In May 2011, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the formation of a new working group tasked with developing standards for client-side APIs (browser based software that runs on your computer instead of on a server) that would enable real-time communications. Writing for ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick correctly identified this objective as a “potent idea,” a technological development for the World Wide Web that could further democratize it. I want to help explain why.
First, a little background: the W3C is the international standards organization that studies and outlines technical standards for the Web. Without the W3C, users would be unable to open a variety of web sites from the same browser because web designers and browser developers would be using different coding languages and protocols. If you’ve tried to open a page in Firefox that only looks right in IE 8, or you have a page that looks good in every browser except IE, you have a sense of why the standards are important and why industry leaders should be encouraged to adopt those standards. (HTML 5 anyone? Everyone?)
What we’re talking about here, however, isn’t just a standard for coding how web pages look, but rather something more fundamental. It’s a standard that can help to bring about a more robust architecture for the Internet, a network design that would be easier to maintain and harder to control.
In Chapter 3 of Cybering Democracy, I argued that the structure of the Internet, dependent as it was on a backbone of tier-1 network access points, resembled a decentralized network rather than a distributed network. I offered the image shown at the right, from a 1964 RAND study by Paul Baran, to explain the critical differences between these networking architectures.
Briefly, a centralized system is the most vulnerable because all communications nodes connect through one central server/switch/node. Take down that central server, and you bring down the whole network. A decentralized structure is better, but the nodes are still vulnerable if they only connect to one server.
Wherever computers depend on a single server for connectivity, vulnerability exists. Outages or filtering rules at central servers determine whether computers down the line can gain access at all and what they can gain access to.
In a distributed system, however, every node (or computer) is both a server and a client and can be simultaneously connected to multiple other computers/nodes. Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are modeled on this architecture. When the same critical data is mirrored on multiple computers, outages affecting one or more nodes (up to a point) wouldn’t necessarily down the entire network. Points of failure (which are also potential points for controlling access) are eliminated in a distributed model.
It is this last feature in particular that makes distributed network designs more democratic. The nodes that make up the network are equal participants in that they can’t govern what others say and do on the network. They can control only what they themselves choose to share with others, and this participation is voluntary. A network of networks patterned according to the principle of P2P distribution, client-side APIs and real-time communications makes it far more difficult for authoritarian governments to monitor and control data traffic, and I consider that a good thing.
To be sure, it also has the potential of creating what Kirkpatrick refers to as “a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.” This includes the two threats that Internet critics point to the most when they call for a little law and order in cyberspace: pedophiles and terrorists.
I’m also aware that a lot of the data shared on current P2P networks are copyrighted materials: movies, music and software applications that users don’t want to have to pay for. So while the idea that we can have more democratic communications over distributed networks is certainly laudable, it remains an open question whether in fact we are using or would use these networks for a common good (watchdog reporting, open political debate, advocacy and so forth) instead of for personal gain or even for nefarious activities.
Perhaps the answer is that some users will employ distributed network communications for positive social, political and ethical ends and others will not.
When I was an undergraduate student at Florida Atlantic University, I remember being told by my instructors that they were going to try to develop my critical thinking skills. The concept was an abstraction to me. Actually, I’m one of those people who really doesn’t get a concept until I’m given an example. So I really didn’t get what critical thinking was for a long time. And by the time I got it, it turns out I’d already been doing it for awhile.
Initially, I thought that analyzing something critically meant being critical about it. Since I am in general a polite person (more so when I was younger), I wondered if I’d be able to manage doing critical analysis. What if I didn’t have anything negative to say? I was doing mostly film analysis at the time, and I really liked movies. So I felt particularly stymied by the idea that I had to find something critical to say about what I was watching.
When I started teaching, I realized that many of my own students were making the same mistake I had made and even taking it a step further. They were hyper-critical to the point of being cynical about practically everything. Cynicism is too often passed off as intellect. When students are trying to impress, they think that the best way to proceed is to say something cynical: “Well, I don’t believe anything I read on the Internet.”
Really? You don’t believe anything posted online? Well, how fruitless is that! Do you really mean that after determining that the source of the information you have been given is a valid source and after confirming the information with a few other reliable sources, you still don’t believe it?
The cynical approach is not critical thinking. A cynic doesn’t evaluate anything; he simply rejects everything out of hand.
Critics of ideology in the media (here, see Frankfurt School as one example) warn us that the masses are made gullible, spoon fed “facts” by the mass media to make them more politically malleable and docile. Critical thinking lies somewhere between this gullibility of the masses and the knee-jerk mistrust characterized by the cynic.
Critical thinking is neither about receiving information as it’s given nor about rejecting it out of hand. It’s fundamentally about asking questions in order to evaluate what you are being told or shown. At the end of the critical process, you will hopefully wind up knowing something more than when you started, perhaps even something emancipatory and enlightening.
Learning always begins by asking questions:
An example of the last question is provided by Justin Wolfers’ March 2011 Freakonomics blog, which critically analyzes a scatter plot as a form of “advocacy science.” Wolfers shows that the dates used by John Taylor to demonstrate correlation between unemployment and investment are selective and that very different results (in fact, no statistically significant correlation at all) are given when all the available data are plotted. What I love about this example is how something as ostensibly self evident as quantitative analysis is shown to be skewed as a simple function of the scope of one’s sample. As Wolfers warns, “Be wary of economists wielding short samples.”
This also reminds me of a joke my professor for a course on research methodologies told me when I was an M.A. student at FAU: Two statisticians were off hunting and spotted a deer. One fired and missed the deer 20 feet to the left. The other fired and missed the deer 20 feet to the right. And then they both looked at each other and yelled, “We got him!” (The moral: stats are seldom on target. Their truth claims are based on mathematical principles that may not adequately reflect real-life circumstances.)
Okay, so what does all of this mean for critical thinking? It means that we also need to ask about how data is gathered and presented. “Facts” are not these things that are just out there waiting to be discovered. “Facts” are constructed. How do we know that this is a fact? What makes it a fact? These are fundamentally critical questions. The point is not to ask questions endlessly, of course, but to ask at least some relevant questions before accepting or rejecting the thing you are analyzing.
It also helps to know when to ask questions and who to ask. For me, the time to start asking is when we’re told we shouldn’t ask questions. This is where it gets tricky in relating critical thinking to politics. For example, for some people, demanding your leaders explain why we’re at war is considered unpatriotic.
Patriotism: now there’s a term that needs to be unpacked and subjected to a little critical analysis. Have at it.