David Brin has an interesting response to Time’s decision to vote “you” (as in the You of YouTube and the internet) as Person of the Year.  He argues that this designation is premature, because today’s net is not an “arena” or a commons. 

Brin’s post is frustratingly incomplete in some ways, however, because he fails to discuss explicitly the existing mechanisms for identifying quality on the internet, be they collaborative (e.g. Digg) or technical (e.g. Google). More on that latter, first let me quote from his arguments.

The internet, writes Brin, is a great platform for self expression, but it lacks the cultural norms and institutions that allow true quality to rise to the top, as seen in older institutions such as markets, the scientific process, courts and democracy. (I like the way Brin has highlighted the common traits in all of these institutions.)

Some of you have read my extensive essay - written for the American Bar Association - about the underlying common traits of markets, science, courts and democracy — the “accountability arenas” that have empowered free individuals to compete and create without tumbling quickly into repression and outrage…. for the first time, ever. Alas, over the years since, I have found that people have trouble perceiving some of what the paper describes… or why today’s internet just does not yet have what it takes to empower us with a “fifth arena.”

Here is one of the key difficult concepts. I describe how markets, science, courts and democracy each have “centripetal vs centrifugal” social phases.

I see these opposite trends having much the same effect for accountability arenas that INHALING and EXHALING have in living mammals. You need both for the system to thrive.
In science, markets, courts and democracy, the CENTRIFUGAL PHASE is when each individual participant may disperse, find allies/collaborators, and safely organize with others under some degree of protection, in a zone where product can be refined and readied for competitive testing.

In science, this zone is your tenured professorship or lab etc: in markets the safe zone is the company/corporation: in courts it is attorney-client privilege and the power of coerced deposition; and democracy has parties.

That’s the centrifugal phase and it took civilization thousands of years to realize how necessary it is, in order for these four arenas to function.

Note that this is the phase that exists now, copiously, in the nascent “fifth arena” of the internet!

The key lacking in the internet are formalized processes and safeguarded institutions that place competing ideas in competition with each other and allow the better idea to win.

What the cybersphere does NOT have is anything even remotely resembling the CENTRIPETAL phase that also empowers the four older, more mature “arenas.”

What is the centripetal phase? This is where in all of the disparate and dispersed participants in an arena are summoned together by a ritual CALL TO COMBAT. What ensues is a battle - competition - that has transformed ancient human bloody-mindedness into something much more like a game. One in which rules have been laid down to ensure that the outcome of competition correlates at least somewhat with quality of product, and much less with power or influence or other means of cheating.

In science the centripetal competition phase compels researchers to publish papers and present them for criticism. In markets the ritual battleground is retail sales - where customers compare goods and services. In democracy the role is filled by elections, and courts have trials.

Presently, on the internet, THERE IS NO EQUIVALENT CENTRIPETAL PHASE that allows us to test ideas, opinions, arguments against each other, using competitive processes to cull wheat from the chaff.

Pearls are said to float upward in shit. But so MUCH of the ranting online today is BS, how can anyone hope for good ideas to actually coalesce and for bad ones to finally die, as they eventually deserve?

Brin overstates his case a bit too much here, although I think his overall conclusions still stand. 

Collaborative filtering sites like Digg do provide a way for better ideas to rise to the top, but their algorithms for selection are hidden and can be gamed or subverted from within.

Likewise, Google has a metric for quality based on sifting through the linking behavior of millions of pages, but this metric is opaque and shifting. Google has mixed motives given that they are also trying to increase their own Adsense revenue and deliver value to shareholders.   (There has been some controversy in this area already, see Google Pimps Own Services in Search Results on Google Blogoscoped.)

To attempt to complete Brin’s (David’s, not Sergei’s!) thought: There are clearly mechanisms for finding quality on the internet, in some ways uniquely powerful, but not institutions for doing so. 

By institutions, I mean systems that have a degree of underlying stability and trustworthiness based on history, checks and balances, transparency, and so forth. Such institutions take a great deal of time to evolve and are at least as much social as technical in nature, often requiring multiple revolutions and upheavals before being solidly established. Perhaps its unrealistic to expect secure institutions of quality and competition would evolve in internet time, even on the internet.

Update: There is some discussion of different forms of internet filtering in the comments section, with responses from Brin. Here’s one such response:

Rob asks: “Are any of those examples of centripetal force?” and cites crude reputation-based systems. And yes, such systems do provide a very very coarse and primitive quality feedback methodology…

…roughly equivalent to “democratic elections” based on screaming matches or court trials by public lynching. Worse, of course, because there is simply no way for bad opinions to lose so much standing that they simply wither up and blow away. Freedom of speech is great, but that right was established in part in ORDER to secure, forever, the benefits of the centrifugal phase. CRITICISM is the centripetal tool that corresponds, and for it to work at the pragmatic goal of providing us all with improved human solutions it must be applied in sophisticated and effective ways!

I tried to explain all this at Google, a few weeks ago. Very smart guys. I think maybe two of them sort of dimly got it. It is HARD, apparently.

Brin seems to suggest that this is more of a “tools” issue than a social one.

Well… I don’t agree that the tools are there, at all. In fact, this appears to have been the obsession that has pulled me away from science fiction for many years. My holocene invention, reputation management, attention management, transparency, indignation addiction, prediction registries… I have been probing at a wide variety of tools that are desperately needed — and that currently are languishing for lack of serious attention out there. All of them are pieces to a puzzle that could bring us a mature, fifth accountability arena… and nearly all of them are simply missing.