A while back I participated in a very interesting discussion. The question was: if you could travel back in time and do one thing, what would it be. We talked through a bunch of different options, from killing Hitler to delaying the development of the nuclear bomb, but eventually we all agreed that the action with the most positive impact would be to introduce Glutenberg’s letterpress printing technology a lot earlier in a widely populated area.
Production, sharing and distribution of information is tremendously important if we want new exciting stuff to happen. But, we are of course reliant on the information shared being correct and accurate. In the days before digital this was hardly a problem: those who produced and shared most information (read: journalists) were employed by newspapers, who in general had a larger emphasis on quality, integrity and credibility. The new wave of digital content producers don’t share these values to the same extent.
It is widely accepted that today’s online journalists and bloggers mostly optimize for one thing only: traffic. I am a strong believer in “you get what you measure”, and if you only measure your traffic you will only focus on traffic. Which means that you to a lesser degree will focus on quality, integrity and credibility. This is something I see over and over again, most recently this morning.
Business Insider did a story on the “24 coolest tech startups in Scandinavia”, and given my origin, location and area of interest this article appeared multiple times in my different social feeds. After reading it I quickly became frustrated with the lack of quality in the story. It’s not that I have something against the listicle format, but content that quite simply is wrong bugs the hell out of me.
This article was about Scandinavian (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) startups, but also mentioned a bunch of Finnish and Icelandic startups. This is a fundamental, factual error, where there is no “room for interpretation”, and something that should be unacceptable for a news blog of Business Insider’s size. Still, it’s business as usual for most news blogs out there. Furthermore, the article listed the publicly traded, founded in 1998-company Aspiro as a startup. While this is something that is more up for interpretation (as there isn’t any clear definition of startup), I believe most agree with me in that this also is wrong. In general, the article was sloppy work, and it worries me that so many shared it so carelessly.
In Norwegian we have a term called “følgefeil” (see pitcture above), which non of our 2 native Americans at StartupLab found any direct translation for. A følgefeil is a mathematical term used to describe when you, as part of solving a long equation, make one computational error that affects the rest of the processes and the end result (while the method used through the rest of the process actually is correct).
The consequences of “følgefeil” are easily evident when it comes to mathematics, but more difficult to see when numbers are not involved. But say that I read the article mentioned above, not knowing clearly the countries included in “Scandinavia”. Going forward, I naively believe that both Finland and Iceland belong to that geographical area, and spread that false knowledge until corrected. It might very well be how the authors James Cook and Joshua Barrie ”learned” it in the first place.
This is a major issue, and I am deeply concerned that some find it trivial. The topic can be something much more serious than the countries of Scandinavia, and the appended implications of a følgefeil can then be even larger. By sharing such articles you say that you accept sloppiness, and increasingly encourage journalists and bloggers to be less thorough in their work.
I guess I should say that we as readers (read: consumers) must take action, but I know for a fact that such initiatives only engage a small minority of us. Instead, the solution probably is to build something that changes the incentives of those who produce content. More on that in a future post.