Citizendium Blog

Yes or no.

If no, why do we keep making them?

For me, the bloom is off the rose.

The Internet affects us psychologically and socially in ways that people like Maggie Jackson and Nicholas Carr — to name just two — have been writing about fascinatingly. (I have written and spoken about the individual impact of the Internet a fair bit as well. See 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Perhaps it will make me even more of a Web 2.0 apostate to say so, but FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, many blogs, and many online forums are becoming increasingly obnoxious to me. I’m sorry to have to say it, but it’s true. Why? For a whole variety of reasons. But before I get into the reasons, let me say that these concerns don’t apply so much to Wikipedia, YouTube (except for YouTube forum discussions, which are obnoxious), or my own two new projects, the Citizendium and WatchKnow (still ramping up). Those actually produce (or usefully organize) quite a bit of interesting content. But as to many others — well, for me personally, things have reached a breaking point.

1. Facelessness

Frequently, we find ourselves in conversation with people we don’t know. We have nothing invested with them socially. When I first started talking to people in this way on mailing lists and USENET, back in 1993 I guess it was, online conversations were a bizarre but compelling game. It was still fascinating that I could speak to people who lived halfway across the world. It was the first time that I had conversed very much with people from Europe or Australia. It was also the first time that I could connect with people with very special interests (in my case, the fiddle tradition of County Donegal, Ireland). The social possibilities seemed rich.

Now they seem woefully impoverished. The stunning diversity of humanity online does not make up for the annoying effects of anonymity and disembodiment — or in one word, facelessness.

It so happens that I “know” fairly well on the order of dozens of people, people each of whom I have, at one time or another, spent many hours conversing and/or working. I’ve met some of these people in real life (IRL), but I would not recognize most of them if I were to pass them on the street. And, when you get down to it, I don’t really know much about these people. We only know about our shared interests — Citizendium, Wikipedia, fiddle music, or what have you.

To be honest, this makes me sad. I think that I should know my Internet acquaintances. I’ve spent so much time with them, I feel that I know them — and yet, I don’t. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but I think there is a small sort of tragedy here. It seems pathetic that we so often meet a powerful and natural need for human companionship by sitting down and interfacing with a computer, usually through the medium of the written word. But really to get to know people, we need to be around them — hear their voices, watch their facial expressions, see how they react to things in your immediate vicinity, and in short “pass time” with them.

Please do not write to say that you have gotten to know all sorts of people intimately through deep conversations about many topics that you could not have discussed face-to-face. Yeah, I know. Me too. I have been doing that for a long time myself, so I know it’s possible. And yet a failure to “interface” in person has seemed to make all the difference to the long-lastingness of the relationships. The people who I have met in person after those long conversations I still count as friends; others, whom I never met in person, I’m sorry to say I’ve forgotten some of their names. (That’s an apropos word here — “interface” — isn’t it? On the Internet, we are faceless; so we don’t really connect, we “interface.”)

2. Groupthink

The second reason Web 2.0 is becoming obnoxious to me is that I really, really hate groupthink. It may sound very strange that the main architect of Wikipedia is an individualist, but I am and always have been. Please don’t misunderstand; I am not, contrary to Andrew Lih and the London Review of Books, an Ayn Rand-following Objectivist, and that’s partly because I detest the way so many of Rand’s followers themselves engaged in groupthink without admitting or even knowing it.

But let’s not get off on that tangent. My present complaint is about the groupthink inherent in the design of so many Web 2.0 websites. It is one thing to aggregate opinions and data that reflects opinions, as Google and Slashdot do. (I think James Surowiecki’s excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds has been largely misappropriated in defense of many of these websites, by the way. Not all online crowds are wise.) It is quite another thing to be part of a community that has a variety of mechanisms that allow us to reward people who agree with us and punish those who disagree with us. Those are the tools of conformity and groupthink. As far as I can tell, the rating of comments in Amazon and YouTube are nearly as interesting as the comments themselves. As a result, we’re stuck with a lot of really overinflated ratings on YouTube (though, again, I really like a lot of the content on YouTube, for all the garbage available there) and a lot of pointless head-nodding in Amazon reviews.

(Amazon punishes user scores when your comments are low-rated, and it’s very hard to give a bad review without your comment being low-reviewed in turn. I’d guess this is because most people who care enough about a product to say anything about it generally have good opinions about it. This artificially inflates ratings — good for Amazon, bad for the end user who wants a more accurate view of the product. This is why I always pay careful attention to the well-written bad reviews.)

