This particular piece of slow food for thought on a very current theme came via our ‘friends’ at Facebook – a source we are finding increasingly, and surprisingly, useful for navigating both the ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ of ‘the now’. What drew our attention was not only the post on ‘Wiki-PR’, but also the accompanying commentary by Kelly Grotke bringing in Nietzsche. And since it is our genuine pleasure to encounter in Facebook a social theorists besides Marx or Zizek (slight exaggeration, but we think you, dear reader, will get our gist!), we felt the need to dig deeper. So please find below first a few quotes from the recent great article from fellow bloggers at the Motherboard on how PR companies are gradually taking over the”world’s go-to resource for information”, as well as a great quote from the essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873) by Friedrich Nietzsche. Is the era of ‘free’ information over only so shortly after the ‘information revolution’, or did it ever exist in the first place? Thanks Allegra friend Kelly Grotke for the inspiration! (And a clever reader will note that contrary to Allegra habits, all the links to theorist profiles take you directly to – Wikipedia!).
‘Is Wikipedia for Sale? The not-so-free-encyclopaedia’ by Martin Robbins
“According to James Hare, head of Wikimedia’s DC regional affiliate, “what makes the Wiki-PR case especially heinous” is the way their blatant reputational whitewashing demeans and frustrates the work of the Wikipedia community. “It’s how their success to date was made possible,” he claims. “I have worked with organizations that had an interest in improving content on Wikipedia related to their work. I and my colleagues at Wikimedia DC consistently advise: be transparent about who you are and who you work for. Wiki-PR acted in gross violation of this basic community expectation, and I regret that volunteer administrators will have to clean up after them.”
The impact of this could be profound. Wikipedia is the world’s go-to resource for information on everything from the Boer War to fifth-season episodes of Buffy. Its reputation rests on the trust people have in its content, a trust that PR firms are degrading even as they attempt to mine it for their clients. We all know that the site is open to abuse, but until now its unique community of editors have prevailed. With ever more pages and more sophisticated ways to attack the site, however, their efforts are increasingly stretched. In a few years, a significant percentage of Wikipedia’s content could be spam.”
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873) by Friedrich Nietzsche
“Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself — in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity — is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see “forms.” ”
Image from http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/is-wikipedia-for-sale
