Comments on: Neo-Luddite Quasi-Mandarins

By: Wido Incognitus

Wido Incognitus — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 12:56:19 +0000

Web 2.0 is terrible. I would agree that it is probably ahistorical to describe new media as contributing to a general decline in intellectual abilities across society, but Scott’s line about “digital literacy” being an aspect of critical thinking is a dodge. Critical thinking can just as easily be used in evaluating the competing claims in more refereed media, which are generally more accurate anyway than new media trash.
It is true that protection of authority plays an important role in opposition to new media, but this is necessary! Wikivangelism encourages noise and alienation. Noise comes from people with little experience or training in an area feeling themselves entitled to argue wrong positions on subjects about which they know nothing, (of course they ignore the fact that expert sanction is that which makes mcu of the wikipedia knowledge reliable in order to convince themselves of a vast expert conspiracy that kept humanity impoversished until 2002). It is true that this would happen anyway (one of the main reasons I hate blogs is that those complainers often pretend as if this is the first time this has ever happened, as if people not in the business of media never had any media access before 2002) but it now happens on a much larger scale than would be the case in a wonderful world absent blogs and wikipedia. Alienation comes from the fact that human interaction is undermined in order to discover knowledge or buy products. People lose this natural need and hide their anger with the blogger’s stream of self-righteous faux-rationality with rapids of pique against political incorrectness. Even consumption of older impersonal media was vastly superior to the current situation. In that case the medium consumed was the clear product of a number of people working together to construct it instead of morons anonymously editing each other’s work and programmers and installation professionals who are so numerous that they could not possibly have credits.
The end of the Inside Higher Ed. piece rejects (wrongly) the idea that the challenge of new media is “new” but still acknowledges the possibility of unpleasantness. But that’s OK. You will continue to ignore any critism of this and dismiss that which does come to your attention with various unnecessary and idiotic counter-arguments (Do you deny that the digital barbarians have more in common with Maoists et al. than do the editors of Britannica?) in order to convince yourselves that you’ve never had it this good. Destroy all your internet connections!
I am entitled use the internet as the prohphet of old media.

By: Crooked Timber » » The Triffid

Crooked Timber » » The Triffid — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 01:53:54 +0000

[...] Another victory for the Digital Barbarians of the LazyWeb. Correctly identified within three comments as Tree Tobacco, Nicotiana Glauca, and [...]

By: Diary of a Mad Natural Historian » A Very Nice Morning

Diary of a Mad Natural Historian » A Very Nice Morning — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 13:48:20 +0000

[...] good entry point into the Gorman/Encyclopedia Brittanica dustup (I’m still reading the posts) aka Neo-Luddite [...]

By: SG

SG — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:01:30 +0000

No ejh, they would concern fully qualified (I checked) librarians wasting hours of my time failing to do a task I subsequently had to do myself. And yes, the tasks were more complex than finding a book – right in the realm of the specialist librarian, in fact.

By: Jon H

Jon H — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 21:24:11 +0000

sph writes: “Perhaps this could be addressed by entities such as Britannica providing more of their reference and source information, and the identities of the authors of their entries. That would allow the concerned reader to dig deeper and judge the trustworthiness of the material (and the “experts”) for themselves. Then again, wouldn’t that make them more like Wikipedia?”

Britannica does do this.

By: yabonn

yabonn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 21:07:12 +0000

If you want to digress, put it in a link.

And what with the footnotes? Yes? No? Under conditions? And if the footnotes are linking in the page? Out of the page? If out of the page, does a permalink makes it different?

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:29:18 +0000

Henry: Your post, excluding the long citation, had four sentences in parentheses. It is a strength of Web culture that it encourages plain writing and frowns on internal digression. If you want to digress, put it in a link. If you are not digressing, parentheses are an affectation of indecision. (I’m a sinner too here.) Joined-up thinking = your ducks all in a row.

By: flavaflav

flavaflav — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:32:07 +0000

“The google and the internet is like a free market economy and the librarian/encyclopedia model is like soviet central planning. No wonder the mandarins in control of top-down authority control don’t want to lose their place.”

Yea, fight the power john g

By: sPh

sPh — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:24:50 +0000

.> And I can’t stress how very standard
> Wikipedia is, in terms of the
> commune/cult pattern

Whereas I am always struck by how similar the goings-on at Wikipedia are to what acquaintances who have worked in commercial information publishing tell me happens behind closed doors at those entities. Very few encyclopedia insiders have ever broken the veil, but the essays by Asimov and Feynman tend to confirm what I have heard from much smaller players.

Does Britannica have access to substantial experts who can make definitive statements on certain topics? Yes. At the same time, topics where definitive statements can be made usually have pretty good entries in Wikipedia too. I have looked up Wikipedia articles on certain lesser-known electric power generation technology and found them more thorough and better written than Britannica’s.

