I’m embarrassed to admit this, but 10 years later, I’m obsessed with The Matrix.  At first I thought it was just longing for Keanu, but I’ve come to realize the movie taps my enduring fascination with notions of truth.  Neo, one of the main characters is asked, "What is real?" and the Matrix trilogy is a search for answers to perennial questions - What’s real?  What’s not.  What’s software?  What’s hardware? What’s numinal – literally from the clouds - at the outreaches of consciousness?

Changing notions of truth have come into high relief as the penetration of broadband increases and any voice can be heard. Traditionalists ask “Can you really trust what bloggers or citizen journalists claim as truth?” Web voices ask, “Is objectivity even possible?  The old fashion science of hermeneutics – the study of interpretation – is now front and center in popular culture.

Perhaps that’s why Stephen Colbert has been so successful with the meme of ‘truthiness’.  The immediacy and fluidity of the web means we care more than ever, about who is to be trusted and where authority lies. We care more about figuring out what is true because we can. Even the Wikipedia “band of rebels”, have become police or even ‘agents’, working to sanitizing opinion from it’s pages.

I interviewed Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media for our recent research on innovation and media for Northwestern’s Media Management Center.  When asked about the future of news, Horan began riffing about the changing notions of truth the web spawns. “Truth is collaborative, it’s not an absolute fact. The truth is what we agree on - which is emerging.”

Practically speaking, truth will always be a difficult issue. What really happened at any one point in time is slippery. The harder you try to grasp it, the more it crumbles.  If you’ve ever made pie dough before, you know what I mean. I often think of truth as a cloud that hovers over those who dialogue about issues they care about and ideally know something about.  And the web provides a form of this cloud of collaboration – however imperfect – always changing and emerging. 

The late philosopher Paul Ricouer in his study of the written word said “What the text means now means more than what the author meant when he wrote it”.  This was prescient of how text operates on the web.  The intentions of the author have slipped off the horizon of time.  What matters is how we all think of it together. Somebody tell Neo - that’s what’s real.