Tag Archives: culture

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The internet isn’t making you stupid. People are making you stupid.

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Westboro Baptist Church "protestor"One of the perennial themes that news sources both online and offline never seem to tire of is “the internet is making us stupid”. According to science historian Robert Proctor, that’s only half correct; it’s not the internet itself that encourages ignorance, but the way it is used by groups with a single point of interest:

[Proctor] has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.”

As Proctor argues, when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he’s a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

“People always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet figured it out,” Proctor says. “But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what’s true and what’s not.”

What is an observable certainty is that the web has become an ideological battle-ground, with dozens of little sects crusading around in defence of their own worldview, ever ready to smother dissent in a barrage of obfuscation.

What is less certain is how new this phenomenon actually is; it strikes me that the web just lets us do the same things we’ve always done, just faster and more anonymously. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the nitrous-oxide cackling of postmodern theorists… perhaps “things fall apart; the center cannot hold“. [via TechDirt; image by Logan Cyrus]

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Why Wikipedia is (apparently) doomed to fail

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As a poster-child of the Web2.0 success story, Wikipedia has grown from a small but thriving community of volunteers into one of the most well-used online resources there is. But that community-driven character could be Wikipedia’s doom, according to professor of law Eric Goldman – and he thinks the rot has long since set in.

Now, the editors themselves discourage the contributions of others through “xenophobia” toward outsiders; Goldman believes that they see “threats” everywhere and points out that the greater part of all edits made to the site are actually reverted by these editors.

In addition, plenty of political jockeying takes place among editors. And editors have few incentives for their work—no way to make money, no real way even to earn attribution. Together, these problems mean that as editors get burned out by patrolling for spam and vandalism, fewer new people will be interested in stepping up to plug the gap.

Of course, there’s probably plenty of people who would like to slap a whole bunch of [citation needed] links all over Goldman’s theory. But what he’s describing seems to be the same sort of institutional breakdown that can be observed in communities, political movements and any other human group effort.

Perhaps it’s the case that Wikipedia has grown too quickly for its culture to evolve affective coping strategies; maybe smaller subject-specific communities would be more resilient? But then again, maybe they’d just become more cultish more quickly, as has the Church of Darwin.

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Darwin as a religious icon

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Charles Darwin portraitIt is, of course, the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, which is a cause for celebration if you’re of a scientific mind. But how much celebration is really appropriate? [image courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Responding at the Guardian to artist Damien Hirst’s gushing foreword to a new edition of The Origin of Species (as well as to Darwin’s unfortunate position in the middle of the tug-o’war between fundamentalist religion and militant atheism) Andrew Brown wonders whether the pedestal on which we’ve put Darwin is too high – and whether some of his more fervent supporters, in using him as an icon against religion, have in fact made a religion of him:

… treating Darwin, or any other scientist, as a wonder-worker just turns science into a priesthood. That doesn’t do anyone any good, neither scientists nor the rest of us. Darwin was a good man and his theory was a great one. But believing it, even understanding it, won’t make the goodness and the greatness rub off on the believers.

To be honest, the whole battle between the crusading atheists and their target pockets of the irrational is starting to worry me in just the same way as the fundamentalist sects. I’m an atheist myself, but I work on the principle that if I object to having someone else’s ideology crammed down my throat, they probably won’t like me doing it to them either.

And, as a matter of pragmatism, persecuting the irrationally religious does little beyond creating martyrdom, and the last thing we need is more people fixated on that.

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Harry Potter fandom – the new folklore?

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OK, try getting your head around this one. According to a PhD student in Folklore, the fandom that kids construct around franchises like the Harry Potter series is a global phenomenon which is not (contrary to what many harassed parents might believe) principally driven by official merchandise.

To which your response may well be “so what?” But think about it a little more – if the internet is destined to produce a global culture based more closely on the ritual and oral model ( as some nay-sayers would have us believe) this theory deep-sixes the corollary that said culture will be entirely corporate in nature.

“They weren’t obsessed with having official merchandise,” Small explained. “They were using their imagination and folk traditions combined with popular culture to express who they are.”

Young Harry Potter fans use acting, art and creative writing to express themselves and who they are, and these activities, too, are often a combination of pop culture and folk traditions, Small said.

Granted, this is one small research paper in a maelstrom of branded plastic crapola, but it has a ring of truth to it. Thinking back to my own childhood, sure, I had some Star Wars figures, and I re-enacted plenty of scenes from the films. But when I needed more extras, I drafted in whatever was handy, or made something to suit.

And in a future world where the barriers to creation are lower (think of Second Life, for example, where anyone with the patience and a broadband connection can be an architect), the concept of highly active and productive fandoms becomes a lot more plausible – fandom as genuine motile subculture, no less.

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End featured warring factions of fandom; can anyone think of any other novels that tread into this territory? [via Techdirt]

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Do novels help our morals evolve?

Victorian era typewriter keysAre there hidden messages and subtexts in stories and novels that help reinforce and strengthen the values our society holds? A group of evolutionary psychologists researching Victorian-era fiction suggests that the classics of the time…

… not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals’ hunger for power and dominance.

[…]

The researchers believe that novels have the same effect on society as oral cautionary tales of old. “Just as hunter-gatherers talk of cheating and bullying as a way of staying keyed to the goal that bad guys must not win, novels key us to the same issues… “

The idea of culture as societal regulation valve is nothing new, I suppose, but it seems the researchers were focusing on the canonical literature of the era rather than what would have been considered popular by the man on the street. What about the Victorian precursors of the pulp magazines, for example, or their oft-unmentioned love of porn and erotica? There was a very different set of values embedded in those, I think we can assume…

That said, I think there’s probably a nugget of truth in the assertion that art contains coded value systems from the society that produced it. So what does that mean for us 21st Century types? We have somewhat different values nowadays, and we no longer have such a dominant monoculture as the Victorians. [image by k4chii]

Looking back on the science fiction novels we’re reading today, what would an anthropologist or evolutionary psychologist from a century in the future make of our values?