Wikipedia versus Britannica.com: some reflections on e-literacy, digital humanities and Salman Rushdie.

Since its inception in 2001 Wikipedia has been hailed, especially by its founders Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger, as the source of  free, unrestricted and  "open-source" knowledge on the Internet: "the free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit." The champion of democratized media, Wikipedia stands by its record (the seventeenth most widely visited site) as among the Web's most popular, certainly most heavily networked and accessed, source of online content. It is unfiltered (meaning it's not vetted or overseen by credentialed experts in the field), free, and mainly user-generated: all the qualities of knowledge that's bound (it hopes) to appeal to the greatest number of digital users. A claim that Wikipedia founders & editors wear like a badge of honour.

But, as its critics continually remind us, Wikipedia is really a source of  shoddy, inaccurate and oftentimes discredited work, particularly pernicious in the way it tends to eclipse more legitimate knowledge-sources like Britannica. The Britannica corporation having to lay off hundreds of its employees in 2001 and 2002 as a result of its online competitor. The only way for it to avoid further losses was, of course, to go digital as well, pitching its role as a true cultural gate-keeper to those who might be seduced by the blandishments of its arch rival. Among its many claims is that "[e]ach article, picture and video is fact-checked by Britannica editors for consistency of style and language level: in general, that everything you see on this site is "expertly-written, fact-checked, professionally edited knowledge."

The integrity of the author, of responsibly researched and edited work and perhaps even of literacy itself is at stake in this debate on the status of free, user-generated knowledge: of e-literacy, in a word. But let's define our terms more carefully, not giving in to the temptation (as so many critics do) to portray complex issues in broad generalizations: as if the controversy could be, first of all, presented  as an either/or. As if it were a two-sided coin with the more traditional linear, sequential view on one side, destined to fade quickly unless presented in a more responsible digitized format, and on the other the looser hypertextual online variety cheered by its supporters as a more fluid, interactive way of reading & writing the world. If it's just a coin, the resolution will always amount to the proverbial toss in the air.

Consequently it is to the more interesting (and oftentimes unstated) philosophical, literary, and historical causes that we must turn to see the issue of e-literacy under its truer, more appreciably complex aspect. When, for example, have the most vociferous critics of e-literacy (like Andrew Keen, Sven Birkerts, Mark Bauerlein) ever really fleshed out terms like 'knowledge', 'reading', 'the book', 'the marketplace', or even the nature of 'human understanding'?  Something that Web theorists and practitioners, like it or not, always do when pressing their case for technology and pushing new product lines.

Take the example of cognitive scientists who study how "the hand movements of people using a mouse" reveal Heideggerian insights into the way people and their tools become one, leading to rather surprising conclusions about computer and self connectivity.  Insights bound to find their way into ways of making computers a more integral " part of you as a thinking, behaving thing.” Or the example of literary authors whose works consist of hundreds of fragments taken directly (& unabashedly) from other writers, as in the case of the recently published Reality Hunger by David Shields, daring in this way to question the notion of authorial ownership and control by an appeal to a social ontology of "online collectivism": substituting traditional, modernist principles of plot development & characterization for newer, bolder epistemological concepts of "metaness" and "mash-up".

Or consider the importance Culture and Communications theorist Ted Striphas gives to a Digital Humanities concept in a recently posted Culture Machine magazine call for academic papers, defining 'digital humanities' as a field of study "embracing all those scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in processes of digital media production and practice (e.g. developing new media theory, creating interactive electronic literature, building online databases and wikis)."  The term is a gathering ground for a new understanding of the 'human'. Researches (reminiscent of  the Frankfurt School of Adorno & Horkheimer) directed towards a liberatory type of digital-textual interconnectedness to guide all future technological studies.

