Whatever happened to our dream of an empowering Internet (and how to get it back) (en)

Andres Guadamuz Back in 2006, Time magazine awarded its person of
the year to us. The Internet. Time writer Lev Grossman wrote the
following: “[2006 is] a story about community and collaboration on
a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of
knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network
YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many
wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and
how that will not only change the world, but also change the way
the world changes.” How naive this sounds nowadays. It is true that
the World Wide Web has the potential “for bringing together the
small contributions of millions of people and making them matter”,
as the Time article states. But it is also true that the Internet
has become a cesspool of disinformation, fake news and conspiracy
theories that threaten our democratic institutions. At some point
we thought that the Internet was not going to be like that.
Cyber-utopianism did indeed paint a picture of a networked
environment where collaboration would lead to a more open and
functional society, but what we got was a set of commercial walled
gardens and filter bubbles where you only read what you want to,
and the algorithms will filter out anything that disagrees with
your own views. Back in 2007, Cass Sunstein had already warned
about the possible dangers of “the daily me”, a Web tailored only
to feed you with the information that you liked, filtering out
dissenting views. But filter bubbles are just part of the problem,
one of the most odious and prevalent problems about online
environments is the erosion of expertise, the blurring of
authority, the disappearance of gatekeepers,  and the growing
belief that all opinions are equal. In the analogue world, sources
mattered. A news item from the Times, the New York Times, Le Monde,
El Pais, o Der Spiegel carried weight because old media was seen as
a reliable purveyor of information. The digital age has brought
about an environment where everyone is a publisher, and a teenager
in Montenegro can put together a believable-looking site that feeds
disinformation. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re not a
journalist. The power of user-generated content is also the problem
for trust and believability. We are more suspicious of mainstream
media because you can find so much more online than what is
available in the limited pages of a newspaper that you start to
suspect that they are purposefully hiding information from you.
Obscure YouTube channels become authorities, Google searches are
deemed the ultimate arbitrator, and truth is measured by whether
you can find a Wikipedia page that agrees with you. Many things are
happening to make the situation worse. People now find it difficult
to identify reliable sources, with frightening studies conducted
where teenagers are incapable of identifying whether a website is
reliable or not. Another increasingly disturbing phenomenon is that
experts are often ignored, or even mocked online, as anyone with a
search engine feels that they are capable of making informed
decisions based on the first page of their search results. This
talk will try to put forward ideas for regaining the promise of a
positive Internet.