You, kind sir, are correct on all counts. What a great article that is. I have such a bad memory that Google and the iPhone are magic for me, reading that article made it feel less like a handicap.

The self deprecation is an obvious defense mechanism, but now that you’ve pointed it out it does seem a little abusive to everyone. I probably shouldn’t beat people up just for ending up here.

I cannot remember what prompted this particular scream of frustration, I do a lot of screaming and ranting. I have a genuine fear that we have been purposely denied real education; fed misinformation and jingoistic propaganda for so long that as our life span has increased in the last hundred or so years, our collective IQ has decreased at a faster rate. Now I’m going to get all worked up again just thinking about the textbooks from Texas. No, I won’t. What I will do is thank you for your time and then take your valuable advice and edit this so that no one knows what we’re talking about.

Signed,

Snarky

Your concerns about wikipedia make sense to me. I also wonder whether the web and wikipedia have often been the terrain on which somebody discovered his or her appetite for learning; if so, it has probably also been the place where a somewhat smaller number of people discovered that footnotes must actually lead somewhere adequate if a text is to be taken seriously (i.e., if its claims are to be repeated & cited in one’s own work).

“Case Closed” was Gerald Posner’s CIA-backed whitewash of the JFK murder. Over-published from above in huge numbers but read by few, the book proved to be a steaming morass of disinformation, omission, plagiarism, and invention, backed by footnotes that led nowhere. “Case Closed” was a disinfo book written (on demand, or perhaps on command) by an authorial prostitute, not a webpage spun by myriad anonymous users, but it had a version of the same problem you rightly lament about wikipedia. This suggests that the umbrella issue which comprises vetting, sourcing, peer review, and research standards & methods is far older than the web and remains as double edged as ever. The web is home to thousands of peer reviewed journals that are as free of wikiism as can be, whereas the NYT, “newspaper of record,” has long since sold its credibility to the highest bidder. So it’s hard to see print & the past as somehow free of the same trouble.

I may be underestimating the problem. As was once the case with books about the intellectual effects of chronic television watching, most mass mkt trade paperbacks on the internet smartosity question seem to be laments, and they do make a case (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, etc.). There is also a good case for the opposite view, where computers and a habit of high internet use gets correlated (or perhaps even more strongly associated than that) with cognitive enhancement of one kind or another.

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/15-how-google-is-making-us-smarter

If you’ll permit me an interpretation, I think the piece you’ve written here is a scream of frustration at the non-fulfillment of your own intellectual needs, pervaded with a deep indignant hope that you perhaps deserve far better than what the readily available media can seem to provide without charging fees that become prohibitive the moment a degree/credential is involved.

That raises the opposite problem: one wants neither a postmodern discursive community free of all authority (wiki, at its straw-man worst), nor a medieval one where appeals to authority are the ultimate horizon of truth.

Arrogant bastard signing off…
JH