Blogging, textual criticism and making it up as you go along

Never before have so many oddballs had the ability to create the future for themselves. Or, at least, not since Sparks last made the charts.

It was UKViewer that suggested we needed a special Sunday for bloggers. But was he right? I have my doubts.  The idea of my Special Sundays was, rather like those in the wider religious community, to remind us of things that we don't think about very often or we may not think are important during our daily lives -Healthcare, Christian Aid, the Resurrection. That sort of thing. But bloggers are different. Bloggers don't need their special Sundays. Because tomorrow belongs to us, and those of our ilk such as the Tweeters.

As the dead-tree press withdraws its content behind its firewalls, something will take its place. In these parts that's currently the BBC.  But as the Age of Osborne roars forwards, even the BBC may eventually have to draw in its horns. Even now the BBC does not always want to cover everything the blogosphere wants to cover. The case of Katharine Birbalsingh, for example, has greatly exercised Cranmer but the BBC doesn't want to cover it at all, apparently.

So as the professional press withdraws from the Internet, a source of free news could take its place. The world of blogging and tweeting could well do it, bringing hot news from anywhere. How democratic, how egalitarian, how libertarian. But how unreliable it could be. Anyone thinking that they were collecting hot news from Smolensk when reading the doings of @konnolsky, for instance, would be in for a real shock if they actually visited Smolensk and tried to find Yuri and the gang. Apart from anything else, I believe that @konnolsky is actually a charcutier, not a bona-fide butcher.
But you can see how it works. If we have to pay for supposedly reliable information, or even the Telegraph, the day comes when we decide we're better off getting our news from free from any old blog or tweeter. And if we do that, then we're going to have validate our sources - otherwise you could end up lambasting an imaginary Fundamentalist Baptist for his view on women's ministry, or praying for the salvation of a fictional neo-pagan religious leader. And that would never do, would it?

After all, I could write on this notice board of Husborne Crawley life all sorts of things that I claimed were going on in Husborne Crawley, and you'd never know that I was making it all up. In the same way that nobody realises that Revd Lesley is actually a 1st class cricketer who just wishes to be a vicar, Clayboy is genuinely made of clay, David Walker is actually Ruth Gledhill making a few quid on the side now she's hidden behind the paywall, and the Church Mouse really is a mouse. So when I tell you that the Chapel of St Bogwulf has disappeared into a black hole, or that there really are wallabies grazing on the sides of the road round here - how would you know I was telling the truth?

We're going to need rules for how to assess the validity of a news source. A rough rule of thumb would be that the more sites comment on the same thing, the truer it might be - but the science of stemmology helps us to see how that might not work.  If one maniac in Trafalgar Square claims to have had a vision of a 65 foot tall Jeremy Paxman, and twelve people pass that information on - the next thing you know the 65 foot tall Paxo would be a well-established fact. And if somewhere down the line by a copyist's error or wishful thinking the Paxo becomes Brian Humphreys, this second family of information would be perpetuated, becoming the truth to the Humphreysites - in a manner familiar to all of us that are advised via Facebook and email of blasphemous theatrical productions, lost children or that "having no thumbs is not a condition, and people with no thumbs are just as good at twiddling their thumbs as those of us with thumbs".  No, the important thing would be to find the number of quantifiably different accounts of the same event - two or three witnesses being the minimum, one would imagine. And in this case to have two accounts that agree in outline but differ in fine detail would be more plausible than to have 100 accounts that are word-for-word the same.

The problem would then lie in the sheer number of feeds one would have to access in order to get something that was approaching the truth. One would have to compare the reports of Trafalgar Square Paxman to those of Humphreys, find the oldest, try to find the blog where the identity changed and then make one's own judgements. Some kind of Wikio-style aggregator would be required, capable of sorting and correlating reports into families, and weighting known, reliable sources.  Then the site would enable us to sift the true from the false, the genuine from the Labour peer expenses claim. Instead of having to trawl news from the web ourselves, we could go to one place and find out what was going on in the world, confident that we were reading something that approached the truth. Who knows, as time goes by we might even be prepared to pay for it.