Once again, let's define our terms carefully. Or the conditions of their origin and development. Is the view that e-literacy is the product of a decentralized, unedited and rampantly user-generated Web 2.0 the only defensible one out there? Has the traditional book really morphed into an outmoded 'other' beyond anything that can restore it to its former self? How do we interpret the sudden arrival of e-book readers (like Kindle, iPad, Nook) intended not just to replace the traditional "codex volume" (Striphas) but regroup older paradigms under a new text-compatible substitute? So that what we are left with, in Stiphas's words, is a view of the e-book that, according to his astute Marxian analysis of its relations to a target audience, consitutes a "form of appearance". Kindle e-reader (and its imitators)viewed here as a product of  historical materialist forces whose potential for corporate abuse becomes an almost built-in feature of e-reader technology and application.

 Again, which view of digital literacy wins the day? There's the romantic-nostalgic view of critics who long for a return to something like a world of linear, sequential 'reading' (the Britannica.com contingent) or that of more contemporary (Wikipedia-style) theorists with their own deconstructive (even anti-humanist) analyses of traditional literacy. We look on, even with a sense of astonishment, at events like American book retailer Barnes & Noble getting into the digital books market and wonder at the seismic forces that make this possible at all. We sense also that we may have turned a conceptual corner: forever unable to reinstate traditional notions of  literacy and reading itself, the book and even the market place, even if we wanted to. In the face of traditional print-based retailers vying for their share of a rapidly growing e-market, it is certainly time to talk cultural revolution along the lines of the displacement of orality by 'literacy' in the age of Plato or the Gutenberg premiere of movable type.

The New York Times (online) "Books" section recently carried an article "Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit" (March 15 2010) on born-digital archival material of author Salman Rushdie kept on display at Emory University (Atlanta). Visitors can gain access to file folders Rushdie used, even going so far as to edit first drafts on the author's own Mac computer: a uniquely author-spectator interaction the author of the article refers to as "access through emulation". But what was even more remarkable (to me) than the display of digitalized archival materials was the way the computer freed an author (living underground in 1989) from the tedium of incessant rewriting & editing and provided more time for thought, a contingency Rushdie says resulted in "tighter" work:

Mr. Rushdie started using a computer only when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa drove him underground. "My writing has got tighter and more concise because I no longer have to perform the mechanical act of re-typing endlessly," he explained during an interview while in hiding. "And all the time that was taken up by that mechanical act is freed to think."

I can't think of any episode more highly qualified to attest to the emergence of e-literacy, at least as a cultural & historical phenomenon. The man and his turn towards e-writing serve as almost iconic moments. It almost looks like a serendipitous meeting of writing genius and a newly evolving means of cultural production thrust cruelly on him. Almost but it isn't. Here history, adaptive literary ingenuity & a new conception of writing itself, one sprung from the former as in their alchemical fires, combine to force a literacy revolution. In fact, the whole Rushdie tale of word processing by necessity and its legacy as a digital relic that can be still directly accessed in its original screen form give literacy its truest definition today.

I'll even cite the Rushdie case as the occasion for a possible resolution to the Wikipedia versus Britannica.com debate. Literacy resides as a lovable bookish ideal only in a writer's (or reader's) imagination: it's very survival, however, as an enduring form of literary transmission needs new materials and means of production, both provided by changing human history. It's necessary to pause at that author and writing technology intersection for the rise of e-literacy, in origin & development, resides just there. Rushdie's use of the computer is a representation of a whole network (perhaps the term's most legitimate use) of converging historical & cultural forces, with the former providing the latter with its necessary impetus. I believe literary imagination subserves events, content and even the most radical contingency.

 E-literacy, in a word, is a conceptual construct, tool of serious scholarly work, but it appears also as a vital cultural conduit for changing weltanschauungen stated primarily in historical materialist terms.The hand-maiden to technological history. Textual content that cannot be reduced to a pure relic (artifact) anymore, and which works by an "access through emulation" principle, to make the processes of creative writing stored in Rushdie's files real in a way that Dickens's original copies in the Victoria and Albert Museum archives can never be. What, in my view, e-literacy is really all about.