This essay can be read in my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Perhaps ironically, it is no longer free.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a very long set of replies.
UPDATE 2: I’ve decided to reply below as well–very belatedly…
This essay can be read in my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Perhaps ironically, it is no longer free.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a very long set of replies.
UPDATE 2: I’ve decided to reply below as well–very belatedly…
I actually agree to most of the views of the writer. College is not a waste of time entirely, there are intangible but necessary aspects like discipline that you can never inculcate just by reading stuff from the internet.
But this is a fact that Internet is a boon in a way for people who want to learn beyond the stuff written in the books. It is really great to discuss technical subjects and get your doubts cleared just by posting your opinions or questions on the technical websites. I have practically seen the wide knowledge sharing helping me.
[…] Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society seems a little light on “society.”I was hoping that Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It would provide a clear rejoinder to a four-way debate between Larry Sanger, Evengy Morozov, Jeff Jarvis, and Nathan Jurgenson about “The Rise of the Internet Anti-Intellectual”. Sanger is concerned that online communities have a history of hostility toward the experts and intellectuals. Sanger Recalls: […]
That was very well-though-out, and hopefully “just in time”. May it be as sobering as you hope, and not as prescient as we dread.
I would only quibble with two minor things:
1) Geeks prize knowledge, just trivial knowledge, like how to construct a particularly gnarly perl-compatible regular expression, or which episode of ‘The Walking Dead’ featured so-and-so as a cameo-appearance zombie. It’s all a chest-beating contest (was going to say something about “-waving”, but this isn’t Facebook).
2) University education is not-quite-hopelessly mired in ca. 1890 ideas about pedagogy and learning, even if it’s starting to adapt (not always, helpfully though – most “distance learning” is a crock). Its glacial, life-sucking pace to many intelligent people accounts for much of the “what a time-waste” attitude many have toward it, and this is an independent concern from anti-intellectualism, even if the two attitudes correlate in negative synergy. As an autodidactic polymath who can breeze through textbooks in a few days if I find the material interesting, I lament most of the time I spent in classrooms, except on the rare occasion I had a great professor – the kind filled with the genuine knowledge of which you wrote – who presented original lectures with additional information and (more importantly) unique, experienced insight, not regurgitations of the texts we were assigned.
All the rest of the trends you identified do seem to be of-a-piece, and genuinely (if accidentally and/or subconsciously) anti-intellectual. A few months ago I broke my smartphone, and decided to spend a few months without one to recapture what some aspects of life were like only a decade ago. It was damned difficult. Our dependence on technological gadgets and databases to find our way around, remember what our friends’ interests are, even know what day of the week it is and whether we’re supposed to be somewhere, are a weakness and a high cost to pay for Mapquest, Twitter, and Google Calendar.
I remain an active Wikipedian after over a decade. But I also own around 3,500 real, paper books. The crowd’s alleged wisdom comes from those (and journals, albeit a few are online-only now), not from some general-public “hive mind”. There is no physics, or medicine, or linguistics, or psychology or whatever, for anyone to summarize on Wikipedia or argue about on webboards, without knowledge-steeped, intellectual professionals generating and analyzing all those facts.
[…] not objective, then well-researched at that. Larry Sanger’s well aware of this phenomenon. (Though it could be me doing a lot of research as […]
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