Technological determinism and the naturalistic fallacy

Sorry for the long title.  'Technological determinism' is the view that the Internet is an unstoppable force (for good) and that trying to close down piracy sites such as Pirate Bay and TVShack will just lead to them being reopened elsewhere.  Implicit (often explicit) in this view is that this force is on the side of good, and right and so on.  A victory of the People against the Man.  The naturalistic fallacy is the fallacy that because something is the case, it ought to be the case.   Though it does not invoke the fallacy, this very nice site here explains it very well in the context of the 'free culture' or 'piracy' movement.

Yes. It is technologically easy to:

• Drive 120 miles an hour.
• Use someone else’s credit card to purchase goods online.
• Log into someone else’s bank account and transfer money to yourself.
• Shoot someone with a gun.

This does not imply that it is right to do so.

Web 2ology

Web 2.0 prophet Cory Doctorow has been awarded an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University. He writes

Networks -- by which I mean the Internet, which is like some ancient god with a thousand faces and guises, but which is actually a single, sprawling network that appears to different people and societies in different garb -- are the most significant means of changing our social circumstances. The UK Champion for Digital Inclusion, Martha Lane Fox, commissioned a PriceWaterhouseCooper study on the impact of Internet access on the poorest and most vulnerable families in the UK. The study concluded that families with network access have better outcomes on every social axis, from nutrition to employment, from education and social mobility to civil engagement and political awareness. Simply put, the Internet is a single wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and access to nutrition, education, employment, politics, and community.

This may be tongue in cheek or some kind of joke, but I suspect not. He is serious. I'm sure there is a correlation between quality of housing and income and access to the Internet. But he seems to be saying that the one is the cause of the other. See fallacy of false cause.

It's time we sceptics added another item to our list of 'ologies'. We already have scientology, astrology, reflexology, cosmobiology. What is the 'ology' for the belief in and the study of weird magical properties of the internet?

Adorno on popular music

I am working on the Wikipedia book, and starting with pre-1960s attitudes about high and low culture, i.e. those pre-contemporary prejudices to which the whole Web 2.0 world-view is utterly opposed.  I discussed Reith's view in an earlier post.

The Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) cannot be left out here. Adorno was passionate about music as a child, growing up in a wealthy and cultured family. He came to the United States in 1939 to join the Princeton University Radio Research Project as chief of the music division. The project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, for understanding the effects of mass media on society.

Adorno was highly critical of the effects of popular music. One of his essays is here, where he tries to capture the difference between highbrow and lowbrow music.  There are two. The first is 'standardisation'.  He makes the interesting point that the difference between high and low is not simply a matter of complexity and simplicity.

All works of the earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically simpler than stock arrangements of jazz. Melodically, the wide intervals of a good many hits such as Deep purple* or Sunrise Serenade are more difficult to follow per se than most melodies of, for example, Haydn, which consist mainly of circumscriptions of tonic triads and second steps.

However, the complicated in popular music never functions as "itself" but only as a disguise or embellishment behind which the scheme can always be perceived. The whole structure of popular music is standardized, "even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization".

Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. The general types of hits are also standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood, but also the "characters" such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense or "novelty" songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl. Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit — the beginning and the end of each part — must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.

'Serious' music, by contrast, is an organised whole in the context of which every detail must be understood, and which is never the simple enforcement of a musical schema. This cannot happen with popular music. No removal of detail affects its musical sense.

The second feature which distinguished the popular from the serious is pseudo-individualisation.  More later.

* The song from which the hideous rock group took their name.

Did Apple change our lives?

A nice article yesterday in the mail, by once young fogey, now officially old fogey, A.N.Wilson.

Einstein fundamentally altered how we look at the universe. Jobs merely developed nice-looking gadgetry which enabled us to do things we did already – listening to music, sending messages and garnering information.

Whereas we once looked information up in a book, we now search for the (often inaccurate) information online. Whereas we once sent telegrams, we now send emails. Yes, Steve Jobs made shopping online easier and more attractive. But it is still only shopping.

The Politics of Knowledge

Any book about Wikipedia must confront the issue of what Larry Sanger has called The Politics of Knowledge.  There is a nice piece by him in The Edge which gives you the general flavour.  Should we be told what knowledge we need?  Or do we know what we need already?  It's  a difficult paradox, that Plato would have appreciated.

Sanger's view is clear:

In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media—in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals.  But we are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web—the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. It is particularly the aggregation of public opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge.

We should not be told what we know.  This whole approach to knowledge contrasts strikingly with the view of education that I grew up with, which I shall attempt to characterise, and which I shall try to defend.

