The idea of truth on the internet fascinates me. Many of my instructors in school have tended to have a serious anti-Wikipedia bent. The majority of my peers fall on the other side of the issue. Can’t say whether this is because of an ingrained technologically progressive idealism or laziness with regard to citation, but the fact of the matter is that the age of collaboration, social-software and other buzzword worthy technologies is upon us. The real questions are how they’re affecting the idea of Truth, how we’re going to deal with them, and what the future holds.

In my opinion, a middle ground must be found. I’m all for the democratization of media to a point, as long as there are enough checks and balances in the system to maintain some semblance of credibility and reason.

Services like StumbleUpon, WordPress, and the sea of social networking websites are great, but the critics of Web 2.0 have a point. At the end of the day, the majority of media in a truly democratic system is noise. For every news-worthy article submitted to digg, there are 40 spam links, 20 dupes, and 10 links to Angelina Jolie photo archives.

If the ideas I’m talking about interest you in the least, definitely check out the documentary. The post on The Next Web features another documentary which I have not yet watched by the same director, IJsbrand van Veelen, about Google. If you happen to watch either, please comment with your thoughts. I’m always interested in what others think about stuff like this.