We now break from this commercial to tell you that you have been watching a commercial.
As the story goes, the internet started as a tool for researchers, evolved into a web of diverse interconnected web sites run by individuals and small organizations, eventually to be recognized as the conduit of the future for media and commerce. Since I've been "on the net", it has gone from having a presence of only a very few tech-savvy companies, to the current paradigm where putting up a web site is the first order of business for almost any new company. Today we are shocked when we can't find someone to do business with after spending ten seconds with our favorite search engine.
We all need to be aware, though, that a company's influence on the internet may extend far beyond the confines of its own web site. Businesses are now using third party sites like blogs to promote themselves. It's not even just businesses, either. Anyone with an agenda has a number of ways to spread their message without even putting up their own blog or web site- all they have to do is find a page related to their agenda that allows comments, and then comment away.
Let's start with blogs. It's very easy to start a blog, as I have just discovered. The only investment required to start and maintain a blog is time. Lets say that an organization with a strong agenda on, say, global warming, wants a blog about it. This is fairly common; blogs run by organizations that have the latest new and information slanted toward the views of the organization are frequently found on their sites. Realize, though, that someone paid to blog doesn't necessarily have to be blogging on his or her employer's web site. They could just go to Blogger and start a "personal" blog. In between postings about the blogger's favorite new T.V. show and the latest news on their dog, they post a link to some information about global warming. Most people have quite different attitudes about information coming from a faceless organization, which we expect to be biased, and coming from "someone like us", who we feel empathetic toward. This is especially true if we watch the same T.V. shows, have a dog, or in some other way identify with the source.
Even an innocuous blog may still contain bias, even inadvertently. Business week, in an article on paid blogging, highlighted an instance of a blogger endorsing a product that she was sent for free.
How many times do we read a blog post, or for that matter something more formal like a news article, and then scan through the comments to see what everyone else's thoughts are? I do this frequently, and often spend more time scanning through the reader comments than I did reading the original information.
In reading through comments, we come to realize that not everyone is as open minded as we might hope. In fact, some people are so biased that anything they add to comment thread is valueless. For an example, read comments on any Mac vs. P.C. comparison article, such as Eight Reasons Your Next Computer Should Be a PC or Eight Reasons Your Next Computer Should Be a Mac. In discussions such as this, you are bound to find examples of this extreme bias. In internet parlance, these posters are called "trolls".
Bias itself is expected, but in the case of trolls it is so pronounced that everyone who recognizes them expects that their posts contain exaggerations and/or falsehoods. Not all trolls are easily recognized; they might, for example, throw readers off the scent by giving some token acknowledgement to the opposing view. Are all trolls just innocent fanboys? Are paid trolls out there? There is a lot of evidence that some commenters may be paid to make the rounds espousing a particular point of view. Search for "paid comment" using your favorite search engine and form your own opinion.
An especially troubling facet of trolling is comments and ratings placed on e-commerce web sites. If companies are willing to hire advocates to post on blogs, why wouldn't they include favorable reviews of their own products on e-commerce sites, or even unfavorable reviews for their competitors? Or, in the case of ideology proponents, poor reviews for books whose premise they disagree with?
Finally we have the site owners themselves censoring comments. I recently read an article about what large companies can do to protect their brands when an irate customer starts to get attention... in this case the customer is the now famous Dave Carroll and the attention is due to his fantastic United Breaks Guitars video. It is rare for me to post comments on articles like this, but I found the article so wrongheaded that I posted a comment saying, to paraphrase, that brands are built and maintained by being a company that customers want to do business with, not by paying a big group of people to make sure the name "United Airlines" is associated with sunshine and flowers. When I checked later, my comment had been removed. The lesson is, don't expect comments to represent a cross section of the readership.
I realize that this may be a counter-intuitive topic to kick off a blog. My hope is that my writings will be informative and thought provoking, but at the same time I would also hope that readers of this or any other source of information will think for themselves and form their own opinions. Thanks for reading!
