Thesis: The single most important challenge to a free, liberal democracy, is the preservation of the marketplace of ideas
1) Without a symmetric information market, a sub-optimal allocation of resources will result; in the case of society, inefficiency and possibly poor decision making
2) Individual actors in the information market have an incentive to maximize their self-interest by promoting a disproportionally higher level of truth, untruth to their arguments and that of their competitors
3) Thus, biases are inherently human nature and some level of bias is unavoidable
4) Yet, biases, like other competing externalities can be mitigated (internalized) by a system of checks & balances
5) What entity (or combination thereof) optimally ensures minimization of biases in information? (i.e., who bares the costs of production?)
a. Government – risk of pro-government stance
b. Corporate conglomerate – risk of pro-corporate interest stance
c. Stand alone operation / fully-supported by public – risk of issue polarization/more profitable in niche than mainstream (e.g. Fox News) OR not commercially viable (e.g., The Nation) OR risk of non-consumption or shift to lower cost ad-subsidized corporate entities (e.g., reading the Metro rather than the New York Times)
6) What are some potential solutions to this?
a. Blind ad system would ensure strong pull toward the middle as opposed to polarization (e.g., ad dollars flow to mainstream, accurate sources rather than partisan sources) – drawback: prevents advertisers from targeting demographics most likely to buy their product; Republicans and Democrats feel, think, act differently, buy very different products/services
b. Checks & balances both embedded within the information producing organizations and also in between entities public (PBS), private (New York Times), and consumers (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) – drawback: creates double-doing (e.g., Every information provider held to same standards)
c. Decentralization of news along the long tail – total available information increases – drawback: potentially leads to consumers to only select sources that propagate their incumbent viewpoints; may lead to enhanced levels of cognitive dissidence (e.g., no standards for news organizations, becomes more difficult for public to ascertain a given organization’s credibility)
Personally, I think we are on a course of decentralization. More broadly, old economy information aggregators such as the nightly news, newspapers and the like will be replaced by user-specific aggregators (e.g., Google Reader) that bring an array of diverse topics of a users interest to their attention forgoing unwanted articles. This can be both beneficial and dangerous as it will reduce information overload (hence increasing personal utility) but also runs the risk of reducing society's exposure to sources of facts and opinion that they were unwilling to subscribe to beforehand.
