Reminiscing on the old economics class I had, one concept that always comes to mind is Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Adam Smith determined that economic balance is regulated by a natural force that keeps things in shape. I remember at the time that I thought on how this applies to other areas of society – such political, sociological or technological terms. But I will not digress into those sectors – those have already been explored by specialists far more knowledgeable than me. Instead, I’m focusing into what I know best – the Web. I believe that, like in economy, there is an invisible hand regulating the online world – but exactly how and to what extent?
As I mentioned before on my Generation Nostalgia post, the future generation is still going to be information addicted – via blogs, wikis and forums, but with a different approach. We are living the peak of Generation C, where everyone is entitled to an opinion and where the opinion leaders are still focused around a few major players such as the Fake Steve Jobs or Kevin Rose. But more players are rising and each blog on the blogosphere, as each article on Wikipedia, is a certified user generated and validated source of information. And this leads to the inevitable question – what is considered a reliable source of information nowadays? More and more kids are using Wikipedia as a bibliographic reference in school work – how are we sure about the quality of the information they used?
The next generation will, in my opinion, gradually overcome this problem via a natural selection. As opinion leaders rise in the net, so will the filtering as to separate the bookish information from the regular opinion. The wannabe’s will fall as crowds will gather around the true opinion makers. Sure, this already happens to some extent nowadays – that’s why some blogs have so many visits versus others who don’t. But in the next generation, the Oldies – who will be Teachers at that time – will be able to look at your grandkids assignments and say “So you got this from Wikipedia. If it’s not written by X, Y or Z, then it’s not 100% true!”. What’s the difference from now? In a nutshell, the naiveté from the current internet users and general offline world will be replaced by a refiner sense of fidelity towards information, thus generating not only User Generated Content, but Validated User Generated Content – like a certification that will be required for blogs and sites to be considered a truly reliable source of information.