[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Friday, Sept. 1, 2006. Click here to read more columns.]
Stephen Colbert has become both a hero and a scourge to fans of the open internet lately: a hero for embracing what the all-for-one ethos online can do, and a scourge for hilariously underscoring the weaknesses of what can happen when anyone can edit anything.
The Colbert Report - a parody of televised gabfests, and which Colbert fronts four nights a week - has become a staple for me, much like Jon Stewart's Daily Show, which spawned it. Colbert's persona is that of an uber-patriotic pundit, whom Colbert himself describes as a "well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot."
I still prefer the Daily Show, but I have to handle to Colbert for insinuating himself so quickly into the culture with phrases like "truthiness" and "wordinistas."
Truthiness, which Colbert coined last October, is about wanting the facts to mean what you want, rather than what they are; a wordinista, of course, is someone stubbornly sticking to an old-fashioned definition.
(So potent was truthiness, by the way, that the American Dialect Society picked it as its word of 2006, less than three months after its debut.)
Over the last month, Colbert has given us another gem: wikiality. "What we're doing is bringing democracy to knowledge," Colbert said on his July 31 episode, as he introduced the word.
He then invited his viewers to log on to Wikipedia - the open-source encyclopedia that allows any user to edit most any document - and write that the population of elephants had actually tripled in the last six months.
The population of elephants has in fact declined, but Colbert - the persona, it should be remembered - argued that environmentalists could be corrected on anything if enough people said it was so.
Colbert's fans - heroes, he calls them - did so, with enough volume to crash the site temporarily, and (more enduringly prompting Wikipedia to lock down almost two dozen articles containing data about elephants.
Colbert made his point, but that was just the start. A month of so after it was coined, "wikiality" at this writing returns more than 290,000 hits on Google, and has spawned a funny site by that name. (With, yes, a full - and fictitious - entry on elephants.)
The so-called Web 2.0 revolution has been made fun of before, but never so sharply or so well; after all, Colbert proved the risks that come with levelling the playing field. One of his damning lines about Wikipedia, for instance, was that a reference "that has a longer section on 'truthiness' than Lutherans has its priorities straight."
That said, Colbert has embraced online culture like few other mainstream entertainers.
Over the last month, Colbert used his website to spark an avalanche of votes calling for a bridge in Hungary to be named in his honour. (This should serve as a warning about tampering to those who launch online contests.)
Also this month, Colbert's staff noticed that a short bit of comic video - of him playing in front of a green screen, like a light-sabre-wielding character from Star Wars - got tweaked with some special effects.
Colbert showed the bit on his show, and then threw open a challenge to home-based animators: download this (via his site, Colbert Nation, itself a parody of fan sites), and send your version back up. One of them, featuring a computer-generated monster, background and sound effects, was breathtaking, and much more entertaining than anything the show itself could have concocted.
Meanwhile, I'm expecting - and hoping - that Colbert will continue to poke holes in the Web 2.0 bubble, and the downside of wikiworld. After all, as his own show put it, the revolution will not be verified.
On the web
The Colbert Report
Colbert Nation
Ostensibly, Colbert Nation is a fan site created by a rabid watcher of the show - one who just happened to set it up before the show went to air, and whose registration addresses matches the makers of the program. It is, indeed, a knockoff of enthusiastic fan sites, and it's pretty funny too. It's also where things like the green-screen challenge wind up. The "official" site is not that staid, by comparison; if you miss an episode, you can watch the highlights online.
Colbert on Wikiality
This clip on YouTube is Colbert's introduction of wikiality, and the spark that launched thousands of instant elephant experts.
Wikipedia
Wikiality
Wikipedia is already several times larger than Encyclopedia Britannica, and although its credibility will always be an issue (at least as long as it hews to its open-editing ethos), its standards have improved substantially this year. Wikiality is a Colbert-inspired parody site; so far, for instance, it is available in only one language - American.
John Gushue is a news writer for CBC.ca in St. John's. Site suggestions always welcome at surf at thetelegram.com.
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