Quality and access

Bill Joy, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, is quoted in Atlantic Monthly this month dismissing the idea that online communities could provide an educational boost for America’s young people. At the center of his argument is quality – a notion I touched upon in my 11 Sep blog.

[T]he real problem is, by democratizing speech and the ability to post, we’ve lost the gradation for quality. The gradation of quality was always based on the fact that words had weight—it cost money to move them around. So there was back pressure against … junk …

Yes. I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea that everyone gets to throw their two cents into the mix and some cents, for reasons beyond my comprehension, rise to the top. There isn’t a filter for quality. And it is troubling that much of what gets posted is taken as the truth without considerable discretion.

But who employs the filter? Who decides what is publishable and what is not? Yes, with so much out there it is easy to dilute information and art and ideas – but without an open forum for these notions, we’d be headed the way of media today – consolidated and controlled by a very few. Until we reconcile quality with access, there isn’t an answer to this that isn’t elitist.