Guarding the Guardians
Published on 10 Mar 2006 at 12:14 pm |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Blogosphere.
A loyal reader writes in to inquire:
Tell me, Oliver, if it isn’t the media and press keeping an eye on your politicians, who is going to?
Safely ensconced in Munich, malt beverage at hand, I reply:
It’s a good question, my friend. Seriously. I think ultimately the question is about who are, and are not, what I will call the Keepers of the Received Wisdom. One might also call them the priesthood.
I think that _anytime_ you have a group of people who become, by whatever means or process, the guardians of the "Truth", sooner or later they become more concerned with guarding themselves than they do with discovering and promoting the truth.
The press have fallen into that trap. They think they’re somehow more noble than the rest of us. The folks who write the blogs, both right and left, are collectively doing a better job of getting the truth out than the media.
Ultimately, the correct approach is one that the science community uses, or at least professes to use. Scientists are human and fail in their aspiartions, but at least they strive to uphold the idea of fully open and free debate, publish ALL your data, keep NO secrets, and if you disprove your own theory you get as much praise as if you prove it, because either way you have expanded the total amount of human knowledge.
Blogs, websites, podcasts, and all such similar things which serve to democratize the media will, I think, bring about a revolution as big as the printing press. That press took around a hundred years to have its effect, in the form of the Reformation - brought about when ordinary folks could buy and read Bibles, and could stop depending on the priests’ interpretation.
Things move a bit faster now - now half so much faster as some breathless prognosticators like to predict, but it
is happening. The next twenty to fifty years will see big changes in democracy, as the digital naitves come of age and assume control of society.
Sooner or later, every successful revolutionary becomes the establishment. It’s happened to the Post and the Times; they are not the guardians they were thirty years ago. But who will guard the guardians now?
Prost! (he says from a bar in München…)
Copyright 2006 Oliver Heaviside
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