Highlights |
 Press Releases | Reality Check For immediate release Contact: Suzanne Seggerman (suzanne@weblab.org) Reality Check is many things in one. It is a non-partisan public interest resource to counter the excesses of the media and model a new kind of public discourse on public issues. It is a community composed of small, online discussion groups, developed as an experiment to overcome some of the limitations of bulletin-board online discussions. And, finally, it is an opportunity to jump into the mess that is the impeachment hearings (and everything leading up to them) and come away with a clearer head. Reality Check is not a place to rehash partisan politics or obsess over the details of another media explosion that has overwhelmed us all. Instead, it's a place to sort out what we think about an event (or a set of events) that is so heavily covered by the media that we've lost track of what's important. It is premised on the idea that people with divergent beliefs -- given the time and space to connect in a safe environment -- will be able to move beyond rhetoric and rediscover the complexities that are obscured by polarized positions. The Dilemma of the Invisible Man Culture Reality Check is implementing a unique experimental technique in on-line dialogue and community building. Although Web-based discussions offer users the ability to connect with each other -- one of the most powerful things any technology can do -- they often create a series of drive-by postings, rather than a community. Most on-line discussions are based on several unwritten rules, which tend to hinder the development of conversations:
2. There is no set starting or end point for the conversation, and members can join or leave at any time. 3. A participant can remain completely anonymous. 4. A participant need have no responsibility for the discussion nor his/her contribution to it. A New Model for Web-based discussion Reality Check's Dialogue Groups were developed to challenge the assumptions generated by this culture and its structures -- to experiment with an alternative model. Each group is a forum in which there is a small, set number of conversants, who agree to participate for a defined period of time. A member can decide how anonymous he or she wants to be, deciding for example whether to use his/her real name or a screen name, and deciding how much to disclose when writing a short bio and participating in the discussions. But, on the theory that our perspectives are shaped by our background, participants are encouraged to ground their discussion in what they've learned through personal experience. When a group gets under way, all of the members are introduced to one another, and throughout the discussions, members hold each other accountable for their comments and interactions with others. While the dialogues are available to the public for reading, only members can initiate new topics of conversation or post messages in their group. The details are, on the surface not remarkable, perhaps seemingly not worthy of an experiment of this nature. But when considered in the context of the Web and its Invisible Man culture, what they present to the users is quite radical. This structure is built on Web Lab's belief that one of a Web site's greatest assets is the people who come there. A site that values this relationship can seek to create an on-line environment that advocates for and assists the users to develop on-line relationships and generate content out of what occurs among them. Web Lab first explored the potential of small group discussions last summer with P.O.V. Salon, a site it created for the award-winning public TV series P.O.V. The lessons learned from Reality Check will be shared with people interested in the Internet and its role in society. |
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