Isn’t the Web wonderful? Students aren’t writing their own essays anymore (In fact, they’re looking for contract essay writers for the entire course of their college career). Anthony DiPierro over at akahele makes the case that the optimism of participants in commons-based models (Open Source and Wikipedia) ignores the fact that “Almost all if not all of the great software projects, even in the open source world, were created by very small numbers of individuals.” Students would rather tweet or update Facebook than pay attention in class, with the result being a crisis of mixed input the likes of which would make Marcuse blanch. The rise of mediocrity and the cult of the amateur seems to be the order of the day.
I, however, feel somehow unconvinced that all these easily accessible tools are causing the decline of civilization. As I post my comments on an easily-accessible open-source blogging package, write my papers on a stable word processing/spreadheet/presentation package, check Wikipedia to see a list of Irish Famines, create little marines in Inkscape with some post-processing in GIMP, to be represented using PHP accessing an open-source database, I tend to agree that, “Anyone who suggests that there is nothing to be learnt from making superior Free versions of proprietary systems, yet uses GNU/Linux, is simply thick.” But that doesn’t solve the niggling Wikipedia issue, where we all acknowledge that the vandalism, pernicious agendas and amateurish errors mean that Wikipedia really isn’t a perfect repository of knowledge.
But who’s being more foolish, the person who relies on an imperfect source of knowledge such as Wikipedia, or the person who clings to the belief that there were perfect sources of knowledge in some halcyon past? Was there really a point when all newspapers were reliable sources of information or all historical texts accurately represented the root causes of progress and decline? And more than that, even if we accept that for one day in 1977 all sources of knowledge were perfect in their unified, magisterial controls, does that make them better than the current imperfect sources of news, literature and knowledge that are actually accessible to, gasp, the unwashed masses both here and abroad? Is it that everyone is growing mediocre or is it that we’re finally able to witness the actual level of understanding and engagement present among society (Both local and global) in a way that was kept under wraps during a less connected time? Do you really think the Arabic Wikipedia caused the misunderstanding of socio-political processes in the Middle-East, or that it represents it? Did the Chinese Wikipedia install the GMD in Taiwan or does it just reflect the current political divide? On a more grounded level, have you noticed that the folks who claim that Wikipedia is junk because it’s not written by experts have a remarkable proclivity for ignoring experts (or deriding them) when they enter into the discussion in defense of the monolith?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 9:02 AM and is filed under Academia, Digital Innovation, Eschatology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.