What’s really disconcerting is when people like NYU’s Clay Shirky seems to celebrate groupthink. If he doesn’t, I wish he would clarify sometime. In this Britannica Blog post, he said essentially that the instantaneous and always-on nature of Internet communication means that people are rapidly losing the patience and even the ability to take longer, more complex stuff (like Tolstoy) on board. But Shirky and some others don’t just assert that this switch to instant, bite-sized communication is happening, they (unlike Nick Carr) seem to celebrate it. I do not, because such communication represents a powerful engine of groupthink, which is both tedious and (if history is a guide) dangerous. If you want to be an individualist, you have to think deeply, a lot, by yourself. I would argue that you really have to come to grips with the great minds of the past (and present), as well. None of this can be done in any “bite-sized” way. But twitters and most blog posts from most people are at once both navel-gazing and intensely attuned to the tastes of one’s audience (real, imagined, or hoped-for). When we write briefly in a medium that makes reading and replying instantaneous, if we aren’t plugged in to whatever happens to be on other people’s minds these days, they won’t read and they won’t reply. We become irrelevant if we’re not mainstream; and you’re bound not to be, because true individualism rarely runs in the mainstream. Of course, the “success metrics” of blogs (Technorati scores, for example) and other social media only encourages this natural human tendency to conformity. I don’t know how any serious intellectual can observe this trend and not be a little nervous.

The result is that we become more and more Borg-like (and, plumped in our chairs, less Borg-like). Sorry, but I will not be assimilated. I just won’t play. I won’t Twitter. I won’t blog about the latest cool thing. I won’t update my Facebook page…often.

Let’s put it this way. I have complex, ever-changing, idiosyncratic tastes and views. The notion that I ought to be particularly concerned about “what’s percolating in blogs now” (for example) deeply offends my individualism. It’s sad and ridiculous that I should let my free time be eaten up by the concerns of an often faceless group of people — especially one that often behaves like a pack of hyenas — rather than my own personal concerns, or by interfacing with the great “cathedral-like minds” of the past. I’ll genuflect where I please, Shirky.

3. Such a godawful waste of time

The first time we see a shiny new Internet toy, we are all oohs and aahs. But, OK…isn’t it time to stop it with the “Which Star Trek character are you?” quizzes on Facebook? (Yes, yes, I have taken such quizzes. I’m not proud of it.) Why do we play these games? Aren’t they getting tiresome already?

Seriously, to my way of thinking, there are worthwhile Web 2.0 projects — like, of course, the Citizendium and WatchKnow (not launched yet) — but it seems like the vast majority of the websites, and many attractive and popular features within more worthwhile sites, are a waste of time.

Now, if you tell me, “You’re not getting it, this is social media, it’s for socialization,” I reply, “Yes, but what kind of socialization?” Are you seriously telling me that you make or foster meaningful friendships with all the silly tools and communities that exist out there? If you want to socialize, shouldn’t you be having a beer, playing pool, watching a game or movie together, taking a hike together — that sort of thing? No, I am not convinced. The fact that it is popular does not mean that this kind of socialization is a healthy way of socialization. It is a pale shadow of the real thing.

If competing for a place on Digg’s front page is of little value qua socialization — and on anybody’s account it has little value in terms of getting knowledge or wisdom — then sit down and tell me soberly: what the hell is it good for?

I know a reply to this will go something like this: you’re whistling in the wind. You’re a luddite. You’re trying to stop the tide. Complaining about Web 2.0 today is like complaining about television in 1960. To which I reply: I know that Web 2.0 is here to say; I helped build it and I know exactly the source of its staying power. I wrote in 2004 that sites like Wikipedia are natural institutions. But every human institution is imperfect, and some have far more flaws than others. Prostitution, for example.

Wasting our free time in faceless groupthink, staring at a screen instead of jostling shoulders or holding hands — is that where we in post-industrial societies are going? Is it where we want to be going? If you’re a kid, is that what you want society to be like when you grow up? If you’re a parent, is that what you want for your kids?

And if not, how can we use our boundless creativity to find a solution?

I’m preparing a speech I’ll be giving on Saturday in Monterrey, Mexico.

