Professionals in the business of information-gathering have always looked at information with a caveat: "Consider the source. The information is only as good as the source."
With the Internet, history's greatest source of information, the caveat creates a couple of problems. First problem: most of the millions of Internet users are not professional information-gatherers, but amateurs. Considering the source is not a caution that would occur to them, and we have already seen the dangerous stampedes that unchallenged bad information can cause, as instantaneously as lightning crackling above a cattle herd.
That problem can be fixed with education, patience and time, and eventually, no doubt, with a bit of professional standard-setting. The second problem is a stranger duck, an original duck that the professionals haven't seen before. It has to do, not with sources that use the Internet, but the Internet itself as a source. It feels like a suspicion, gradually rising, that the Internet, as a source, is flawed. It's like asking the reader of a book to consider not only the author, as a source, but books themselves, as sources. How would one go about confirming the reliability of books as sources, even if one were moved to?
It's not a question being openly asked, about the Internet (not yet, anyway), but a subliminal suggestion. "Consider the source," as it applies to the Internet, seems to appear peripherally, almost unconsciously, in conversations that didn't start with the Internet at all. Joe Morgenstern senses it in his Friday Wall Street Journal review of a move, "Julie & Julia." The movie comes at the audience in two halves, he says, and the half about Julia – Julia Child, the celebrity chef – provides far more than half the movie's substance. The other half is about Julie Powell, a New Yorker who had the idea to cook all 524 recipes in Childs' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year, and write blogs about the experience.
The problem for the audience is watching half a movie about someone who really does something – Julia Child – and watching the other half about someone writing a blog. It's a good blog, and a great idea, cooking all those recipes in a single year, but to the observer, it's still only a blog. Monty Python had the same idea 30 years ago, imagining an audience watching an author composing the opening lines of a great novel. Great sketch, but not so great that I can remember the author or the novel, which I will recognize instantly, once somebody tells me. See? What Julia Child did was real accomplishment: "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." What Julie Powell did was blog. One is on the field. The other is on the sideline. The world will remember Julia Child, who mastered her art, but not Julie Powell, because she couldn't even overcome her source.
That same feeling pops up in a Sunday essay in The New York Times Book Review. This essay is one in a series that "will explore the dominant themes and currents of thought in a particular area of American life." This essay, by author Kurt Andersen, is about American pop culture "in the Age of Obama," when cable TV and the Internet represent a "vast new maw" for consumption of pop culture. He concludes:
"There's a lesson here about how we think of consuming culture. Maybe we can once and for all stop defaulting to easy categorical boundaries between high and low, and discriminate instead between the well made and the shoddy."
The lesson is important for the masters of the Internet, who all agree that, on the Internet, content is king. If so, then it should be original content, and made well enough that the consumer, in considering the source, will be able to discriminate it from the shoddy. Otherwise, content on the Internet may never be king, or prince, or even duke. Nobody will ever remember its name.
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