When you get to controversial historical and political topics, of course, Wikipedia’s entries go crazy. But is that different from Britannica? Or just carried out in the open? What would a Britannica article on the Tuskegee Experiments written for the 1970 edition had said? Nothing. Yet some of Britannica’s medical contributors had to have known those experiments were going on. How would that compare to a crazy, “conspiracy theory” (parallel universe) Wikipedia entry on the same subject in 1970? Would the answer be different in 1974?

Perhaps this could be addressed by entities such as Britannica providing more of their reference and source information, and the identities of the authors of their entries. That would allow the concerned reader to dig deeper and judge the trustworthiness of the material (and the “experts”) for themselves. Then again, wouldn’t that make them more like Wikipedia?

sPh

By: John G

John G — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 12:38:05 +0000

The google and the internet is like a free market economy and the librarian/encyclopedia model is like soviet central planning. No wonder the mandarins in control of top-down authority control don’t want to lose their place.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:11:51 +0000

Henry, I was trying to respond to “I’m not aware of anyone, apart from the odd blogger in the odd blogpost who is making that case in a compelling and sophisticated way”. I’m not sure what context you had in mind, but from my perspective. the problem is that there’s no interest group which will publicize making that case. What I was saying in my post is that there’s a base of support for this-changes-EVERYTHING, and on the other side, for hell-in-an-handbasket. But the measured critique has no constituency which will get it heard. If someone writes it, or already has written it, you’ll likely never hear about it.

By the way, no offense meant to Aaron, but he wasn’t the first or most extensive to examine who does substantial updating in Wikipedia – he independently replicated some more academic research. This was pointed out in the comments to his post. But you heard Aaron, because he has more reach in your social network. Anyway, see Seth Anthony “Contribution Patterns among Active Wikipedians: Finding and Keeping Content Creators” wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:SA1

And I can’t stress how very standard Wikipedia is, in terms of the commune/cult pattern (albeit with an interesting Internet twist). You could take any 1960’s era paper on the anthropology of small revolutionary communes led by a charismatic leader, and apply it to Wikipedia. But the attention is all in writing “wisdom of crowds … democracy … new new new …” (or inversely “mindless masses … communists … bad bad bad …”).

What I meant by group dynamics is that the Internet twist means much more of the interaction is documented, for anthropological analysis. So you can trace feuds, factions, alliances, etc. to a greater degree than if you had to go out and live on Jimbo’s Revolutionary Server Farm. Crucially, not all of it is public, since there’s still the backchannels that are inner-circle-only. But more of it is visible than trying to run around from the field to the house to the canteen to get an overall view of the interactions.

I semi-joke that somebody needs to find some middle-aged/senior-citizen former-hippie women who are now social sciences academics in order to do this right.

By: frank

frank — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:10:13 +0000

“it’s not as far as I can tell stupid and ill-informed; it’s my experience…”

Then it MUST be true, right? See, folks, this Web 2.0 thingy will work out just fine, nutting to worry about at all. Wikipedia tells me that the treatment of solipsims as “a bankrupt philosophy, or at best bizarre and unlikely” just ain’t fair…

By: ejh

ejh — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 10:32:28 +0000

Would they concern a fully-qualified librarian (I assume you checked this) telling you where to find a book in the library?

By: SG

SG — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:57:30 +0000

ejh, it’s not as far as I can tell stupid and ill-informed; it’s my experience of trying to get librarians to help me with anything. I suppose it could be my fault; but I could tell you stories that would make your ears burn.

By: ejh

ejh — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:37:13 +0000

No, sara, I think (from knowing quite a few young and disgruntled librarians) that the older librarians are pissed off at the “cult of googling” for showing that most librarians` jobs can be done by anyone who can read and type. Sure, there are specialists out there but the majority of librarians are really just doing the google thing themselves, and being paid considerably more than people who work in bookstores to essentially do the same thing.

What an extraordinarily stupid and ill-informed comment this is. Knowledge and evaluation of sources? Understanding of the requirements of the user? Tailoring of search terms according to the purpose of the search? Professional experience of problems encountered in searching and the various means by which they may be overcome? Appreciation of the limits of electronic sources, both specifically and generally? All instantly knowable to anybody who can read and type, apparently. Oh, and apparently librarians just do the same stuff as people who work in bookshops. That’s because all they do is look up books, isn’t it? (I suspect somebody here doesn’t know what librarians do or realise that there may be a difference between waht a library assistannt on the checkout desk does and what professionally-qualified librarians – not just a few “specialists” – are actually able and required to do.)

What’s actually annoying (a qualified librarian writes) is that you have to deal with this sort of pig-ignorance on a regular basis: people who think that because they think they know how to use Google they can do something that they do not remotely understand in the first place.

Pope wrote that “a little learning is a dangerous thing”. He might have added that fuck-all knowledge and a contempt for learning was not only dangerous but dangerously stupid.