sachafeinman

When I was a kid, sixteen maybe, my grandfather took me to a production of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn.  The play consists of nothing more than an imagined conversation between Niels Bohr, his wife, and Werner Heisenberg after World War II.  Was Heisenberg actively working on the development of the A-Bomb for the Nazis, or was he in fact a saboteur, secretly slowing down the project because he considered the production of atomic weaponry to be fundamentally immoral?

I was mesmerized by the author’s application of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to the act of remembering and recording history.  To whit; the more you examine something, the harder you work to pin down the objective facts of whatever it is that you’re measuring, the further away you get from Truth.

It was a revelatory moment for me, understanding how a primal law of physics might explain aspects of our existence that, ostensibly, have nothing to do with science.

For much of this course (reflected clearly in what I’ve published on this blog), I’ve been obsessed with the idea of authority in the digital age.  And like Heisenberg’s Principle, the harder I work to pin it down, the further from success I seem to get.  Is authority Pagerank?  It can’t be… It’s not human!  Is it Wikipedia?  No way!  Digital Maosim is the antithesis of what we need from “authority” in the most dire of times.  And our most reliable and classic institutions, the ones fueled by our “trust” that they are the embodiment of “all the news that’s fit to print”?  They’re dropping like flies.

We the intelligentsia mourn the passing of the era when it was all so simple, damnit!  When the New York Times and Tom Brokaw had a monopoly on telling us what was happening in the world and why we should care.

Having worked in the industry, however, I have a very different (read: cynical) view of things.  For all the editors/reporters I’ve met who demonstrate remarkable, farsighted news judgment and a commitment to the higher civic responsibilities of journalism, I’ve known and worked with just as many who are incompetent, selfish and borderline sociopathic.   In fact, the later types often thrive and rise to the top of the industry.  It’s not without reason that one of the most influential works of long-form journalism published in the last 25 years opens with the sentence: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible”.

It should not come as any sort of a surprise that human beings are often petty and always fallible.  However I was shocked when I came to understand, through lived experience, how the veneer of institutional prestige gave extraordinary currency to ordinary people.  Watching inept professionals run newspapers and magazines into the ground cast a profound doubt on how I define authority.  If these institutions are comprised of such an unimpressive workforce, why are they so important?  How ironic that newspapers and magazines, operating on a charter to explain the world to us, can’t make sense of the Internet (the most important development in publishing since Gutenberg!) and adjust their business models accordingly.

There was a lot of mourning in class over the last two weeks, something I don’t want to be too dismissive of.  When the New Yorker arrives in my mailbox, it’s a goddamn mini-holiday, and there are few things more satisfying than spending a lazy Sunday morning picking through the Times.

But I really meant it when I said that we can’t gloss over how deeply flawed the old system was.  A board of (usually) older, white, upper-middle class men meeting on a daily basis in order to decide what will and wont’ be tomorrow’s news was a far from perfect system.  As much as I love old-media (and once wanted nothing more than to be a part of its establishment), I no longer see it as the great and powerful OZ.  This was more a product of my personal experiences than anything else, but it does conveniently dovetail with the rise of the Internet and the pulling back of the curtain for all the rest to see.

I decided to analyze the Wikipedia entry for East of Eden.  John Steinbeck’s last major work probably isn’t a great piece of fiction, but it is my favorite novel for personal and sentimental reasons.  I picked it up for the first time when I was thirteen, and have re-read it eight more times over the ensuing years.  My only tattoo is a direct reference to the book.

There exists a solid nucleus of information for East of Eden, but it could be much, much stronger.

Intro:

The entry opens weakly, with an explanation that Steinbeck wanted to use the book to describe the sensations of the Salina Valley to his two young sons.  This statement needs a reference, one that can be found in Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters.

The note that Steinbeck considered East of Eden his greatest work is a famous one.  However it also needs a citation (the same line, also sans notation, is on the John Steinbeck page).  Proof that he felt this way can be found in the introduction to the Penguin Books Centennial Edition.

Summary:

The summary of the book is adequate, though it does gloss over a few key points.  The first glaring omission comes in the fourth paragraph, the one starting with “Adam Trask”.  There is no mention here of Adam and Charles’ father, Cyrus.  The relationships of Adam/Cyrus and Charles/Cyrus set both the narrative and thematic templates of much of the rest of the book.  The family dynamics that are established when Adam and Charles are children will be tragically recreated when Adam has children of his own.

In the following paragraph, the entry’s author fails to mention that Charles sleeps with Cathy before she and Adam escape to California.  In fact, Charles is the real father to the children that Adam will unknowingly raise as his own.

