The Objective of Neutrality

In Weinberger's chapter "Social Knowing," the discussion of Wikipedia and its practices regarding neutrality and anonymous authoring becomes a topic of relevance for not only research and information access, but also of best practices in all social sectors.

The working definition of neutrality in the Wikipedia community, for posting content, relies on the belief that neutrality is achieved when people stop changing the content (Weinberger, 2007). For Wikipedia, this is what works. The authorship and the content of the site is entirely open to the public and as such every individual feeding information into the articles has their own information, their own perspective, and their own language to describe the person, places, and events contained within the articles. It takes everyone's participation in authoring these articles to achieve the most neutral voice on the subject as possible. -- I really appreciated Weinberger's contrast of this process to that of newspapers and media outlets where only one voice or one message is really heard. Everyone likes to believe that the news they hear/read contains "the facts," but the truth of the matter is that it is not in most cases the whole truth.--

An example of how social interaction can reduce bias

At Wikipedia, the approach to article writing is entirely collaborative and prevents any one voice from necessarily being the dominant one. At Wikipedia, they realize the importance of representing facts in a neutral playing field for the sake of the readers right to decide what they think about the topic. They encourage well rounded information to bring the greatest degree of knowledge on the subjects to their users. In the case of Wikipedia, it is not just the few, powerful, educated, and influential figures of the world who are writing our history and sharing the information we "need to know," it is the people from many spheres of the world who are documenting the information and relying on one another to build a complete picture of events.

When it comes to "deciding what to believe," it is the expectation of the Wikipedia community that the readers will challenge the facts/data and explore the truths themselves before adding this knowledge into their worldview. This process directly relates to Shedroff's Model of Understanding :

It would behoove the public to value the kind of information  and methods of collaborative communication demonstrated by Wikipedia- neutral, unbiased, and interactive information presented in compromise- rather than allowing themselves to learn from one source or one authority. Shedroff's model addresses particularly how we on an individual basis take in data and integrate information into our knowledge and sense of personal wisdom. What may not be clearly understood from this model alone is that the data, provided by the "producers" is already imbued with context when it gets to us. Producers are consumers and consumers producers. We are living in a time when we collectively teach and learn in our social interactions everyday. Such is the wonder of our digital age- where rarely should anyone be expected to be an expert on anything. We all dabble, we all explore, and we all have a relevant context for information. We do not live in the a world of Orwell's imagination. We live in a time where we are more powerful in our collective search for knowledge than the few who would choose to censor it.

1984 - George Orwell

I have personally pushed myself to explore more topics that have been the subject of public outcry in the past two years. I have struggled with communicating differing opinions and values in social media on more than a few occasions (and have all but given up on trying). But, I have found that it is because my voice is the one saying, "Where did you get that information? Did you actually read the official document yourself? Are you aware that the resource you're sharing here is completely biased and provides a very harsh criticism from a very narrow view point on this subject?" I am finding that it does become more and more difficult to reign in conversations and allow clear communication to occur- especially when it is something which people are particularly impassioned by.

The simple fact is that once people hear something, they tend not to look any further in to it- or they only listen to the voices saying all the same things and it spirals into a world of anger and argument because, "THESE are the FACTS! I don't care that you found someone else saying something different- THIS is the TRUTH because THIS is what I READ." The topics become impossible to discuss in most places because people are very passionate about their beliefs and in most cases are unwilling to hear opposing beliefs. In the places where people have an opportunity to "discuss" topics, they end up arguing instead and working themselves into a fury- name-calling others, cursing at them, judging the morals, intelligence, and sense of decency in the people who offer different beliefs or perspectives. There tends to be a great deal of capitalization and exclamation points.

Most people, it seems, are unwilling to discuss the difficult topics because it is very personal- their ideas become a part of their identity, their sense of self- and to have a disagreement on something is to face a personal attack (even when the subject itself has nothing to do with them personally). The context rather than the data ends up translating the information. The individuals in disagreement most often are fighting not about the facts, but about how they have individually interpreted them. The interpretations form the "brands" and the "labels" that individuals cling to and identify with instead of discussing the raw data and coming to a neutral understanding. The individuals hoist their banners and create divisions between themselves and "others" and turn what should be an open forum of information sharing into a battlefield to fight for the title of "truth" and authority over the "others".

To a large extent, I think that better educating everyone to be more wise in their information gathering in this digital world cannot be emphasized enough. While many voices together may hope to weave a neutral and accurate tapestry of information (like in Wikipedia), most people are not gathering their information from those forums and are instead turning to the individual voices who seem to shout the loudest- or use the right "brand". Seeing the success of Wikipedia- and knowing that from time to time articles need to be locked when tempers flair- does give me hope for the future and the information sharing between people. But, until people once again become more skeptical of the information they find online and re-learn to question bias and access information from many diverse voices, I fear it will take a long time before the majority of the voices stop shouting and start listening.

As Weinberger put it:
"For 2,500 years, we've been told that knowing is our species' destiny and its calling. Now we can see for ourselves that knowledge isn't in our heads: It is between us. It emerges from public and social thought and it stays there, because social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished" (2007, p.147).

We are all allowed our opinions, but we have to begin to acknowledge that opinions are not facts- they are interpretations. All interpretations are valid because they are unique to the individual context. We cannot force our opinions upon each other. We cannot turn opinions into laws by which everyone must abide. We cannot keep cultivating arbitrary figures of authority based on what is "right," because there are no absolutes. We have to create a spirit of open access to information and allow one another the opportunity to "know" whatever it is we may know and believe [without judgement] whatever we choose to believe. But, then again, that's just my opinion.