After reading
Amber's post, I starting thinking about something we bring up when talking about online discussions. One complaint is that everyone just says the first thing that comes to mind; they speak without filtering or editing themselves.
But I don't think this is a new concept. I first thought of Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. Edmund Burke published his book
Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. Mary Wollstonecraft read it, got angry, and published her own response, the famous
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, just a few weeks later.
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| Quickly (and beautifully) written. |
What's our beef with quick writing? Is it that too many people can spread information now? Maybe someone besides Mary Wollstonecraft had some thoughts about the French Revolution, but they couldn't get a printer. I guess we'll never know. Of course, when word processors came out, novelists mourned that now anyone could write a novel. Though I don't think anyone writes a novel these days because they think, "ooh, I can do it in Word!"
So, what is it about the ease of publishing that makes us so hesitant to value something?
The refining process involved in the deliberative act of writing, revising, and publishing is largely absent in digital settings, so it to some extent lacks the ethos that more traditional, printed texts enjoy. I think systems of legitimization are developing in the digital sphere, but it's taking some time. One of the big issues of the modern age, I think, is simply sorting out the useful and true from the trivial and fallacious.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the revision process (I am an editor, after all), but my somewhat snarky point was that I don't think Mary Wollstonecraft went through a lot of revising if she managed to read Burke's publication, think through a lengthy response, write it, and have it circulated all within a couple of weeks.
DeleteIt's true what you say, though. I often find myself reading something I know is completely incorrect online, but written as if from the point of view of an expert.
I agree with Greg too: it is difficult to sort out valuable and useful works from the mass of the internet. I was thinking about how we could possibly hone down our searches to find the valuable. We have databases from the BYU library for example that find specific articles, but it can be difficult even still to use these databases. Then I thought of how effective the people's opinion is. The more retweets, thumbs up on a youtube video, or kudos on a post, the more likely someone is to find it. You would hope it was a valuable tweet or video, but more often than not it's over something stupid or amusing, not necessarily valuable or publishable.
ReplyDelete