Truth in Online Community

Returning to the original topic in this blog, reflecting on the nature of life online and real, living a life of truth is now even more poignant with the explosion of messages online. The problems with veracity online is well-known, but not only among spammers and hackers. Even a mainstream community such as Wikipedia is subject to falsehoods creeping into the millions of articles. Six Sigma is needed in Satyagraha even more urgently online than in real life.

The ambiguous nature of truth is even more evident online because the three aspects of testing truth - completeness, validity, and consistency, are even more difficult to conduct than in reality. Truth online is like soundbites on television, presented to us in small chucks, on blogs, on web pages, in email messages. None of them provide a complete big picture, and if they do, few of us has the patience, or the time to absorb, to comtemplate the messages in their totality, and weigh them against each other to find inconsistency and mismatch with reality.

Is the cultural ADD of the online population to blame for the low quality of truth in online communities? Is the media cultivated hunger for sensationalism and shock-and-awe at the root of mistrust and misunderstanding reflected in real communities? Only future social historians can debate and conclude for sure. For us living the transitional life of the Future Shock, we can only hope to ride out the Third Wave without wiping out, ourselves and the other living beings on the Big Blue Planet.

An excerpt from M.Scott Peck's Different Drum continuously resurface to my consciousness. Quoting a passage from a book, Freedom from the Known, by the Hindu mystic Krishnamurti:

"We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggreesiveness of our own lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness, our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all of which divide us. And only when we realize, not intellectually but actually, as actually as we would recognize that we are hungry or in pain, that you and I are responsible for all this existing chaos, for all the misery throughout the entire world, because we have contributed to it in our daily lives, and are a part of this monstrous society with its wars, division, its ugliness, brutality and greed-only then will we act."

What struck me and resonated with me upon reading this passage is the profound truth that it points to, cutting through all the philosophical dressing. The fundamental message of peace is simple, as simple as Ghandi's Satyagraha and John Lennon's Imagine, and its application demands more vigorous discipline than Six Sigma:

Each and every act of aggression contributes to the totality of chaos in the world.

When we can feel in empathy the pain and suffering of each and every victim, then we will act to stop aggression every where. When each lie, each falsehood is confronted as a murderous act of killing truth, then we will stop spreading lies online or otherwise. Each act to stop aggression and falsehood must be an individual's act, not by law or compulsion from without, but by conscience or empathy from within. Utopia is the day when every act of aggression, whether physical or verbal, whether mental or emotional, in whatever form, is stopped by each individual making a conscious decision not to cross the Solzhenitsen Line, when every action by each individual in the commmunity is made in the spirit of truth and love.