Comments on: An exercise for the reader

By: Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:10:06 +0000

I haven’t seen that one, Axel.

By: Vipul Naik

Vipul Naik — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:48:08 +0000

On a related note, there’s a book “Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond” by Axel Bruns, published in February 2008, that has quite a bit of coverage of Wikipedia and Citizendium (the author also quotes extensively from your Slashdot piece on Wikipedia). have you read the book? What’s your take on that?

By: Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 05:11:19 +0000

Vipul, perhaps I’ll make a report later. Basically, they are matters of which I have personal, direct knowledge. Indeed, the problem is precisely that Clay, like you, was operating on limited knowledge and was merely repeating what he had seen in sources full of poor reporting.

By: Vipul Naik

Vipul Naik — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:00:44 +0000

Hi,

In what way did Clay Shirky get the part he wrote about Wikipedia wrong? I couldn’t detect any factual inconsistencies in what he wrote in his book, given my limited knowledge.

Thanks,

Vipul

By: Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:28:47 +0000

See this comment by Clay on the Britannica Blog; I wasn’t commenting on his book, which I haven’t read yet. I did read the parts he wrote about Wikipedia and my role in it — that part, I can tell you, he got wrong.

I’m not saying Clay thinks his vision is dystopian. I’m saying that a world in which we have lost the taste for long discourses, fictional or non-fictional, because it reflects a “cathedral-like model” of the mind that we have rejected in favor of shorter, blog- or Twitter-length comments and collaborative work a la Wikipedia, would be a world in which we would de facto have forgotten all the Great Books. That would then lead to the dystopia. I’m not sure Clay understands or agrees that his hoped-for future has these features. Perhaps he just didn’t realize. I don’t know.

By: CircleReader

CircleReader — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:10:33 +0000

Well, gosh; I’ve just finished reading Clay Shirky’s book-long description of the features and virtues of a world connected by social software (Here Comes Everybody), and certainly didn’t find anything radically dystopian in it — quite the opposite. Nor did I detect an arrogant, elitist tone to his rhetoric or a suggestion that the web will doom great books or liberal education. I do think Shirky sees our society (at least the internet connected parts of it) as being already in a printing-press scale technological revolution that puts the prestige of the Liberal Arts canonical works (along with much else) in a different context that might be hard for some to “grok.” But I don’t think he believes that civilization or its documents are about to collapse–only that change happens with real substance for everything, including things that have “stood the test of time.”

So my first reaction is, “Huh? Who’s he been reading?”

Which just means, of course, that I’ll just have to take your challenge and do a little close reading to compare & contrast the the texts you cite, and the reasons for your characterizations of them. When I’m not reading Tolstoy on BookGlutton or forming my political opinions through discussion on Newsvine, or figuring out how to avoid the dystopian vision of this response to Cory Doctorow’s take on the future of bookselling.