Via BoingBoing, this discussion of a mysterious technological object purchased by Todd Lappin.
I went to a meeting on teaching technological literacy, especially information technology literacy, in liberal arts curricula last weekend, and I’ll probably write more about that meeting in this space shortly. Quite a few of the people attending felt the most urgent priority was to teach students how to judge the authority of information found online.
You couldn’t find a better exercise to teach from than Lappin’s flickr page, on several levels. You could just ask students to identify: a) who is joking; b) whose representations of the device are most authoritative and c) how knowledge of the device accumulates successively over time in the comments thread. You’d think a) is the easiest, but I find it’s one of the chief places that IT-illiterate people get into trouble in online environments.
Beyond that, you could use the comments thread as a springboard to talk about the distribution of collective expertise in online environments, about the sociology of information technology. I’d go so far as to make a predictive hypothesis: any mysterious technological object could be identified through online sharing of information at a significantly faster rate than artistic, cultural or historical objects or texts. Some of that distinction is changing rapidly, though not because the sociology of IT fluency is growing more diverse or distributed, but because of tools like GooglePrint. Two years ago, I would have said you could slap up a longish but not famous quotation from a well-known novel alongside the picture of the RADIAC device and seen how long it took people to meaningfully identify each of them, and predicted the quote would almost always have come last. Now that’s not a good test any longer.
It’s not just sociology, of course, not just that the most IT fluent people skew towards technological or scientific knowledge. It’s also that humanistic knowledge is more open to fundamental epistemological disputes. Many of the things which could be said to be discretely “known” by humanists couldn’t just be put up on a flickr page for collective identification, since there might be a dispute about what is knowable. (This is a big dimension of competitive grant competitions where humanists and scientists are both in the pool: the scientists tend to have much more agreement about the basics of what constitutes a competitive proposal.)
Still, this is one reason why I’m so eager to ensure that humanists be as IT-fluent and engaged by online discourse as anyone else. When you see that message thread, it’s really a thing of beauty to behold, a moment where we’ve arrived in a future that was once a dream and found out that it really works. To build on that promise, we need everyone to come inside the tent, where knowledge becomes truly democratic in its provision and yet where there is a continuing value in having some people know some things well that other people do not: a perfect balance of specialized expertise and shared knowledge.
Two years ago, I would have said you could slap up a longish but not famous quotation from a well-known novel alongside the picture of the RADIAC device and seen how long it took people to meaningfully identify each of them, and predicted the quote would almost always have come last. Now that’s not a good test any longer.
If the quote came from a public domain work, couldn’t you google it and be almost certain to get an instantaneous identification? And since the advent of Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” function — and now Google Print — the same is often true of in-print copyrighted texts. Since the pool of unscanned texts is getting smaller and smaller, won’t identifying a quote be much quicker than identifying any photographed object, at least until the technology of searching images by similarity improves dramatically? The better comparison would not involve a text alongside the technological object, but a sculpture or a strange musical instrument or a prayer shawl — another imaged thing.
Right. That’s why I mention GooglePrint. Maybe the more appropriate timeframe would be five years ago.
To build on that promise, we need everyone to come inside the tent, where knowledge becomes truly democratic in its provision and yet where there is a continuing value in having some people know some things well that other people do not: a perfect balance of specialized expertise and shared knowledge.
I was just trying to explain this in a discussion about the Wikipedia with a geologist, a much younger person than myself (which scared me). He was so hung up on the idea of authority resting in either a single respected person or collection of “approved” editors that he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that the wikipedia might actually have more authority in some cases. I used the analogy of the Oxford English Dictionary as something that was put together by a collective of smart people. And he said, “Yeah, but I can go to the library and pull that off the shelf, so I know it’s authoritative.” Gah! As if there’s something special about a printed book. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Sometimes I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall.
You and me both. It’s a strangely protean kind of resistance: every time you try to identify it or pin it down, it squelches away to some new point or posture.
This reminds me of some of the stuff Ethan Zuckerman has written about Wikipedia, which (at the time he wrote) had done a much better job on GSM than it had with Ghana. While part of the purpose of Savage Minds was to get anthropologists to engage with the public sphere, another goal was to drag anthropologists into the modern era by encouraging them to embrace such technologies. I’ve also written a series of articles for the anthropology association newsletter with a similar aim. Initially I though that the next generation would be much better about this kind of thing, but when I was teaching at Haverford last semester, I found that only one or two of my students were familiar with sites like Flickr and del.icio.us.
though/thought
Laura’s comment that ” the wikipedia might actually have more authority in some cases” leads back to one of Tim’s main points: how do people know — how can they be trained to know — what those” some cases” are? I have at times found Wikipedia to be an extraordinarily rich and detailed source of information; at other times I have found it to be absurdly inaccurate. Presumably we’ve all had similar experiences. So it is not necessarily irrational for people to think, “Gee, I don’t know enough about this topic to assess the validity of Wikipedia’s information, so I would be better off going to a print source from a publisher I’ve heard of — since major publishers have editors and fact checkers.” I mean, isn’t that a reasonable response? I say this as someone who goes to Wikipedia fairly often — but not for everything.
I wonder if Laura’s geologist’s point was that you can be sure that a print OE is what the editors intends (possibly with a very few typos), while the wikipedia is more subject to destructive modification. It’s true that the Wikipedia has protections, but they aren’t as good as just being a physical object.
Alan, you’re absolutely right. For one thing, never use just one source, especially for something you don’t know much about. I think that often that second source is going to be a print source (or a digital version of a print source) and it’s the distinguishing of accuracy of sources that is the difficult task for teachers. It’s also a difficult thing to teach students about the nuances and biases one finds in different sources, something that occurs in both print and digital forms.
And Nancy, yes, there may be more destructive modification, at times, of the Wikipedia, but there’s nothing about a physical object that makes it inherently better. What if the editor had a particular point of view and therefore edited a collection, an encyclopedia, in a way that advocated that point of view? Isn’t that destructive in a way. I think what I want students to learn is that just because it’s in print doesn’t mean it’s fact and what I want professor to learn is that just because it’s digital doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate. We should be equally critical of both mediums.