A World Without Frames

I had the privilege of seeing Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speak at the University of Alabama, courtesy of The Blackburn Institute. In anticipation of seeing him speak, I'd been reflecting on the value of Wikipedia in a post-2016 world. Since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, it seems as though the discourse on social media has become more toxic and less fact-based, that traditional news outlets don't quite know what to do with Trump and his international equivalents, and that non-traditional news outlets are creating and disseminating biased and false information about our world. All the while, Wikipedia continues to churn away, largely free from the toxicity and contentiousness that has gripped the rest of the internet and, seemingly, the rest of the world. How did they do it?

I went into the talk with a slightly more specific version of that question: is it the particular approach/model that Wikipedia uses that is responsible for its relative success vis a vis the Truth, or is it the particular domain in which it operates - that of the encyclopedia? Wales didn't quite speak to this question, but he did talk about his relatively new passion project: the WikiTribune. In a way, the fate of that venture will answer the question, as it applies the model and logic of Wikipedia to the world of news and current events. Wales' working theory seemed to be that ads were largely to blame for the degradation of news: the way that the online ad economy works puts all websites on an even playing field, all competing against one another for attention. News sites do not just compete with other news sites; they compete with parody news sites, entertainment sites, gossip sites, etc. He praised the recent move toward the subscription model, noting that the New York Times has seen recent financial success pursuing this model. Subscriptions prompt users to think, 'what is the overall value of this product, in the long term?' That's a key shift in thinking, from what you click on in an impulsive manner to what you value, a shift from short term thinking to long term thinking. So, if we get rid of the ads, do we improve the quality of news and discourse around news?

My suspicion is that there is another factor at play: whether the content pertains exclusively to current events. News must privilege certain stories over others in a way that an encyclopedia or a library does not, assuming it has a front page (can we conceive of a news site without a front page, regardless of whether said front page is personalized?). Here, the decades of research on framing and agenda setting is relevant: by virtue of editorial decisions about what to cover and what not to cover, news gets us to think about certain issues or events (or certain aspects of those issues/events) and ignore others. Encyclopedias do not direct attention in quite the same way. Sure, it could be argued that within a given entry, an encyclopedia/wikipedia chooses to emphasize certain aspects of the subject while ignoring or downplaying others, and thus frames the subject in a way that shapes perception. But I'd argue the way in which Wikipedia has incorporated different perspectives on contentious topics into entries reduces this effect.

Can you do the same thing with news? Is that what WikiTribune will be?

I haven't a clue. But it was kind of thrilling to be in the room with someone who was taking a stab at solving a problem of this scope, someone who was uniquely positioned to stand a decent chance of succeeding.