The topic is the purpose of the Internet. I believe it makes sense to say that it has a purpose, in the same way it makes sense to say any publishing medium has a purpose. I say that there are two usefully distinguishable notions about what the Internet is for: (1) communication and socialization and (2) finding information. But there is a problem, I say, in that most websites are set up as media of communication, and what policies that sense for media of communication often make no sense for media of information. Among other things, I’ll be explaining how communication produces lots of information of great value and interest to the conversationalists but of almost no value to anyone else. In another connection, I’ll explain that Google Search is essentially a popularity contest in much the same way YouTube, Digg, and social networking sites are. And — you guessed it — I’ll be arguing that there’s something wrong with this picture.

What do you think? What is the purpose of the Internet? Are there conceptual confusions involved in the Web 2.0 policies that make online communities, and even Google Search, into popularity contests? How might it be changed to be more suited to the purpose of finding information?

Also, if anybody has any pointers to previous essays on these themes, I’d appreciate it.

A special issue of the highly-regarded journal of social epistemology, Episteme, has just appeared. The journal is edited by one of the most important living epistemologists, Alvin Goldman, but this issue was co-edited by University of Arizona philosophy professor Don Fallis and me (Don more than me). Anyway, here is the issue.

I have an article in the issue, called “The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia.” Here is the abstract:

Wikipedia has challenged traditional notions about the roles of experts in the Internet Age. Section 1 sets up a paradox. Wikipedia is a striking popular success, and yet its success can be attributed to the fact that it is wide open and bottom-up. How can such a successful knowledge project disdain expertise? Section 2 discusses the thesis that if Wikipedia could be shown by an excellent survey of experts to be fantastically reliable, then experts would not need to be granted positions of special authority. But, among other problems, this thesis is self-stultifying. Section 3 explores a couple ways in which egalitarian online communities might challenge the occupational roles or the epistemic leadership roles of experts. There is little support for the notion that the distinctive occupations that require expertise are being undermined. It is also implausible that Wikipedia and its like might take over the epistemic leadership roles of experts. Section 4 argues that a main reason that Wikipedia’s articles are as good as they are is that they are edited by knowledgeable people to whom deference is paid, although voluntarily. But some Wikipedia articles suffer because so many aggressive people drive off people more knowledgeable than they are; so there is no reason to think that Wikipedia’s articles will continually improve. Moreover, Wikipedia’s commitment to anonymity further drives off good contributors. Generally, some decisionmaking role for experts is not just consistent with online knowledge communities being open and bottom-up, it is recommended as well.

Here is a direct link to the PDF. Not sure how long this will be up; I’ll post a copy on larrysanger.org eventually.

It’s a work of academic philosophy, but that didn’t stop Slashdot from commenting. (I gotta wonder…what percentage of the commenters bothered to RTFA?)

The other articles are interesting — check them out!

The sheer number of fields that are intensely interested in wiki knowledge communities is staggering.  (I’ve learned this partly because I’ve been invited to speak by a surprisingly varied assortment of groups.)  I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while.  Here goes (in no particular order):

• Philosophy - social epistemologists are fascinated by the change in standards of knowledge implicit in a wiki encyclopedia like Wikipedia; there are semi-serious metaphysical issues in the relativistic notions lampooned by Stephen Colbert as “wikiality.”
• Library and information science - two of the field’s concerns are credibility of information and how people get their information; people now get a lot of information online via wiki…
• Communication - the game-changing conversational and production dynamics of wikis are fascinating
• Journalism - the idea of a really big collaborative news wiki, not yet successful but seemingly possible, is frightening and fascinating to journalists
• English/writing - the notion of asynchronous, distributed collaborative writing, wiki-style, has a lot of English majors hot and bothered
• Publishing business - massive groups of volunteers working together to create something that is actually usable by people outside those groups poses a potential threat to, and opportunity for, the traditional publishing business model
• Internet business - ooh!  A new way for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to exploit the sheep and make money!
• Computer science - it’s a major new Internet phenomenon, and CS people study the Internet
• Anthropology and Sociology - wiki communities are possibly more fascinating than the ordinary online community because they involve not just interaction but strong collaboration; the description and quantification of such social behavior is fascinating for people in these fields
• Political science and philosophy - what sort of communities are wiki communities?  How are they governed?  How should they be governed?  (A particular interest of mine.)
• Government - governments are intensely interested in wikis because they allow large numbers of people to organize information together, and one of the biggest headaches in governing is precisely how to let large numbers of people to organize information together
• Futurology - wikis like Wikipedia (and maybe Citizendium) portend great things, because they can bring together millions of people in a common cause; what does that mean for the future?
• Activism - see above, the part about millions of people in a common cause.
• Nonprofits - I was surprised to learn, a few years ago, that Wikipedia is the great success story of the nonprofit world; but this shouldn’t have been surprising, because Wikipedia et al. successfully harness zillions of unpaid volunteers, which is exactly what nonprofits dream of doing.
• The open source/free culture community - because these communities produce free knowledge
• Education - Wikipedia and, potentially, Citizendium and a children’s encyclopedia I would like to see created, have forever changed the way most kids, and college and even grad students, study; and educationists, who love love love group work, are highly interested in how wiki can be used as a teaching tool.
• Science and research generally - the impact of wiki knowledge resources on the perception of their fields, and the possibility of using wikis to organize their knowledge, is highly interesting to researchers of all sorts.

