Ministry of Truth

Wikipedia today represents a lot of what social media stands for:

The collaborative building on of ideas.

Wikis are the perfect examples to illustrate this concept of sharing info and constructing knowledge collaboratively. Using this medium, people may edit each other's work to create (ideally) a more objective and accurate source of information.

We all can already imagine this does not exactly work as expected because people will edit things to promote their own opinions, to change compromising information, to manipulate the public.

On a video showed in class recently, the speaker said that reality becomes a commodity when reality is what the majority agrees upon and when who or what controls the majority's thoughts is money.

This reminded me of George Orwell's book, 1984, again. In the book, Orwell created a department called Ministry of Truth in which the government had the workers select, alter and create historical data to promote the totalitarian regime.

If what the speaker suggested about Wikipedia being one of the sources that reflect this entire social media movement of creating knowledge together and editing truth accordingly, and if we take his premise of people being mainly motivated by money, then

We already live in a world somewhat like Orwell invisioned.

The idealistic version of shared information ignores the fact that so many of these media are being used to advertise and propagate existing realities.

Should we rely just on what the majority has to say?