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As president of the ALA, Michael Gorman led an organization historically committed to protecting and enhancing the individual citizen’s right to information and freedom of expression. But here he seems to take a stance better suited to the counter-reformation than the age of information. From his strange conflation of blogging with intelligent design, to his atavistic take on authority and individual expression it’s clear that Michael Gorman misunderstands the potential of the Internet so thoroughly that he can’t even be wrong about it. For the Internet is not the end of the responsible making and sharing of knowledge, but a tool—in fact a uniquely powerful creation of reasoning human minds—that fosters and empowers responsible individual expression.

Citing Goya’s Sleep of Reason, Gorman dismisses (in the first of his three essays) in one gesture the varied panoply of actions together called citizen journalism as nothing more than navel-gazing and vain self-promotion, a black sabbath of mumbling, incoherent wretches pursuing id-driven hungers with decadent abandon. But when I mash-up Goya with Web 2.0, what comes to mind is the remarkable Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War)—a series of drawings made between 1820 and 1823 in which the artist depicted the depredations of Napoleon’s Grande Armée as it swept through Spain on a campaign of terror. Goya was a court painter whose portraits of cardinals and dukes conferred authority, but whose more subversive images (in both the Caprices and the Disasters of War) were suppressed and shunned throughout his lifetime for political reasons. The Disasters of War, in fact, wasn’t published until long after the artist’s death put him safely out of reach of inquisitorial authority. Too bad he didn’t have an Internet through which to express his clairvoyant visions.

Just as Goya’s etchings are much more than mere cartoons, there’s more to citizen journalism than the Drudge Report and Perez Hilton. It’s clear that Gorman hasn’t spent much time looking at Global Voices, a web site founded by Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard’s Berkman Center to “aggregate, curate, and amplify” the work of committed and courageous citizen journalists around the world. A thoughtful visitor to Global Voices might conclude that today, Goya would be a blogger in China, giving voice to embattled beliefs in the face of a regime that favors the market over the human freedoms; he would be an activist in Western Massachusetts using Google Earth share documentation of the razed villages of Darfur; he would be an out-of-work engineer in Nigeria using Twitter and e-cards to alert sympathetic others about the environmental devastation wrought by Big Oil in the Niger Delta. Desastres de la Guerra can be taken as a powerful example of citizen journalism avant la lettre. Who after all was Goya, a mere artist, to presume the authority of political dialogue?

In her late work Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag pondered Goya’s works as she came to grips with the powers and limitations of images to effect political change. There, she reminds us that neither the art of a master like Goya, nor the modern journalism of authority, nor even eyewitness itself is enough to ensure right action. Even when looking firsthand at atrocity and deprivation, after all, we’re likely still only looking. This bourgeois quietism is one of the unfortunate fruits of the culture of authority Gorman counsels us to venerate. But the web isn’t about consuming news, or expertise, or knowledge. It’s about making knowledge, growing expertise, and taking action.

Does Gorman really believe, along with Andrew Keen, that “the most poorly educated and inarticulate among us” should not use the media to  “express and realize themselves”? That they should keep quiet, learn their place, and bow to such bewigged and alienating confections as “authority” and “authenticity”? Authority, after all, flows ultimately from results, not from such hierophantic trappings as degrees, editorial mastheads, and neoclassical columns. And if the underprivileged (or under-titled) among us are supposed to keep quiet, who will enforce their silence—the government? Universities and foundations? Internet service providers and media conglomerates? Are these the authorities—or their avatars in the form of vetted, credentialed content—to whom it should be our privilege to defer?

Experience, expertise, and authority do retain their power on the web. What’s evolving now are tools to discover and amplify individual expertise wherever it may emerge. Maoist collectivism is bad—but remember that Maoism is a thing enabled and enforced by authority. Similarly, digital Maoism rears its head whenever we talk about limiting the right to individual expression that, with the power of the web behind it, is creating a culture of capricious beauty and quirky, surprising utility. Digital Maoism will emerge when users are cowed by authority, when they revert to the status of mere consumer, when the ISPs and the media conglomerates reduce the web to a giant cable TV box.

