 40 percent of those pages are updated weekly, with 23 percent in the dotcom domain updated daily.
We love the Internet. It increases productivity and improves communications. About 66 percent of American adults use it for everything from paying bills to purchasing goods in a single click. Exciting developments happen daily in wildly creative blogs and peer-to-peer networks. How did we ever live without it?
The Web was built by data-sharing scientists on the venerable principle of open access. But the sheer volume of conflicting information, further degraded by valueless and outdated data, now threatens to become just so much white noise. People have already begun to tune out.
Even worse, the Web has engendered a new breezy attitude about manipulating data that’s spilling over into every medium. We casually turn Gene Kelly into a hip-hop dancer, smear presidential candidates of both parties, and propagate "facts" that even lead nations to war.
Cybersaturation is blurring the lines between data and information, between knowledge and truth. The Web is also vulnerable to single powerful forces that could commandeer it for their own economic or political purposes. We are losing our framework of trust.
We can’t solve this problem, but we can raise a question: Are there tools and services that we could create to help users gauge the reliability of data found on the Web? Filters that could detect derivative information, even when the author tries to camouflage the source? Algorithms that could synthesize "objective" searches on a given subject?
Of course, the first step for careful consumers and caring citizens is judicious use. Vint Cerf says, “There are no electronic filters that separate truth from fiction.” But, as a responsible engineer, I’d like to see us try. I welcome your thoughts at dean.forefront@coe.berkeley.edu.
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