July 23, 2007
The Web as a Cure for Scholarly Isolation
Life for scholars was lonely before the Web, says the philosopher David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and author of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books, 2007). In a debate with Andrew Keen, a Web 2.0 critic and author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing our Culture (Doubleday/Currency, 2007), Mr. Weinberger says that before the Web grew ubiquitous, “ideas were scarce…because space, time, and the limitations of paper made it hard to hear what others were saying and well nigh impossible to talk with them about it.” Now, he writes, “I am in contact with people who come up with ideas I’d never have encountered, who are sources of wide expertise.” —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday July 23, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Hewlett-Packard Hands Out Technology for Teaching Awards
Next: Regent U. Hires Firm to Push Online Program
The New York Times Book Review for June 29, 2007 promotes Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur,” a diatribe against new knowledge and new understandings in the Age of Information, Knowledge, and Technology over and against the traditional hierarchies and “expertises” espoused by Baby Boomers.
I have not read the book, so this is not a review, but rather a commentary based on the review. Very un-expert, and precisely the kind of exercise Mr. Keen would no doubt condemn. But alas, I was gleefully unaware of the book, or the NYT review, until I ironically came across it, alas on the web, that bastion of amateurish inkings that comprises the core of Keen’s concern. I’m presently engaged in a full summer reading program of classic German literature — a very “expert” enterprise Keen might find “unusual” for an “amateur” such as myself.
The review points out the shocking revelation that the web has its “dark side” too, something amateurs have long known, but the experts have apparently just discovered. Of course, to say the web has its dark side is a bit like bemoaning Playboy, Penthouse, or Hustler, insofar as the print world is concerned. I suppose Keen is bristling less about high-brow burlesque and more about digital nakedness.
The NYT review also notes this curiosity: “This book, which grew out of a controversial essay published last year by The Weekly Standard….”
Taking up the mantle of Gustav Le Bon and the psychology of the crowd, the Times notes that:
For one thing, Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, ... war in Iraq, ....” The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created the disastrous Tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th century.
Wait a minute! Didn’t the Weekly Standard, the Kristol camp, and other “conservatives” advocate the war in Iraq?
Wasn’t it the “expertise” of Neo-cons like Paul Wolfiwitz, William J. Bennett, William Kristol, and Francis Fukuyama behind the ruse that simply used George W. Bush, and manipulated Bush’s emotions about Iraq and his father’s presidency, that led the US on the path to calamity in Iraq?
The NYT (a paper print news media dinosaur) and the Weekly Standard, and Mr. Keen stand for a hierarchy tottering on its last legs.
I fail to understand the point: are “experts” not wrong?
What is evident to me is that these busted boomers are clinging to an argument based on authority, hierarchy, and privilege; they despise digital democracy because it threatens their existence, challenges their authority, and breaks down their well-preserved hierarchy.
What they are really against is the sort of liberal-minded, interdisciplinary, hybrid knowledge production which threatens their hegemony, dominance, and control.
There are lessons to be learned in the new digital age, there are classics still worth reading, sources of non-digital media that are still founded on integrity.
But to denounce the new demos based on namecalling (‘amateurs”) and to rely on received opinion (“experts”) will lead us back to the New Babylon.
There may very well be good reason to retain expertise, but Keen’s idea seems to be more along the lines of a complaint rather than a reasoned argument about the nature of expertise.
To say that the artificial, contingent structures created to support the hierarchies within which expertise rssides ought not be challenged because of some innate value within the order is not good reason to reject so-called non-expert, or amateur, wisdom as Keen suggests.
Moreover, and equally dispeptic, is the idea that the restraint of digital dialogue somehow saves expertise and its collapsing supports. A better argument may be that more dialogue, not less, actually emboldens the case for expertise instead of undermining it. In that case the peculiar instance arises when expertise is called into question—-suspended—-not to remove but to transform it in new imaginative, and more innovative ways.
Ultimately Keen’s project seems to be based on the claim that expertise, a priori, precludes the possibility that the underlying order of received opinion is subject to new information and knowledge because the speed of the digital demos requires a new infrastructure ill-suited towards the current hierarchical regime. Such a viewconfounds emerging knowledge and has real consequences in praxis.
If the federal drug approval process had not been radically altered in the late 1980s to the early to mid-1990s, hundreds, indeed millions, of the living might instead be dead today. This singular illustration undergirds compelling reasons to at least reflect on the possible ramifications of both continuing on under the status quo as well as presing ahead with change.
Experts will not retain relevance because they are called experts. Expertise only matters when it has significance in real life and real time.
My article proposes that the democritization of knowledge production:
1. is not an inherent threat to traditional expertise per se
2. that current frustrations of experts is in large part the failure of experts to respond to challenges to authority
3. that in the longterm the digital demos will improve, not hurt, what we know as expertise
— Constance Lavender Jul 24, 05:49 AM #
A revolution is a revolution because it turns the old order upside down. Constance Lavender’s comment (#1) is wonderful: thank you very much. Whatever the authorities today think about developments in the spread of knowledge is pretty much irrelevant. In the short run they will still make tenure decisions based on where you publish. They will still draw from their own network of colleagues to constitute the Editorial Board. But the fabric of knowledge is changing so fast that the Editorial Board’s decisions will quickly prove to be irrelevant. Tenure is dead on arrival for that reason, too. Eventually it will be irrelevant for most academics. The spread of knowledge is organic and, finally, beyond control, thank God. I feel blessed to live in the day when we can see beyond the printed book, beyond the journal article, beyond the College wall.
— Philip J Tramdack Jul 24, 10:18 AM #
I really don’t know how Lavender can come to all her conclusions since she has not read the book. But that’s just the way 2.0 works, doesn’t it? Don’t read it, quote somebody who did. It’s out there if you want to read it; don’t bug me, I got mail! I would have stopped after she made her stance clear in her first paragraph (“diatribe”) but alas! I read it all anyway, something I suggest she do with the book. There is much to criticise in Keen’s book, and much of it is rather simplistic. But why are we supposed to accept that it is all good just because it is a revolution?
As for Tramdack, not only will tenure be dead, but so will management. Who needs scholars, who needs expertise, when the medium IS the message?
— John Jul 24, 02:40 PM #
Dear John…..have you read the book?
— Constance Lavender Jul 25, 08:40 AM #
My ideas about the hierarchies that support expertise are not based on this book, although it may be included on a bibliography for further reading.
I’m not sure, thankfully, I’ve reached any conclusions; I’m merely proposing ideas worth exploring.
What do you think of the three points I raise at the end of my comment, John?
I’d be interested in your feedback, especially since you took the time to read my whole diatribe.
Your comments would be especially welcome considering that you’ve read Keen’s book which, I openly admit, I have not.
Rather, I was relying on the expertise of a reviewer from the NYT Book review to provide, in a sentence, Keen’s thesis.
— Constance Lavender Jul 25, 09:24 AM #