David Weinberger: Transparency Subsumes Objectivity | KMWorld
While looking at Knowledge Management World magazine, I came across an article I hadn't seen by David Weinberger, "Transparency: the new objectivity."
The ideas are worth considering in relation to the Journalism That Matters conference in Seattle next week.
Objectivity serves its purpose, but in some of the most important realms, its time has passed. In those realms, transparency is the new objectivity.
Objectivity still is required for much of science. In fact, the scientific method is designed to remove the subjective elements from research. In the classic case, an experiment isolates a single variable to see what effect altering it has. The scientist’s preferences and expectations are carefully made irrelevant. Objectivity works.
But we have taken objectivity into realms where it really should not go. For example, for a long time, journalists aimed to be objective. That’s not an achievable aim, and the claim that reporting is objective is not just wrong but seriously misleading. ...
Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to accept ideas as credible the way the claim of objectivity used to. ... In fact, transparency subsumes objectivity.
There's more - and numerous comments on an earlier draft at Joho, where an astute reader connects these ideas to Yochai Benkler's talk on The End of Universal Rationality:
We have a lot of sophisticated analyses that try, with great precision, to predict and describe existing systems in terms of an assumption of universal rationality and a sub-assumption that what that rationality tries to do is maximize returns to the self. Yet we live in a world where that's not actually what we experience. The big question now is how we cover that distance between what we know very intuitively in our social relations, and what we can actually build with.
[Update: I'm looking back at how Peggy Holman phrased these types of ideas in her Kosmos Journal article, "Journalism that Matters | An Emerging Cultural Narrative." She described the roles and characteristics of the traditional journalist as: outsider, gatekeeper, arbiter of truth, professional, dispassionate. Against those, she contrasted the roles of the journalist in the new news ecology: community member, sense-maker, evaluator, professional and citizen - with passion in the mix.]
