Smart Mobs: Swarm Intelligence Takes On CBS
Well, I sure can pick a time to have all my virtual worldly goods in a figurative box, can't I? If you've been off the net for the last 24, or confine your reading to business blogs, I'm talking about the takedown of the apparently forged Bush TANG memos proffered by Dan Rather on Sixty Minutes. In the clearest demonstration to date of the power of citizens' media, dozens to hundreds of experts ranging from typography to antique typewriters to military lexicons and document formatting spontaneously organized and seem to have soundly beaten the research capabilities and judgment of a major mass media organization. Less than one day from the first 'huh?' on a single blog, to major splashback to the MSM. There were a lot of players, but from the post mortem analysis point of view, perhaps this post at Powerline is one of the more interesting, for its blow-by-blow posting of the accumulating interest and evidence.
On the substance of the forgery, I'm not an expert on any of the topics above, but I do span the interval from manual typewriters to Selectrics (best d**n keyboard ever made) to Wordstar to Word. If the 'explanations' I'm seeing for how those memos just happen to look like Word output are the best that can be done, then CBS (and maybe the Democratic party) have just had their Rosemary Woods tape moment. If you're old enough to have seen an F-102, you're old enough to know what I'm talking about.
From the long perspective, regardless of your politics, realize that you have just seen history made. With the Trent Lott affair, the blogosphere demonstrated greater persistence than the mainstream media. With the forgery episode, it has conclusively demonstrated its superiority in speed. If you speak OODA loop, it's proof positive that citizens' media are so far inside the loop of the mass media that it isn't even funny. You've just a seen a virtual F-16 turnin' and burnin', while the turboprop bomber of the mass media wonders what the heck happened. As usual, Wretchard puts things into the global perspective, and then takes the military metaphor a step further. Me, I'm sitting back with a glass of wine, waiting for round two: the search for the sources.
Oh, yeah, I did sort of borrow someone else's tag line, didn't I? Well, they weren't using it anyway, since this best example of effective swarm intelligence to date is apparently not of interest, as of this posting. I wonder why that is? Meanwhile, the coiner of the phrase "citizens' media" wishes the whole thing would go away. I wonder why that is? < /snark> As for CBS, let's just say "tick, tick, tick...". I wonder how black that eye can get?
Update 9/14: Tony Blankley says it more eloquently. Creative destruction indeed!