Is anyone else as amazed as I am at the sheer number of disciplines interested in the topic?

Why are wiki knowledge projects of such intense and broad-based interest?

There’s a good reason.  It’s because of what wiki knowledge projects are.

They are a new thing under the sun: international communities of volunteers that collaboratively produce free knowledge, information of use to everyone, distributed online; and, in the form of Wikipedia and soon the Citizendium too, they are remarkably huge and well-used.  The mere description is enough to get a whole bunch of people excited about these communities, even if they don’t understand them very well.

But there is an even more essential explanation: wiki knowledge projects are an enormous coming-together of people to understand the world.  Long ago in the 1990s and in the dark ages before that, learning and imparting knowledge socially was as it were fractured, done through a variety of institutions: schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and of course informally in groups.  And these institutions were inherently separated by space and time.  Most of these institutions will continue, I am sure; they have their place.  But the Internet provides a way that everyone, globally, of all ages, of all professions, of various educational attainment, can participate together in the same (virtual) place and at the same time, in both the creation and consumption of a new sort of knowledge project.

I think most people have vaguely, but not quite, realized that we are coming to grips with a new kind of knowledge institution – one that has the potential to be as powerful as any that has come before it, or more so.  (I introduced the idea of wikis as a new institution in this paper.)  Everyone may not quite understand what they’re dealing with, but a growing number of people understand that this new institution is very deeply important.

And over the coming years, they will realize that it is deeply important that we get it right.

Not exactly CZ related, but this might be of interest to some people. Over on Edge, I was invited to respond to an essay that asked, “Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?” My answer: no, or at least not if the scientific help takes the form of an allegedly ideology-free “economic Manhattan project” that attempts to make economics scientifically rigorous.

Open blog — your comments requested! 

I want to open up the Citizendium blog to general discussion of an important topic: how can we keep Google (and the larger Internet) from “making us stupid”?  I solicit your ideas.  Click on “Comments,” or scroll down to the bottom, and share them!

(more…)

An exercise for the reader: compare and contrast the radical, dystopian, Internet-inspired futures imagined by Clay Shirky (though I admit I might have gotten Clay’s actual position wrong) and Mark Pesce. Quite apart from shared theoretical themes, note some subtle rhetorical similarities: the notion of historical inevitability; the failure to describe fully the features and virtues of the brave new world the theorist evidently desires; the gaping holes in logic and the use of very loose analogies; the subtle suggestion that any disagreement with their position indicates backwardness, conservatism, Luddism, unhipness, and the like; and last but certainly not least, the outrageous and absurd suggestions that the futures envisioned — one entailing the collapse of liberal education and many of the basic documents of civilization, the other entailing the collapse of democracy — are actually somehow to be hoped for.

Fascinating.

Here’s another essay, which I’ve been saving up.

Mark Pesce, in a talk that appeared on Edge.org, appears to argue that the plugged-in world of the future will foster an anti-democratic revolution. Stated briefly and clearly, his argument goes like this:

(1) As more and more people get online and get connected, they join communities, like Wikipedia, that empower (”hyperempower”) them.

(2) Wikipedia and other successful online communities are not democratic; they combine anarchy with mob rule.

(3) Increasingly, these empowered people will turn their collective attention to the problems of politics, as Barack Obama’s online campaign community does.

(4) In embracing politics, they will not become less anarchical, or less apt to be organized by mob rule. Political action will look like Wikipedia’s anarchical, mob-rule community.

