User-generated content

Let’s say that you’re reading a news story about a particular area of geographic conflict and you decide to investigate further. Without an encyclopedia available, as fewer and fewer of us seem to have them on hand these days, you quickly check out your handy online references. To your surprise, the article on this disputed feature seems to be an amalgamation of strongly differing opinions and ideologies, to the point where the article has been locked down from further editing. Such is the nature of the brave new world of user-generated content, where a content publisher forges a careful alliance of sorts with a wide range of contributors across very diverse locales and cultures. Depending on the intended purpose of the provided content, the end result can take on a life of its own, as it becomes the focal point for a silent yet fervent battle over “fact” and “truth” from divergent viewpoints.

Text by Tom Edwards

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User-generated content

In this new world of social networks, the blogosphere, online communities and the ever-growing notion of “crowdsourcing” factual information, the pure objectivity of content has become even more tenuous and fleeting. Why do I say more tenuous, as if to suggest that perhaps our trusted information resources weren’t objective to begin with? Well, quite frankly, they weren’t. As a cartographer, I can directly attest to this reality, at least as it pertains to maps. I’ve conveyed previously in this column that experienced cartographers realize the maps you read, and often implicitly trust, are actually the end products of a long process of empirical data passing through several stages of subjective human interventions based on a specific purpose, the technology available, the intended audience, and the organizational and/or cultural context. What could be called a “correct” map in one ...

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