Authority has its uses, to be sure, but it presents problems as well. We’re told that the authority of scholarly expertise in our tradition rests on something called authenticity. Very nice–but remember that Gorman’s criteria of authenticity are highly selective and synthetic; historically, authority has not always been justified in such congenial terms. Anyone know what dysmenorrhea is? It’s the medical term for premenstrual syndrome, and at one time was the Library of Congress’s sole subject heading for monthly distress. (Think of a young woman in the 1960s turning to the card catalog for guidance on the new and troubling changes her body has undergone. Gee, thanks, authority!) Authority kept public libraries in the South segregated under Jim Crow. The authority of the American Psychological Association classified homosexuality as a pathology in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until well into the 1970s, as David Weinberger discusses in Everything is Miscellaneous, his fascinating new book on the liberation of order and knowledge on the Internet.

No, there is no citizen surgery. There’s no citizen bus-driving, either, because the work it makes sense to collaborate about and share isn’t determined by its degree of academic or technical sophistication. There will always be jobs that require a pair of hands connected to functioning heads. But openly accessible, digitally networked webs of knowledge are changing other aspects of medical practice (and mass transit, for that matter) in countless ways. The extraordinary range of projects and tools emerging under the umbrella of “Web 2.0″ is hardly about a flight from individual responsibility and identity. People use the web to assert not only their rights as free persons, but to take up the responsibility mandated by the exercise of those rights.Today, concepts and images are answerable as they’ve never been before; creators submit their acts and ideas to the scrutiny of the largest peer-review panel ever conceived. Gorman is right to point out that in the world of the printed book, it was never printing itself that conferred authority (although there’s no denying that, historically, the press did act as its own imprimatur, lending works an often-unearned authority). And as with Gutenberg’s invention, it ultimately isn’t the technology of the Web that’s important (although like Gutenberg’s press, it’s a tool of unprecedented, epoch-making potential).

What’s really exciting is the profound social discovery the technology allows us to make—that civil society, access to education and opportunity, and a culture that values expression can create a world of wildly individual consciousnesses, whose capacity for collaborative knowledge-making gives rise to authority of a new and emancipatory kind.        

   

 

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13 Responses to “Authority of a New Kind”

  1. Sarah Donaldson Says:

    This is a wonderfully written piece, nicely and intelligently argued, but it (and the author) suffers from a bout of naivete (if not also from a lack of candor).

    Gorman certainly exaggerates the dangers of Web 2.0 and fails to give an inch in the virtues of the new technology, but Mr. Battles, and other Web 2.0 enthusiasts, fail to appreciate what the ideologues in their camp are willing to sacrifice on the alter of the new and novel. We can argue all day long about the meanings of the word “authority” and “authenticity,” but in the end, we’re still left with a Wild West ethos on the Web where kids armed with a powerful new toy (yes, yes, the toys and tools are “creative” too!) can hide behind anonymity, shirk responsibility, pretend to be professors of Church doctrine a la “Essjay” (in the recent Wikipedia scandal), and trash and defame the character of a John Seigenthaler. All with impunity and in the name of progress, creativity (there’s that word again!), and “wildly individual consciousnesses” (Battles is too good a stylist to float such a phrase).

    The “pro” camp in this debate only hurts its cause by not more forthrightly and honestly acknowledging many of the problems elucidated in Gorman’s post.

  2. Bob McHenry Says:

    Yes, Ms. Donaldson, it is wonderfully written, if your taste runs to the purplish in prose. But naive? Oh, no! Nothing naive here. Take, for an example, the dextrous way in which Mr. Battles eases from one sense of “authority” to another: at one moment it means command of a body of knowledge; at another, political power; at a third, possession of certain credentials. With three definitions to hand, he can discredit almost any claim for authority.

    Naive? How about that phrase “bourgeois quietism”? It cannot possibly mean anything, but we all know instinctively that it’s a bad thing. This is very clever advocacy.

    The Internet, according to Mr. Battles, is “a tool—in fact a uniquely powerful creation of reasoning human minds.” So is the atom bomb. I assume we all agree that we would not be delighted to see one in the hands of every fool with a pseudonym.

