I wanted to check out what the new Government Budget meant to my take-home pay – I went to boards.ie and found a link there that had been recommended by a number of others.
If I want to see what’s happening in my former hometown of Lanzarote – I have a look at the Lanzarote Gazette’s Resident’s Corner Forum.
When I’m looking for a hotel-room online, I read the the hotel’s reviews on tripadvisor before booking.
And so on – the list is endless. The point is that each of the above examples has one thing in common – the information sought and received has been generated by fellow users, and has not been dispatched through the official line of communication. I could have looked at the Government’s Budget pamphlets (rarely user-friendly), contacted the Lanzarote Tourist Board (too time consuming) or simply believed the hotel’s own website blurb (they’d be completely honest, right?), but what drives us all to find more accessible and reliable information is the peer review element we get via on-line forums. It’s the closest equivalent to asking a friend in the non-virtual world.
Similarly, we are no longer reliant on a very small number of official and semi-official media outlets to bring us news of current affairs. News will often break on forums before the mainstream sites pick it up. An on-line forum is also less likely to carry a slant on the item than State-run outlets or those owned by tycoons with vested business interests.
In the same vein, many of us will check out users forums before buying the latest technology gadget. We want to know if others can verify whether the actual specs live up to those theoretic ones declared by the manufacturer. We also post detailed reviews on products and services to show our expertise and to help others.
We are all now citizen journalists and technical communicators.
Just like the real world, however, the comments and posts found in on-line forums must sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt. We’re all human and we all have our biases. Having said this, most forum information is simply offered by people who have no prior agenda except to help others to benefit from their (sometimes unfortunate) experiences.
I love the internet for giving normal human beings a voice and an open forum. I suppose gossip being a basic human need (maybe tied to our development of complex communication protocols) means that it is inevitable that a technology like the internet will have a large basis on gossip. However, its a brilliant way to find out things that otherwise would have been impossible in the ‘old days’. Saying that, it isnt peer reviewed and you get a lot of rubbish said too – but isnt that true in the real world also?
The Internet is a true democracy, where each voice is as powerful as the next.
The basis for free speech (not loose talk, mind) is that every eejit is entitled to his opinion!