When I grew up in 1950s Britain, when broadcasting was under the shadow of a man called John Reith.  Reith's whole philosophy of broadcasting was unashamedly anti-populist or 'elitist' (if you like).  His endeavour was to carry to the greatest number of people everything that was best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement, and to avoid whatever was harmful.  The arbitrators of 'best' and 'harmful', of course, were the elite group of producers who ran the BBC.  Reith was often criticised for setting out to give the public not what it wanted but what it needed, to which he replied "the answer was that few knew what they wanted, fewer what they needed".  As if to say, the public, the crowd, do not know what they need to know, and so must be told.

So, in the 1950s, there were only three BBC stations, all state-controlled.  There was the 'Light Programme', the most popular, devoted to what is now called 'British Light Music', of which Puffin' Billy and Barwick Green are archetypes (interesting how these tunes are engraved in the collective subconscious of my generation), as well as 'variety shows' and comedy. The "Home Service" was the channel for news, features, and slightly more demanding drama . Finally there was the "Third Programme" which was unashamedly highbrow and 'elitist', consisting of classical music concerts and recitals, and scientific and philosophical talks, poetry readings and classic or 'experimental' plays. Anna Kallin (who naturally has no Wikipedia biography) was responsible for much of the philosophical and cultural programming, of which this page gives you a strong sense.

It's easy to be critical of this approach now.  Yet it had a wonderful effect. It was on the radio, free for anyone to listen to, and brought directly into the living room the contrast between between 'high' and 'popular' culture. The very idea of 'high' culture, and the idea that some kinds of knowledge are better, was made manifest.  It must have inspired many young people to get an education.

If you believe in the distinction between high and popular culture, you cannot avoid the Reithian  approach to broadcasting, or something like it. It is a logical consequence.  Popular culture by definition is what the populace want, or think they want.  High culture by definition is higher and better.  It is what the populace needs, and is what they should want (even though they think they don't want it).  If you believe in the distinction at all, you cannot avoid an 'elitist' approach like this.  That is the Reithian politics of knowledge.

If you don't believe in it, you may as well get the general public to write down what they know, or what they think they know.  That is the Wikipedian politics of knowledge.

Which is right?  I welcome Larry Sanger's views.

Web 2.0 Nonsense on Stilts

Here. Nonsense on stilts.  Every cliche or stereotype of 'Web 2.0', and Wikipedia as well.  It begins with the (desperately flawed) study in Nature which supposedly showed "few differences in accuracy" between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, comments approvingly on the "bogglingly complex and well-staffed system for dealing with errors and disputes on Wikipedia", without mentioning about how astonishingly corrupt this system is.   It argues that there are three main advantages to Wikipedia:

• Wikipedia offers far richer, more comprehensive citations to source materials and bibliographies on- and offline, thereby providing a far better entry point for serious study (yes, but many of these 'citations' are completely fake, as was proved in this case, and many others are simply cherry-picked).
• It is instantly responsive to new developments (and yet articles like Durandus or Roscellinus are entirely plagiarised from the century old Catholic Enyclopedia and Britannica 1911)
• It has 'history' and 'talk' pages (of course, but as the article immediately concedes "a load of dimwitted yelling and general codswallop may also emerge", and usually does).

And then we move on to McLuhan, and the stupid idea that "technology alters cognition itself". 

The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of harmony and peace.

And so Wikipedia, along with other "crowd-sourced" resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of "authority," "authorship," and even "knowledge."   We have reached 'the end of truth'

Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic. Rather than being handed an "authoritative" decision, you're given the means for rolling your own.

Fortunately the commenters were somewhat better informed than the author of this silly and foolish article.  One of them writes

This article is foolish and actually mischaracterizes what Wikipedia is doing. Wikipedia is based around a strong hierarchy between experts and everyone else. Credentialed experts do primary research. They look at the actual stuff. Wiki-editors do secondary research. They read the sources that the experts write and debate the meaning of those sources. This is the governance that is built into the site, and it is a hierarchical one. Wiki-editors would only be “fellow travelers” with experts if they did primary research themselves. But how many times have you seen wiki-editors cite their own research in French or Russian archives, or their own experiments on bacteria, or their own mathematical proofs? Never. And that’s the difference.
Wikipedia hardly devalues experts. It enshrines them like never before. Every statement in a Wikipedia article has to be backed up with a citation to an article or book produced by a journalist, an academic, a scientist, or some other credentialed expert who has carried out primary research according to currently prevailing methods in journalism or academia. In no way are the wiki-writers “fellow travelers” with these expert sources in the governance of the site. Their job is only to debate which wording best characterizes the existing expert sources for the purposes of an encyclopedia article. This is all great as a learning exercise, and I applaud them for doing so, but it does not equalize experts and readers.

