Literacy: December 2007 Archive Page

In Reason, David Harsanyi reviews The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen.

"Can a social worker in Des Moines really be considered credible in arguing with a trained physicist over string theory?" he asks, referring to Wikipedia, the online, user created encyclopedia. "Can a car mechanic have as knowledgeable a 'POV' as that of a trained geneticist on the nature of hereditary diseases? Can we trust a religious fundamentalist to know more about the origins of mankind than a PhD in evolutionary biology?"

Well, yes and no. I, of course, have the prerogative to trust whomever I want. In the same way I once gathered my news from The National Inquirer and listened to Art Bell's late-night radio broadcasts for clues to my place in the universe, today I can ferret out similarly useless information webwide.

The more significant point, one that Keen ignores, is that the Web 2.0 explosion has provided me with something I've never had before: access to ongoing discussions between and among trained physicists, trained geneticists, and religious fundamentalists. Laymen as well as experts are now invited to sit in on these conversations. On occasion, the amateurs get it right, triggering dramatic results. Matt Drudge can announce the Monica Lewinsky scandal while Newsweek dithers about publishing it. Or a blog like Little Green Footballs can help catch Dan Rather peddling forged documents about the president's service record. Rather than undermining information, this new access has expanded users' understanding of the world.

I'd like to add just a bit to Harsanyi's defense of the conversational nature of Wikipedia. The social worker who isn't qualified to argue with a trained physicist over string theory can, of course, contribute to an article on social work. But more important, if the social worker asks questions on the string theory discussion page, or even makes bad edits in the article itself, that's a sign that at least one member of the audience doesn't understand the Wikipedia article, and it's a beacon calling for others to fix the problem, making the article more accessible to the social workers of the world, and in the process, improving it.

This is, of course, the very reason why Wikipedia is not a reliable source for college research papers (or even middle-school ones), but quite frankly nobody should turn to any encyclopedia, not even the printed encyclopedias gathering dust on the library shelves, as the final destination of any serious research. (Encyclopedias provide a general overview, putting a topic into a general context, but you won't find original research in any encyclopedia, you'll just find someone's summary of sources that a serious research should really go read first-hand.)


Because the discussion over each article happens transparently, with each mis-step and correction chronicled in the article history page, the enemy of usefulness on the internet is not the nature of the information itself, but rather the naive attitude of a reader who does not approach that information with the proper critical standpoint.  Each year when I explain to freshmen my attitude towards Wikipedia, somebody in the class is shocked to learn that anybody -- anybody -- can edit an article. Recently, one young man said, "They wouldn't let them put it on the internet if it wasn't true!"

I have high praise for the high school teacher who, instead of banning Wikipedia, instead assigns students to read the discussion page of a controversial topic, so that the students who go on to college will arrive with the idea that college is not all about hunting through textbooks or listening to lectures to find the "right answers," but rather that college is an opportunity to learn the skills necessary to succeed in an information-centered world.

A student sent me an e-mail asking for advice on how to write a letter to the editor. I found plenty of web resources that are designed to help volunteers write letters designed to get a particular message out -- that is, Citizens for the Defense of Rutebegas offer specialized tips for how to write letters that raise awareness of the plight of rutebagas.

I wanted something more general. On rhetorica.net I found a good overview of the general form of a persuasive letter.

Letters to the editor should be thought of as bits of a sustained civic conversation. You are not going to change hearts and minds with a single letter. But you might have a chance with several, well-written letters offered over time. Write for the moment. Write for the one point you're making today. Don't write as if you expect to slam-dunk the issue for all time. Ain't going to happen.

[...]

To conclude: You do not have a First Amendment right to be published in your local newspaper. You do, however, have the right to publish your own newspaper, or a blog, or you can stand on a soapbox and speechify to your heart's content.

Doris Lessing doesn't like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica:

Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn't believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. "And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc." It is now common, she says, for "young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers."

Because, of course, to know about computers is to know nothing of value.

I just read a paper from a college senior who, when writing a paper on a canonically validated text, initially cited more sources from a DVD documentary than from scholarly books and articles, so I, too, lament the decline of literacy. Yet I'm not exactly comfortable with Lessing's take on the value of a liberal-arts education, or her assessment of the causes of the decay of literacy. Like the printing press, blogging puts the power of literacy in the hands of the populace. If the unwashed masses have the tools in their hands, they're going to use them to produce texts about what matters to them, not what matters to the ones who were already in power before the tools escaped into the wild.

It is rather amazing that educated people who don't have time to read a book have the time to make Lego stop-motion animated versions of viral dance videos, but I'd much rather that people create and share their own works -- which means the processing of a few diamonds along with a lot of roughage -- than limit themselves to silently swallowing what big-business wants them to consume.

From a speculative essay by Richard M. Stallman:

In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime.