Web 2.0 - isn’t it fantastic? Everyone’s an author, an editor and an instant publisher. Everyone has an opinion and everyone has an instant audience. Bravo. It’s democratic, I’ll give it that, but do you remember when Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal actually had some credibility? For a long while now every time I click on a headline, it turns out to be a badly written, poorly researched and non-edited blog entry. And, ultimately, a waste of my time. I’m very good at wasting time, I don’t need Newsweek to provide more opportunities.
But what am I going to do? Scream into space and exhaust myself in frustration? That would be silly too and so I thought that it would be clever to keep up with the rest of society and enter the social networking fray. I started this blog, I’m on Twitter and FaceBook. I write insipid myopic reviews on goodreads.com I’ve made an attempt to embrace it and I feel like I’ve given it a good turn. After all of this, I’m still not convinced. I may get taken to the edge of town and stoned for this, but it all feels like AOL 1.0, just more voices.
The egalitarianism is lovely though and if you know nothing about human nature it seems like it could all work out. Perhaps like-minded people will find each other and share information. Nobody will be responsible for fact-checking or journalistic integrity, we’ll just take each other at face value and trust that everyone knows what they’re talking about. We’ll all just type and find each other through keywords and create beautiful little societies on the internet. Sounds so cozy.
And stupid.
As we blindly and boldly march into another dark age and cast away all of the knowledge that has been so hard won. We forget civility, we forget common courtesy, we forget facts, we operate on impulse. We give away schematics and engineering skills to countries that we don’t trust, we can no longer manufacture anything ourselves and depend entirely on more countries that don’t particularly like us. We don’t read because we’ve already read the Cliff Notes on the internet and we know it all. And besides, there’s a movie. And there are the reviews on IMDB so why would you bother with any of that?
Then there is Wikipedia, “the sum of all human knowledge”, spearheading the campaign for misinformation and leading the parade into darkness. The most efficient way to dumb us all down that I’ve ever seen or could have imagined. It’s an interesting concept; to toss out the window any opinion from an expert on a subject and allow anyone with a loud enough voice and the tenacity to edit a page to carry the day.
It is the Randian Objectivism of Jimbo Wales at work, making the effort of learning a subject meaningless because the populous opinion will win out over facts. He trusts you to do the right thing and edit the encyclopedia responsibly. Only web 2.0 could create an environment where I can type a line like that… “edit the encyclopedia responsibly”. Just so you know, I’ve heard it on Web 2.0 that the George Bush page spends 80% of the day vandalized.
It is free though and the real encyclopedia’s that have been thoroughly researched and sourced and documented cost money to access (Encyclopedia Britannica is $69.95 a year). With web 2.0 we’ve traded the value of real education for the shiny ease of use and no-cost alternative of opinions and graffiti. Which makes it almost useless for anything other than entertainment.
You may be saying to yourself “well, it’s just Wikipedia, who cares”? But it’s not just Wikipedia; that content is all over the web, quoted as fact, embedded in websites. It’s one of those proper nouns that has become a verb and most of the Google searches I do return Wikipedia articles in the first one or two results.
When I read about previous dark ages it breaks my heart to realize how long it took to recover only some of that lost knowledge and ponder where we would be as a species if it hadn’t been allowed to happen. It’s incredibly frustrating to watch real education lose respect to the loudest voice with truth being the victim.
So let’s all hold hands in our little online societies and watch together as we travel down the slope towards complete and utter stupidity.
WOW…damit…SOB…nail on the head…
Todd, just to clarify, are you sobbing or cussing?
Dear Joanne,
Have mercy on yourself & others: begin the piece at “Web 2.0 – isn’t it fantastic?” would be my suggestion. Don’t talk crap about your own writing (for more than half a sentence) if you want someone to keep reading it! In this genre–I’d place your blog and mine as online literary journalism–self deprecation can be a spice but not a side dish.
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
Dear Arrogant bastard,
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