wacktivists

I like that word a lot ;)

There's a short blurb in the New Yorker this week that's worth looking at, especially because our next topic is social software.

The article is about Wikipedia (hence "Wacktivists") and the use that certain political candidates (primarily the two men who were running for senate from New Jersey) made of their Wikipedia entries.

Some of the hijinks are pretty funny--certain entries have at times been changed to read: "He funny looking" (apparently grammar isn't a forte) or to report that a candidate lives in "Flatt Butt, Nebraska, with his husband, Joe."

But a lot of it is a discussion of how the ugliness and mud-slinging of the political arena--normally confined to the airwaves--is spilling over onto the web. If politicians love to swing their records to suit the moment, what better venue than a self-edited page on Wikipedia, available to every interesed voter with an internet connection? And if the truth, at least the publicly available truth, can be so easily modified, how can one become reasonably well-informed as a voter?

This sort of goes hand in hand with some of the issues raised regarding social software in the Many to Many blog we've been assigned--vandalism, supposed accuracy, the fall out from the sort of free-for-all that open collaboration entails. It sort of goes back to a lot of the questions we've been talking about before--it's related to some of the stuff Oz has had to say recently, and some of which I raised in a post on pacing--about the relationship between reality and the web--more specifically, about who takes credit and, eventually, who takes responsibility for what's out there and whether or not it's the truth.