A major subplot of the novel deals with another family (the Hamiltons) residing in the Salinas Valley at the same time as Adam and his children.  Samuel Hamilton is actually a thinly veiled fictional sketch of Steinbeck’s own grandfather, and his offspring are references to specific aunts and uncles that Steinbeck grew up with.  A short note referencing this should be added to the summary (again, see the introduction to the Penguin Books Centennial Edition).

Major Themes:

This is the entry’s weakest section, as the author fails to mention and contextualize the book’s most important theme.  As mentioned at the end of the Summary section, Adam’s dying word to his son Cal is “Timshel”.

Within the world of the book, “Timshel” represents a specific theological view; that God imbued man with free will, and that the greatest exercise of that freedom is to choose the path of righteousness over the path of evil.

The author correctly mentions the books many references to the story of Cain and Abel, a parable that is played out again and again in various forms from the book’s first page to its last.

“Timshel” is the crucial ingredient in the worldview that Steinbeck is trying to communicate, and it’s absence is a terrible omission.  When Adam utters the word on his deathbed, he is freeing Cal of his culpability in the death of Cal’s brother Aaron.  He is also letting Cal know that he is not necessarily doomed to repeat the Trask family tragedies over again, that Cal has it within him to right an entire history of wrongs.

Writing East of Eden

The entry briefly notes that the book was not well received by the critics of its day, though it offers no reference to prove this. The statement is true, and can be found in the introduction to the Penguin Books Centennial Edition.

It also fails to mention that one of the biggest faults critics had with the novel was its treatment of women.  They felt that the book’s female characters were one-dimensional and simplistic in comparison to their male counterparts.

Finally, the entry doesn’t observe that Oprah Winfrey made East of Eden the initial selection for her re-vamped book club (which had then been on hiatus for over a year) in June 2003.  This distinction propelled East of Eden back to the top of the best-seller list for the first time in almost fifty years.  The proper citation can be found here:

http://www.oprah.com/pressroom/Oprah-FAQs

All edits would be executed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JDilla17

In The Plex builds nicely on the foundation laid by Clay Shirkey’s book from last week.  That is to say, it picks up on several of Shirkey’s key themes (principally that our classic notions of organization/management have been completely upended by the onset of the digital age), and couches them in a longer, more specific narrative.  With Google, however, we are not just dealing with the company’s division of labor (which, if not revolutionary, is extraordinarily unconventional), but with the restructuring and reordering it brought to the concept of Internet search.

If Here Comes Everybody was the theoretical framework, In The Plex is the case study.

Thanks to equal parts intuition and obsession, Larry Page and Sergey Brin “cracked the code” of the internet, bringing order to a realm where previously there had been none.  Whereas prior attempts at search had resulted in messy and useless results, Page and Brin brought the inspiration of their university experiences to bear on the problem.  Replicating the academic tradition of citations, they wrote an algorithm that calculated a webpage’s significance by judging its inbound hyperlinks.  The larger number and better quality links to a page, the more likely it offered a valuable source of information on a given search term.

This knack for radical, unconventional thinking extended itself into a variety of areas as the company grew.  What began as an experiment in search has gone on to upend the advertising business, cell phones, news aggregation, and dozens of other industries.

The common thread in all of these innovations was the company’s single-minded obsession with improving the “user experience”.   Weather it was rejecting the pleas of their early VCs to engage in a little marketing (Page and Brin, preferred to concentrate on improving their product) or offering remarkably fair rules to those bidding on AdWords (users were refunded the difference between their bid and the next lowest), Google brought an engineer’s clear sense of logic to bear, always concentrating on the user’s satisfaction.  As the company’s China debacle demonstrates, the “engineer’s way” does have its limitations.  Nevertheless, that the young, contrarian company never got hung up on ideas of “stickiness” and “walled gardens” quickly lead to their remarkable multi-industry dominance.

On a still deeper level, though, this week’s reading takes me back to the most significant question I had after finishing up Shirkey.  How do we re-define authority and intelligently allocate our trust going forward in this brave new (digital) world?

Although the ad game was never of interest to Brin and Page in their Stanford days, they are now very much in that business.  Google runs on advertising revenue.  Everything else it does, including its search capabilities, wouldn’t be were it not for advertising.  That being the case, it strikes me that we the user are now just another Google product.  The company records, orders and stores our searches, “auctioning” them off to potential advertisers as the most thorough catalogue of human intentions ever assembled.