(5) So, sooner or later, these mob-like political groups will seize power from democracies.

Apparently, Pesce thinks such an event would be a good thing; as he says in his speech, “representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and rebooting them is not enough.”

This is a transparently poor argument. Why think all online communities are or will be anarchical or mob-like, like Wikipedia? They aren’t. Why think that, just because people become politically mobilized online, groups like Obama’s will eventually try to start a real (bloody) political revolution? Maybe they will, but any strong claim like this requires strong evidence, and Pesce hasn’t given any. Finally, why think it follows that just because online communities are anti-democratic, the meatspace societies such communities favor will also be anti-democratic? Of course, this does not follow. Ignoring the more radical outliers, Obama’s followers are Democrats. I am quite sure that if you were to survey even some of the most radical and annoying of Wikipedians, you would find the number of them who actually oppose democracy to be very small indeed.

I think Pesce, and many other would-be Internet revolutionaries, have forgotten that we are still in the early stages of the Internet. Most people who spend much time in the Wikipedia community find that they dislike its governance; many would prefer something more sensible, with a few clear, established rules and a reasonably reliable way to enforce them. Since I was there, I can assure you that Wikipedia could have been instituted that way. Moreover, Wikipedia has flourished precisely because of certain definite policies. It’s not a stretch to say that the only reason Wikipedia has been as successful as it has been has been its commitment to certain policies (which a certain non-anarchist, yours truly, helped to establish in its first year), such as creating encyclopedia articles (as opposed to personal essays, for example), neutrality, and not signing articles, with discussion about an article happening on a separate (”talk”) page. There was a time — in the project’s first year — when these policies were, each of them, at least somewhat controversial. We easily could have gone farther and added a low-key, bottom-up role for experts. Also, it would have caused a fork, but we could have instituted the use of real names as a policy, at least for administrators. Such policies would have made it possible to enforce rules and approve articles, as the growing Citizendium now does. The point is that Wikipedia’s development has not been wholly anarchical, and indeed its success has depended precisely on its not being so. Moreover, less anarchical projects might well do better in the long run; I hope so, but we’ll see.

Pesce is not the first to suggest that the Internet will result in a massive anarchist revolution. At the risk of banality, let me say that I favor good old-fashioned democracy both on-line and off, and I obviously oppose the anti-democratic, mob-rule society Pesce appears to desire. I do not think that the mere fact that Wikipedia has a dysfunctional anarchical/mob-rule governance system indicates that democracy itself is somehow outmoded — that seems to be Pesce’s inference, and it is as silly as it sounds. In his talk, I should clarify, Pesce does not really say what he’s in favor of. But I can make a reasonable guess. He says that our inevitable destiny is the destruction of democracy and the “hyper-empowerment” of individuals. Well, in politics, democracy is the only way to “hyper-empower” people; anarchy leads to mobocracy, and mobocracy disempowers all but those with the stomach and ability to lead the mob.

However all that is, and as many people have said, I would say instead that the Internet is more likely to strengthen our democracies. Pesce has nothing like a coherent or plausible argument to the contrary — merely a “just so story,” wishful thinking delivered with breathless, barely concealed hopefulness.

UPDATE (July 30): an almost identical version of this appears on the Britannica Blog.

The part of the Britannica Blog “Your Brain Online” debate that I am interested in is this question: does Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, mean the end of the Great Books or of liberal education? And is anybody really saying that it does mean that? I’ve written once before on this question, but I would like to clarify my position.

Let’s get clear on what the problem here is. The problem is not that most people are in danger of becoming “uncultured”; there never was a time or a place in which most people were particularly cultured, i.e., thoroughly familiar with the history, literature, science, religion, and so forth that defines a culture. The problem — if we can believe what some Web 2.0 revolutionaries say — is that those who are cultured are doomed to become uncultured, by the inevitable influence of the Internet on our minds, at least by the standards of liberal education. And our children will never be cultured again, not by the standards of liberal education. Rather, they will be acculturated by the Internet. It seems that Clay Shirky, just for example, believes that the only things of cultural importance in the future will take place in “the crowd” online, a “group mind” or a “collective intelligence” — even if the crowd looks in the future a lot different from how it looks in 2008. Of course, I could easily be misunderstanding Clay, and so I want to make this point very generally, and not as an attack on Clay. My concern is that, if we are on a vector toward the radical collectivization of knowledge in this way, the products of the best individual minds of the past will become less and less valued by anybody. Yet they plainly do have considerable value, on virtually any educated person’s view now. If we did not think so, we would not buy the books of the people who have posted on the Britannica Blog, for instance: no individual mind would be worth spending so much time on.

