[Wylug-discuss] Webtraffiker

[Dave Fisher]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 05:56:23PM +0000, Mark Ruddell wrote:
> The bit I struggle with is why marketing should be necessary at all, if
> the playing field were levelled so that unbiased information could speak
> for itself.

Firstly, information can never be entirely unbiased.  It can be more or
less reliable (i.e. produces consistent results when tested), more or
less appropriate (i.e. biased towards the context in question), more or
less balanced (i.e.  incorporating multiple biases), etc.,

Information wouldn't be much use if it were unbiased, which is why we
distinguish between information and data.  If information is processed
data (i.e. biased to suit some further purpose), the concept of data is
a useful fiction which allows us to conduct interesting debates based on
the presumption that we can access and manipulate 'raw' facts.

Of course, in empirical sciences, these 'facts' are always pre-biased by
the processes of selection, collection, observation, etc through which
we gather (create?) them  ... even mathematical objects can be only
treated as 'pure' data within a theoretical context (however
reliable/robust the theoretical models have proved to be).

Secondly, the playing field is never uniformly levelled ... for that to
happen everyone would have to start with exactly the same resources and
apply them all with equal efficiency (communism anybody?).  This is
neither the state of things, nor a very interesting hypothesis (since
information is valued in proportion to its scarcity).

Thirdly, information never speaks for itself.  To exist in the first
place, someone must have interpreted the data it is based on.

In our cynical age we now recognise that many of history's most
revolutionary scientists, were actually individuals who packaged and
marketed the ideas of others.  This doesn't necesarily mean that they
were charlatans.  In many cases the packaging was a genuinely innovative
step which unified otherwise disparate lines of thought.  In other
cases, the scientific 'marketeers' rescued fully formed ideas from the
heretical margins (or complete obscurity) to which conventional wisdom
had consigned them.

In short, even marketeers 'stand on the shoulders of giants'  ... and we
may never have heard of the giants if they hadn't.


> Isn't that one of the benefits of standards-compliant web
> design?

Not necessarily.  The standards themselves are imperfect artifacts
produced by people with particular interests that they want to promote.

Fortunately, from an OSS-promotion point of view, the W3C standards are
(on balance) biased towards the kind of outcomes we tend to favour, e.g.
cross-platform interoperability, vendor-neutrality, low cost of entry,
etc.

Unfortunately, the imperfections leave wriggle room for all sorts of bad
behaviour from browser-based lock-in  to snake oil SEO merchants.

Given the unpleasant motives which drive such people and the even more
unpleasant effects of their success, I think OSS supporters should feel
obligated to use their own technical knowledge to counter them, i.e. use
the standards to do some even more successful marketing.

Dave