In this modern age of the Interwebs/Internets/The Great Series of Tubes, truth is a consensus, rather than an absolute. I don't entirely blame this era of the Post-Modern "well if it works for you" mentality, but is allowing the largely uninformed world the ability to decide the truth of something for everyone else the best thing? I'm not talking about spiritual truth and the issue of whether or not you're going to burn in a lake of fire for all eternity, but the simple expression of measurable, documentable, day to day, facts.

Historically speaking, personal testimony in the form of journals and diaries is one of the key sources when researching an event. However, through blogs, every single current event has hundreds of people recording the incident. The problem is they probably weren't all present and that they tend to draw their content from one another. The problem is with the documentation of fact.

Wikipedia is a glorious resource, but it is still only a consensus. While it may be better than only allowing the "victor" to write the history, it will never give an unbiased account of well, anything. The problem is that people like truth that agrees with their opinion of what truth should be.

Social media and social bookmarking perpetuate this problem. Things that people agree with are promoted and things people disagree with are routinely buried as "inaccurate" or "this is lame" (at least on Digg). I've written recently about how newspapers as a whole don't place much value on social bookmarking, but are they correct to do so on an epistemological (study of truth/knowledge) level as well?

Blogs really are the crux of this issue; without them would we need sites like Digg to decide "truth"? A blog can turn anyone with an Internet connection and some hosting space into an instant self proclaimed pundit:


It is ironic that I'm attempting to wax eloquently on a topic I have no credentials to speak about. I won't pretend that these are indisputable facts, but merely my observations. That being said, this really is the "glory" of the Internet. I can expound through this site and spread my thoughts to the world (true or not) and have them arbitrarily accepted or denied. I suppose that rhetoric is just as potent on the Internet as it is on the campaign trail.