If you are not convinced by the example of Tolstoy, think of various dense, system-building philosophers. If anyone were to say — and I dare not accuse anyone of actually saying this, as that truly would be damning — that such thinkers are no longer relevant, because they weren’t part of anything like a Blogosphere, that would be to declare your own personal intellectual bankruptcy, your utter failure to benefit from a liberal education. Let’s be serious, here. If you actually think the Internet’s “group mind” somehow renders passé all the difficult, great books, which shaped our civilizations — if that is what you really want to do — then you certainly are not, not in any way, “on the cutting edge.” I don’t concede that one inch. If you say such a thing, then it seems to me you have merely given us embarrassing evidence that you not really fit to be reasoned with.

But I very much doubt that such philistinism — and that might be too good a word for it, because what it is, is just crude, unserious, uneducated, or silly nonsense — is actually the direction we are travelling in. There are far too many people who still actually appreciate all those old books, and the value of the liberal education that only they can impart. Moreover, if we are travelling toward such widespread philistinism, I have not seen the case made convincingly that we are. Merely to point to the power of the Wikipedia model, or the sheer amount of information in the Blogosphere and all the rest of the Internet, does not even come close to making the case. Pointing out that some of us as it were compulsively check for e-mail and other short Internet communications, and have little time or concentration for long reading, also does not prove that we are, all of us, doomed to become philistines.

Do I really need to point out the virtues of liberal education and how they apply in the present case? Sadly, perhaps I do. “How soon we forget.” Liberal education is so called because it liberates the mind from a million prejudices, replacing them with knowledge of history, science, and culture, and above all making it possible to think through new problems. (For those who are not familiar with the phrase, “liberal education” refers to “the liberal arts,” not to a position on the political spectrum.) So far from being irrelevant, nothing could be more useful in the proper evaluation and appreciation of newfangled stuff like Web 2.0 than a liberal education. Is it any wonder that the principals in the debate are all, quite obviously, possessed of a liberal education and so familiar with great artists and thinkers like Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Proust?

My concern is not “nostalgic,” of course — why would it be? To say so assumes, first of all, that the Great Books (not just Tolstoy of course) are in fact passé, that we have somehow “moved on” from them. But nobody has established that, not in the slightest way. More importantly, nobody in the Britannica debate ever clarified in what sense the Internet poses any sort of threat to how we value the Great Books — other than that we might have to rouse ourselves a little if we want to read them. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with nostalgia or with silly romanticization of a novel-gobbling past. It has to do with a proper valuation of human minds and of what they have produced, both individually and in the aggregate, from around the world and from the dawn of recorded history until the present. If someone really did want to dismiss the power and interest of individual human minds and what they are capable of producing as somehow passé, he would thereby do away with all those great books, and the strange, ever-conflicted, varied culture that resulted from them, and I suppose replace them with the Borg. You will be assimilated; resistance is futile. Right? It’s techno-socially determined. You can’t do anything about it.

Does anybody in this debate really believe that Web 2.0 spells the end of the great books and of liberal education, and its entire replacement by the productions of undifferentiated “crowds”?

Surely nobody really believes that, or even anything like it. I do wonder, of course, what the perceived merits of the Great Books and liberal education will be, once we have gone through the massive societal transformation that, I fully agree, the Internet is bringing us. I would like to point out that if we do give up the foundations of Western civilization, indeed the written records of all civilizations, and if we give up even any pretention to having to become acquainted with those records, we give up a very great deal.

The prospect is nothing short of horrifying. It would be quite literally the death of civilization as we have known it. That means all the good parts as well as the bad. It essentially would herald not a bright new world, cleaned of bad old influences, but very probably a new dark age. After all, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

As an aside, I should also state (apparently, it’s necessary) that I am not opposed to Web 2.0. If you know me, you’ll realize this is just silly. I just have a different idea about what direction we should take, that’s all. (For some clues, see 1, 2, 3, 4.) I am much more optimistic about the prospects of the Internet and what it means for human civilization. I think it will enhance liberal education as never before, and more likely to usher in a new enlightenment than to cause the death of civilization.