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And I thought we were over the "objective-subjective" thing a while ago... How about "polylogue"... it's cumbersome but otherwise rather precise... it speaks of what's happening... as opposed to what's produced.

Consider also "intertextualité"... introduced by Julia Kristeva in the early sixties (if I am not wrong)... I just discovered (on Amazon) that she also wrote a book called "Polylogue" (1977).

this certainly strikes a chord with me

I'm not sure it strikes exactly the same chord with this guy:

www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm

Dave, you can't pick out any one false node to dispute the truth value of the Web.

The real issue is: How can we then dispute the truth value of the Web? I don't know the answer to that.

How many false nodes would be enough? And, it wasn't just one, it was the Kevin Marks/Big Hair Guy thing, along with the Seigenthaler thing, which also made the NY Times.

My point is there is no particular virtue to the web, the truth is still a scarce commodity. Technology does not change human nature. It expands what we do in space, and compresses them in time. Bad people will still do bad things, and good people will still do good things, and the rest of us will be left to try to figure out which is which.

And to figure out what simply doesn't matter.

Small preliminary joke: I was tempted to write only "YOU'RE WRONG!", as a minimalist ironic rebuttal. But I decided the humor wouldn't work well in this context, pity.

"The old, romantic view of truth was lonely. This one is social, and thus is joyful."

Brrr ... What's so joyful about old-fashioned playing to people's prejudices, that it should be hailed as the New New Thing in Polysubjective Emergent Web 2.0 Modality, representing the Wisdom Of The Popular? The above sort of description reminds me in a disturbing way of literary scenes where a religious character (Inquisitor-type) tells a scientist character (Galileo or Darwin type) how dour and bad it is for the Earth not to be the center of the Universe, or Man not specially created by God (and thus, the scientist character needs to be killed or imprisoned, for the good of society, of course). It's happy-happy-joy-joy to be told the world revolves around you, you're right just because you're you, and you're playing the grand game of collective intelligence. And a real downer to hear that you're not the smartest bestest most divine being around.

What do you even *mean* by "the truth value of the Web"? That's like "the truth value of the [printspace|radiosphere|TVworld|chatternet ...]"? It sounds impressive, but if it's unpacked, is it anything more than the prosaic idea that people believe different things, many of which are not factually true (for whatever "factually" means)?

David, you're a nice guy, and it's a measure your good-heartness that I probably won't suffer too much from posting this (I almost dumped it as not worth risking being attacked by an A-lister, which is itself a sad comment on the wonders of law-of-the-jungle truth). I believe I understand what you *think* you're doing. But, how does one distinguish "something new" from something very old indeed, if believing in something new is so pleasant, and believing in something very old indeed is so socially unrewarding?

Looking again to French, what about *plurilogue*, or even *pluri-jectivity* (from the root plural), some perspectives more or less subjective than others while coming from different places and people ?

I don't know why not just call it debate. I don't see the need for a new term to describe a social process that has always been required in order to discover what is true or at least true enough or true for now. All that the web gives us is a means to have this debate to let various opinions be heard. That is the downfall of the media is that the opinions are controlled or homogenized to make them more palatable by everyone or at least the majority, the democratic term for the largest market share.

Truth has never really been solitary. Sure there are countless examples where lone or small numbers of people spoke the true, but the point is they shared it with society as a whole often to great personal peril. It is the sharing of that opinion that allowed it to become the truth. Lonely is not sharing it with others, and an opinion not shared can never be recognized for what it is, true or otherwise. It is the lack of sharing of opinion and the control of information that holds down truth.

This is why I have always been skeptical of Wikipedia. It is not a forum for debate, but an attempt at implementing an old school model of editorial control without an chief editor. I am not surprised that edit wars break out and I doubt that they will ever stop. If I am looking for something that I can use as a source I will still use a hard copy type publication, partly so I will be confident it will be the same when I look for it again, but I will use wild and varying opinions from the web to determine which source seems to be the best.

Kevin Marks has a great Douglas Adams quote on his site related to his edit war that I think sums up nicely what I feel about truth. The only issue I have is that Kevin says that this sort of debate on truth has been raging in academia for a couple of decades, but it seems to me that we have had that debate since at least Plato. Of course my own opinion on this is tainted largely because I was a student of philosophy.

"intersubjectivity" carries baggage I don' t want

That's a shame, because it strikes me that that's precisely what you're describing - and no, it's not a new phenomenon. As you wrote yourself a while back,

some things become clearer if you do not start with the premise that people are fundamentally isolated and battle against noise in order to connect with others. Instead, we find ourselves in a world shared by others. Connection comes first.

we find ourselves in a world shared by others - the core truth of phenomenology in its social form, it seems to me, and a very important truth at that. (I expanded a little on this parallel here.) Intersubjectivity in some form happens every time a group gets together and starts functioning as a group. What's new and interesting about the MMO version of the process is the scale and the transparency. I don't believe those properties in themselves make it a new phenomenon, though.

This is clearly a question of scale. We've always had debate and conversation and always will. The edit wars will only end when the group is reduced to sufficient homogeneity, which only means that the wars resume outside the borders of the site. And there's nothing new in this ...except the quantity, the ability to reach across geography, the size of the topics deemed worthy, the constant challenging of beliefs that in a smaller context would go unnoticed, etc.

You're right, Seth, that "truth value of the Web" is a facile phrase, and I almost didn't use it. But I did, sort of the in the manner of trying clothing on. Yet, I think there is something worthwhile in it. Your comparison to the "truth value of printspace|radiosphere" etc. is helpful, because my point (if I have one) is that, because the Web is more diverse and more conversational than print|radio, its sense of truth is different as well. Print and radio are a set of assertions made by a handful of people who have authority precisely because they have been authorized to make assertions in print and radio. (Talk radio is different. Put it aside for now as a distraction.) The Web is open to everyone, amateur, conversational, often more transparent. Thus its relation to truth is different (in ways too oft discussed). To be overly simple about it (which is the mistake that got me into this pickle in the first place), it'd be possible to read a day's set of papers and decide just how truthful they're being - how comprehensive, how accurate, etc. It wouldn't be possible to do that for the Web, and not just because of the scaling issue. Instead, we'd want to know whether the conversations were advancing us or not. And "advancing us" is too vague a criterion to be useful, although I believe it's the right criterion.

Talk radio is different. Put it aside for now as a distraction.

Hold that thought. What happens on talk radio is that speakers with no authority are temporarily endowed with authority by virtue of having no authority. It doesn't negate the model you describe, merely offers a carnivalesque inversion - right down to the lack of authority conferred on any authority-figure who's foolish enough to appear.

dave rogers said in his comment:

"My point is there is no particular virtue to the web, the truth is still a scarce commodity. Technology does not change human nature. It expands what we do in space, and compresses them in time. Bad people will still do bad things, and good people will still do good things, and the rest of us will be left to try to figure out which is which."

I would like to point out that anonymity makes people act in ways they wouldn't in real life. For instance, my name isn't Arthur, so I can act like a prick and not worry about offending anyone because I can change my online identity whenever I want. Masks make people act differently, and I wonder if we all have a little bit of multiple personality disorder because of the internet.