Correct.  Not that even this works, in many cases, but I have discussed all that elsewhere.

5 Myths About the 'Information Age'

A lovely article here.

"We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented.

And see my own ramblings, e.g. here.

University of the future?

An amusing example of Web 2.0 nonsense, byJim Barber, vice-chancellor of the University of New England, is being discussed all over Web 2.0. It's the usual stuff. Wikipedia is 10 years old, it's full of 'user-generated content', Encyclopedia Britannica has lost the battle, Wikipedia has 10 million articles, reference to the 'Nature' article which apparently showed Wikpedia was more accurate than Britannica, open-courseware movement, blah blah.

Barber suggests "we could start by dispensing altogether with the term lecturer", and that "with the recent arrival of web 2.0 technologies and the imminent arrival of the National Broadband Network, social interaction is no longer constrained by space and time."

Universities that continue to regard user-generated knowledge as inferior to
that of experts and treat technology as an adjunct to genuine learning will find
it increasingly difficult to compete with the new virtual institutions that
offer open courseware without the capital-intensive overheads that campus-based,
proprietorial education imposes.

This is nonsense. As I have argued in a series of posts over the last two months, Wikipedia is not designed to produce 'user-generated knowledge'. It is a tertiary source reflecting information in secondary sources generated by subject-matter experts - indeed, century-old subject-matter experts. Wikipedia is not putting the academic world out of business.

But who is Wikipedia putting out of work? To understand this, and to understand the truth about 'user-generated knowledge', you could do no better than to read Joseph McCabe's excellent discourse on how encyclopedias are actually written (he is referring to Columbia encyclopedia, not Wikipedia):

But let me say at once that this encyclopedia [i.e. Columbia] has certainly one
distinction, though it does not boast of it. It has more ladies than men on the
list of its editorial and writing staff, 31 females and 28 males. We, of course,
applaud their bold vindication of the new equality of the sexes; or we would
applaud if we could take it as proof that the majority of experts on the many
subjects discussed are now feminine. Unfortunately, we cannot infer that if we
know the technique of creating an encyclopedia. A number of real experts are
paid handsomely to write and sign lengthy articles on subjects of which they are
masters, and the bulk of the work is copied from earlier encyclopedias by a
large number of "Penny-a- liners." None of the articles in the Columbia are
signed. You might infer from this that all articles are written by experts, but
we shall have reason, presently, to doubt this.

Doesn't that remind you of Wikipedia? The bulk of the genuinely encyclopedic content in Wikipedia is copied and pasted from other sources. Indeed, from 100-year old sources, as I have argued in earlier posts. At least traditional encyclopedias plagiarise more recent sources (I have an amusing example of that here)! and at least traditional encyclopedias have lengthy articles by masters of the subject, whereas Wikipedia has practically nothing.

See also the insightful essay by the late Roy Rosenzweig, writing in the The Journal of American History June 2006 about whether history can be open source. It was written four years ago, but his observations about Wikipedia then are true now, even down to the fact that the article Cultural history of the United States was a stub then and is a stub now - with the odd result that a Google search on 'cultural history of the United States' returns the article #1 on the search, even though there is nothing in it, apart from one banal sentence.

Will Wikipedia put professional historians out of business? asks Rosenzweig. No. "Good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose. He puts his finger on why subjects like history (and, I would argue, philosophy) are so difficult for Wikipedia to get right. Broad synthetic writing is not easily done collaboratively. Good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose. Exactly the same is true of philosophy, and more so.

Overall, writing is the Achilles' heel of Wikipedia. Committees rarely write
well, and Wikipedia entries often have a choppy quality that results from the
stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people. Some
Wikipedians contribute their services as editors and polish the prose of
different articles. But they seem less numerous than other types of volunteers.
Few truly gifted writers volunteer for Wikipedia. Encarta, while less
comprehensive than Wikipedia, generally offers better—especially, more concise—
writing.

And the bottom line, in any case, is that students are not supposed to rely on any kind of encyclopedia.

Most readers of this journal have not relied heavily on encyclopedias since
junior high school days. And most readers of this journal do not want their
students to rely heavily on encyclopedias—digital or print, free or
subscription, professionally written or amateur and collaborative—for research
papers. One Wikipedia contributor noted that despite her "deep appreciation for
it," she still "roll[s her] eyes whenever students submit papers with Wikipedia
as a citation." "Any encyclopedia, of any kind," wrote another observer, "is a
horrible place to get the whole story on any subject." Encyclopedias "give you
the topline"; they are "the Reader's Digest of deep knowledge." Fifty years ago,
the family encyclopedia provided this "rough and ready primer on some name or
idea"; now that role is being played by the Internet and increasingly by
Wikipedia.