ChezLark

David Brin has an interesting post in which he argues that the current Internet is missing a vitally important piece — robust mechanisms for separating the wheat from the chaff.

There is a lot of fuss going on about Time Magazine’s decision to put a mirror (framed by a computer screen) on its latest cover and announcing tat the 2006 Person of the Year is… “you.” Which translates as Joe and Jane Public — millions of us — who are starting to flex our cyber-empowered wings and express ourselves as never before.

But… David opines that successful human-organization mechanisms like

[...]markets, science, courts and democracy each have “centripetal vs centrifugal” social phases.
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In science, markets, courts and democracy, the CENTRIFUGAL PHASE is when each individual participant may disperse, find allies/collaborators, and safely organize with others under some degree of protection, in a zone where product can be refined and readied for competitive testing.
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Note that this is the phase that exists now, copiously, in the nascent “fifth arena” of the internet!
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What the cybersphere does NOT have is anything even remotely resembling the CENTRIPETAL phase that also empowers the four older, more mature “arenas.”

What is the centripetal phase? This is where in all of the disparate and dispersed participants in an arena are summoned together by a ritual CALL TO COMBAT. What ensues is a battle - competition - that has transformed ancient human bloody-mindedness into something much more like a game. One in which rules have been laid down to ensure that the outcome of competition correlates at least somewhat with quality of product, and much less with power or influence or other means of cheating.

In science the centripetal competition phase compels researchers to publish papers and present them for criticism. In markets the ritual battleground is retail sales - where customers compare goods and services. In democracy the role is filled by elections, and courts have trials.

Phil Bogle has a follow-on post in which he points out that some nascent “centripetal” mechanisms exist already:

Collaborative filtering sites like Digg do provide a way for better ideas to rise to the top, but their algorithms for selection are hidden and can be gamed or subverted from within.

Likewise, Google has a metric for quality based on sifting through the linking behavior of millions of pages, but this metric is opaque and shifting. Google has mixed motives given that they are also trying to increase their own Adsense revenue and deliver value to shareholders.
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To attempt to complete Brin’s (David’s, not Sergei’s!) thought: There are clearly mechanisms for finding quality on the internet, in some ways uniquely powerful, but not institutions for doing so.

By institutions, I mean systems that have a degree of underlying stability and trustworthiness based on history, checks and balances, transparency, and so forth. Such institutions take a great deal of time to evolve and are at least as much social as technical in nature, often requiring multiple revolutions and upheavals before being solidly established. Perhaps its unrealistic to expect secure institutions of quality and competition would evolve in internet time, even on the internet.

These are great observations. Many people seem to be coming around to the idea that the next significant step forward on the Internet will need to be improved mechanisms for filtering and managing the tidal wave of content being relentlessly created by the masses.