  3. Sage Ross Says:

    Re: Sarah Donaldson’s comment

    The Essjay and Seigenthaler incidents are hardly convincing examples of anonymous defamation perpetrated with impunity. In both cases, the individuals and their actions were exposed, and had real-world consequences. Essjay lost both his job and his place in the Wikipedia community (both of which he had earned on the basis his actually contributions, not his made-up credentials).

    In many other, less-publicized instances as well, people who use the freedoms of Web 2.0 maliciously often can’t escape consequences or maintain their anonymity. (Attempts by congressional staffers to whitewash their bosses’ Wikipedia articles comes to mind.)

    The reality of many Web 2.0 communities is that people work as hard to maintain the reputations of their online personas as they do their real-life reputations. It may be surprising, but it’s undeniable that the vast majority of Wikipedia users take their editing rights, and the accompanying responsibilities, very seriously. As the saying goes: “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”

    2284
  4. Sarah Donaldson Says:

    Re: Sage Ross

    In neither Wikipedia scandal was the perpetrator or his actions dealt with forthrightly. Seigenthaler had to wait many months to have the defamatory entry taken down, only to see the entry live on for additional months on the Web in mirror sites of Wikipedia, and Jimmy Wales was less than forthright in dealing with Essjay; in fact, at first he defended Essjay’s actions, in an embarrassing way that shocked even the most giddy of Wiki enthusiasts.

    And, last, how would you know that Wiki users take their editing rights very seriously? They’re anonymous, their backgrounds unknown, their decisions unjustified until after the fact–how can you say with any certitude or convincing conviction that the mere 800 people truly copying and pasting the quickly deteriorating Wiki together are not any more bogus in their claims than Essjay? Even other Wiki administrators were fooled by Essjay’s claims!

    The onus is on Wikipedia, and its creators and champions, to show why we, as readers, should trust your claims. At least with Britannica we know the authors and can view their CVs and read and vet their other work, thus granting us some reason and rationale for extending them and their work some modicum of faith.

  5. 上海数据恢复 Says:

    In neither Wikipedia scandal was the perpetrator or his actions dealt with forthrightly. Seigenthaler had to wait many months to have the defamatory entry taken down, only to see the entry live on for additional months on the Web in mirror sites of Wikipedia, and Jimmy Wales was less than forthright in dealing with Essjay; in fact, at first he defended Essjay’s actions, in an embarrassing way that shocked even the most giddy of Wiki enthusiasts.

    And, last, how would you know that Wiki users take their editing rights very seriously? They’re anonymous, their backgrounds unknown, their decisions unjustified until after the fact–how can you say with any certitude or convincing conviction that the mere 800 people truly copying and pasting the quickly deteriorating Wiki together are not any more bogus in their claims than Essjay? Even other Wiki administrators were fooled by Essjay’s claims!

    The onus is on Wikipedia, and its creators and champions, to show why we, as readers, should trust your claims. At least with Britannica we know the authors and can view their CVs and read and vet their other work, thus granting us some reason and rationale for extending them and their work some modicum of faith.
    good

  6. Matthew Battles Says:

    I love the archly supercilious tone Mr. McHenry uses in calling my prose purple–it seems that online, the defenders of eternal values are as susceptible to the savor of the “flame war” as the brutish, pseudonymous hordes of the internet. But perhaps we’ll move beyond the ad hominem to the issues at hand. I ease from one kind of authority to another because authority is a complex thing, and their forms in practice will overlap. Don’t think that means I don’t appreciate authority that takes the form of expertise–indeed I hold it in the highest regard! My browsers all bookmark britannica.com, in fact, and I find myself in libraries–real ones, with columns and bricks and bookstacks–four days out of five. But I know there’s a great deal of expertise out there on the internet, far more than the caricaturish image of a cyber-lumpenproletariat allows.

  7. K.G. Schneider Says:

    Honestly, this whole “debate” needs 24×7 feminist watch. Global Voices was co-founded by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, not solely founded by Zuckerman. In fact, having been present at the creation, I would say MacKinnon was the most present voice in its creation.

    Too bad, because that bit of revisionist history mars an otherwise fine article with excellent points. Note that in addition to changes to the DSM, librarians in ALA have waged long battles to give GLBT voices better representation in library catalogs. More of the same argument, I know, but worth raising.