Google has become synonymous with authority.  “I don’t know, Google it,” is now the catch-all phrase in response to any and all mysteries.

I don’t mean to sound naïve here, and I appreciate the need for revenue and profit as a means by which we create and innovate.

But none of our previous markers of authority (newspapers, magazines, books, encyclopedias, etc.) were ever so dependent on advertising.

Does something about the intrinsic nature of the answer change when it has a sponsor?

Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” serves as a succinct and easily accessible introduction to the ways in which new digital technologies are altering our society’s oldest and most trusted institutions.  The government, the clergy, our newspapers, even our ancient encyclopedias are undergoing fundamental transformations as a result of the Internet’s rise.

While the specifics of each case might change, they are all linked by Shirky’s central preoccupation; that our classic notions of the division of labor and of organizational/management principals have no place in a digital world wherein anyone with a computer and an internet connection is radically empowered to consume media as an individual and produce it as part of an army.

I have never met Clay Shirky, nor have I been exposed to any of his political beliefs.  Nevertheless, “Here Comes Everybody” reads like some sort of 21^st century anarcho-syndicalist manifesto.  It is more than a little unexpected then, that I couldn’t help but think of the German political scientist Ralf Dahrendorf while reading much of the book.  Writing in the mid-20^th Century (though Wikipedia tells me he didn’t die until 2009), Dahrendorf sought to revise Marxist theory, insisting that class structure was no longer defined by the ownership of the means of production, but by the occupancy of positions that allowed the wielding of organizational authority.

Surely, Dahrendorf never imagined the slew of citizen journalists/bloggers whose output has shaken autocrats in China and professional newsmen at the New York Times.  Nevertheless, as Shirky sees it, this is the most fundamental aspect of the digital revolution.  In chapter two, he writes:

“Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals.  Every transaction it undertakes – every contract, every agreement, every meeting – requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention or money.  Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of.  As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable.”

The “digital mob”, with its ability to assemble and disassemble in a way that seems spontaneous while happily laboring for free, has (inadvertently?) exploited this weakness in the essential organizational structure.  Is this a positive or negative development in human history? I would argue that the question is irrelevant; this “thing” simply is.  We have ourselves a new reality, one that is consistent with the history of technology’s effect on social behaviors and communicative norms.

That said, the grass is always greener, and I do find myself lamenting the diminishing weight of “authoritative” voices in the journalism world.  Without a doubt, citizen journalism can be remarkably powerful, effecting our system and addressing our shortcomings in ways that our traditional new sources are unable to replicate.  Shirkey wisely points to the example of Trent Lott, whose celebration of Strum Thurmond was initially slept on by the mainstream media.

A similar (and I would argue, more powerful) example  came out of North Korea in November 2010.  A few of that country’s citizens managed to acquire a handful of cell phones, using them to surreptitiously make video recordings.  The ensuing footage, snuck out of the country at great personal risk, was raw and disturbing.  It is significant (though now commonplace) that traditional news outlets, such as The Daily Telegraph ran the content on their websites, for that is all that the paper could do.  It would be near impossible for a major media institution to assume the cost and risk of sending one of their own highly trained reporters into the world’s most closed off state.  And yet an average citizen of that same state, one with (I would assume) no training or technical sophistication, can produce a “story” so effective that an age-old institution such as the Telegraph will follow their lead.

The flipside to this, however, is that when everyone is an “authority”, no one is, in fact, an “authority”.  While the leveling of old institutions and power structures has an unquestionable romanticism, a little authority now and again to point the way can be reassuring and even constructive.  In what was for me the books most interesting chapter, Shirky portrays the rise of the crowd-sourced Wikipedia as an almost accident while the site’s architects were laboring on the expertly cultivated (and now defunct) Nupedia.

Wikipedia is indeed a profound testament to the power of human capabilities combined with digital technologies, the ultimate proof of Shirky’s assertion that communication is a fundamentally social undertaking. It is free, remarkably accurate and widely respected.  And yet… it has no innate authority.  In spite of its omnipresence, Wikipedia is not trusted as citation worthy.  As we don’t really know where the information in any given entry comes from (who wrote it, who edited it, who copyedited it and what are their qualifications), we don’t quite trust it as a final source.

Maybe these notions of “who” are as outdated as traditional organizational structures, and in 20 years time the Kennedy School will allow its students to quote Wikipedia on a paper about microeconomics.  But I wish Shirky had better addressed this paradox.  If the wisdom and power of crowds is the great organizing tool of the future, when and how will their wisdom come to be as trusted as that of a well-educated individual?