Are We Really Slouching into a Mediocre Babylon?
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?
Aren’t you mixing up a word-processor with Twitter? You don’t use OpenOffice to tell an indifferent universe what you had for breakfast.
What I want to know is, when all the newspapers go broke, what will Wikipedians cite as they create their little revenge articles about comic book authors?
I never said anything about Wikipedia or Open Source in that article, other than to mention Wikipedia as an example of a great software project which was started by a small number of people. I certainly didn’t say that either tool is “causing the decline of civilization”. Tools are not volitional, after all.
Thanks for the publicity though.
You did mention Wikipedia and Open Source quite clearly, not only in the direct quote from the link, but also later:
“Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross created Firefox. Apache was created by Robert McCool. Michael Widenius wrote the majority of the first version of MySQL… Jerry Yang and David Filo made Yahoo. Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz invented Wikipedia.”
Perhaps you meant crowdsourcing (And the Sucker Map) as something different than open source / Commons-based peer collaboration?
But the decline of civilization was just my extrapolation of the Wisdom of Crowds versus the Cult of the Amateur. I’m not so concerned with defending the open source model, it doesn’t need it, when you’ve got billions of dollars worth of business relying on open source apps in critical locations, I’m pretty sure even a non-expert can accept that argument. It’s more interesting to me when that model is applied to knowledge presentation and how the picking and choosing of “experts” who support the various sides comes out.
I think you’re confusing “open source” with “mass collaboration”. I don’t have a problem with “open source”. It’s great that Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel under the GPL. On the other hand, I think that “mass collaboration” leads to mediocre content. GNU Hurd, with its mish-mash of developers and no strong leader, is a piece of junk.
My article certainly wasn’t knocking “open source”, and it wasn’t even directly knocking Wikipedia. The thesis of my article is that the creative process is one that takes place only in individuals. If you accept that argument, I think it has a huge impact on the way Wikipedia ought to be run, but I leave that reasoning to another article, or perhaps to another author (I don’t much care about Wikipedia any more, I’m more interested in figuring out what was successful about Wikipedia and what was unsuccessful, and starting from scratch rather than trying to reform from within).
In a future article, I hope to explore the more positive side of collaboration. Great software, great films, great orchestras, great buildings – they are all collaborative works to which many individuals lend their creative abilities. But they have great architects, great directors, great conductors, great architects, that coordinate those creative energies and put them together.
My reply has grown so long that I think it’ll just have to be a post… I’d very much enjoy your thoughts on it as soon as it’s up.