    Gorman was only invited to this discussion because of the notoriety that followed a classic error he made a couple of years ago, when he assumed that editorials in newspapers and magazines mocking bloggers and technology would receive the same diluted, editor-filtered response of yore (I’m surprised none of you have spent much time discussing the role of the mainstream media in filtering information; go to the NYT of the suffrage era and see how the suffragists are mocked). He was reviled and he was defended, but most of all, what he thought was a final product became part of a conversation that goes on to this day.

  8. Matthew Battles Says:

    Mea culpa, K.G. Schneider–I am absolutely, inexcusably remiss in failing to credit Rebecca MacKinnon! I’m also glad that you bring the question of media filtering into the discussion–it’s clearly one of those areas in which different forms of authority, the wise as well as the wicked, tend to overlap. The mostly salutary development of the public editor in journalism is I think at least in part a response to the smarter, more pointed scrutiny the media received from readers/viewers/ listeners who use the internet to school themselves in the media’s ways.

    I also appreciate Sarah Donaldon’s thoughtful responses, although I do take issue with the charge of naivete. I do know that bad stuff goes down on the internet–and the Siegenthaler affair (now two years old) is hardly the worst of it! Digital networks have spawned new forms of mischief-making, spam and viruses chief among them. But calumny and libel aren’t artifacts of technology. As Adrian Johns points out in his magisterial Nature of the Book, it took a long time for the world of print to develop a kind of immune system to protect readers from piracy in printed books. The short take would be that such are the forms of good authority that we wouldn’t want the Web 2.0 to scuttle. But I simply don’t think these things are incompatible with the kinds of knowledge-sharing and meaning-making the new technology does make possible. Although it is an important story in the history of the Web, one to preserve and consider again and again in the years to come, the Siegenthaler affair isn’t much help in coming to grips with Wikipedia *now* (which has changed in important ways since then).

  9. Deepak Says:

    While I am none too enamored by the intelligence of other members of the species, I still find it difficult to understand why some people feel threatened by Web 2.0/Wikipedia/citizen media (pick your poison). Yes, there are a lot of idiots in the world, but how does one define authority and expertise? As someone who could be considered an “expert” in my field, just cause of education if nothing else, should there be an expectation of my word being sacrosanct. Not one bit. In the end, you prove yourself by your actions/words/video, etc. Most of the stuff out there is garbage, but then that’s always been the case (how many professionally developed movies are any good?). You just get to see a lot of it, and once we figure out how to filter information in a more usable way, we’ll all be a lot happier. As someone I know would say “some people take life far to seriously for their own good”.

    1da4
  10. Seth Finkelstein Says:

    Deepak, because “Web 2.0″ runs on telling those idiots that they’re as good as experts, in order to make a buck off them. This business model is not new at all, but has become more virulent, as the hucksters have been making far better use of the Internet than intellectuals (I don’t think that was technologically predestined, but it’s what happened).

  11. 上海数据恢复 Says:

    I am absolutely, inexcusably remiss in failing to credit Rebecca MacKinnon! I’m also glad that you bring the question of media filtering into the discussion–it’s clearly one of those areas in which different forms of authority, the wise as well as the wicked, tend to overlap. The mostly salutary development of the public editor in journalism is I think at least in part a response to the smarter, more pointed scrutiny the media received from readers/viewers/ listeners who use the internet to school themselves in the media’s ways.

  12. 上海数据恢复 Says:

    networks have spawned new forms of mischief-making, spam and viruses chief among them. But calumny and libel aren’t artifacts of technology. As Adrian Johns points out in his magisterial Nature of the Book, it took a long time for the world of print to develop a kind of immune system to protect readers from piracy in printed books. The short take would be that such are the forms of good authority that we wouldn’t want the Web 2.0 to scuttle. But I simply don’t think these things

  13. 上海 数据恢复 Says:

    Nature of the Book, it took a long time for the world of print to develop a kind of immune system to protect readers from piracy in printed books. The short take would be that such are the forms of good authority that we wouldn’t want the Web 2.0 to scuttle. But I simply don’t think these things

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