technical images and linear text

note: this is a public-domain article that i’ve resurrected from a now-dead site via the wayback machine. you can view the cached version of the original site here. to make this article “come back,” though, i’ve reposted the text on my blog. enjoy.

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this is my brief thought on wikipedia. as someone who reads an almost ungodly amount of it, I think that I am distinctly more qualified to comment on it than any random sampling. such as that one study which I can’t be bothered to find a link to now.

Jaron Lanier says that “reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure.” It’s true, in its way. Wikipedia is tremendously wrong. It’s got tons of factual mistakes. One time, I opened a page, and was greeted with an enormous close-up of a penis. Other times, huge chunks of articles have been cut off. But I’ve just fixed those problems and gone along my way. In other cases, articles are something that’s not quite ‘wrong.’ Just, odd. And serendipitous, and un-encyclopedic. Like this one.

It reads like something you would hear in a bad police movie, not the encyclopedia Britannica. Maybe it was copied directly out of something ordered from the back of Soldier of Fortune. Who knows. Is it wrong? I’m not sure. Will I ever be fighting a ‘close quarters battle?’ Doubtful. But does it give me a very intriguing perspective on a whole little subset of society and its discourse? Of course it does. Pages like that one make wiki fantastic. You can read into a little slice of a culture very different from yours, and learn a whole bunch of stuff about entire disciplines you once knew nothing of. With one or two clicks. From a firefox panel, even. So Jaron misses the point, and so do the Britannica-study guys.

Cory Doctorow says it much better than I could here. In an extended blog-style quote:

“Wikipedia isn’t great because it’s like the Britannica. The Britannica is great at being authoritative, edited, expensive, and monolithic. Wikipedia is great at being free, brawling, universal, and instantaneous.

So, Wikipedia gets it wrong. Britannica gets it wrong, too. The important thing about systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail. Fixing a Wikipedia article is simple. Participating in the brawl takes more effort, but then, that’s the price you pay for truth, and it’s still cheaper than starting up your own Britannica.”

Fantastic.

Es muss sein.

Voltaire once commented that the Holy Roman Empire — now known as more-or-less Germany — was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.”

How is this the case? Well, this might have been the first recorded and recognized instance of the Big Lie technique of propaganda, wherein an enormous lie is passed off as truth, to blind the receiver to its falsehood, and the myriad smaller falsehoods that surround it. As the most infamous propagandist of the twentieth century remarked: “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously” (Hitler 134).

In the case of the Holy Roman Empire, then, its name is clearly designed to surreptitiously contain a normative judgment. The citizen of the medieval era (who did not happen to be Voltaire) would be apt as not to assume that this Empire was both Holy and Roman; how could one lie in the name of a place itself? Since in our daily lived experiences we have no reason to question the honesty of naming, why should we assume that the name of a concept is not a faithful description?

What could this medieval political entity possibly have to tell us about reality television, though?

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Modern society, particularly modern American society, is endlessly patting itself on the back. It thinks of itself as a spectacular society, a fantastic society which is more or less the most fantastic place which there is or ever has been on Earth to make one’s home. These things are partly true. What does it mean, though, that these are the adjectives which we employ to denote ‘goodness’? Why is it that we consider ’spectacular’ and ‘fantastic’ to be synonymous with “good,” indeed, to be the superlative forms of ‘goodness’? Is it not the case that they mean simply, “in the manner of a spectacle” or a “fantasy”, respectively? Indeed, this is the case — and this is why we believe these terms to denote positive attributes. In a society enthralled by an endless parade of spectacles, to be considered spectacular, is the highest of compliments. As Guy Debord writes:

“The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.’ The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance, which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance” (12).

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