Look, Wikipedia is not entirely reliable, that is all, and you know this. I don't get why that is intellectual "snobbery".
you're right, I know this: so does everybody else. While what you've said about wikipedia was topical a couple of years ago, it's not now: your presumption that you're the keeper of wisdom you need to reveal to the rest of us is misplaced. The snobbery is bound up with your
"simply put" view that you and your ilk hold some sort of monopoly on such (imo trite) understandings and need to spell them out.
You seem to think that this is somehow a class-based assault on the salt of the earth "the man in the crowd" who (you presume) edits Wikipedia.
For the record I make no such presumptions, why would I, I can read Brandt or any of the other critics same as you, and have been discussing these issues for some years.
I don't want to unduly nit-pick, but where did that quote come from? it wasn't me, I don't tend to write 50% of people out of the equation.
But even Wikipedia has a system which demands references for all pieces of information. Even here the man on the street is required to look up to his "intellectual betters" (as you would see it).
that misses the point rather spectacularly, whilst revealing your prejudices quite plainly. Leaving aside that it's not actually true, (probably the majority of information on Wikipedia is not explicitly referenced), there's no question of "looking up" to contributors, nor of considering them somehow "better". I've made edits, probably so have you, so have millions of other people. Do you really believe that knowing & being able to reference some fact or other makes you better than others, and that you need to be looked up to? That strikes me as barmy, tbh.
Which is more condescending to said man in the crowd: telling him Wikipedia is fucking great and always right, or that its useful but flawed?
in 2008, both! It's not really necessary or appropriate to start handing down pearls of wisdom about wikipedia like that, particularly in a thread about web 2.0. Especially tired ones that have been debated widely, here and across the web.
Anyway, who has said anything of the sort? I introduced Wikipedia to this thread, you immediately took a swipe, no-one else has mentioned it: where have I made any such claims about accuracy? In fact, if you were to re-read what I wrote you might notice the cynicism involved.
Pass the sickbucket you patronising pretend-populist fuck.
dear oh dear, this from someone who can't tell the difference between a minor point in an online discussion and an "
official or academic document"
I agree with you that the internet enables better access to both information and tools to make marginalised voices heard. But the same shit goes on online as offline, the same types of filtering processes, so its not the revenge of the uneducated, it is the continuation of the same
you agree with me, you say, then go on to make yet more presumptions about what I think.
Anyway the last part of what you've said there is off beam. 'Offline' (by which I take you to mean the pre-web structures for sharing information and opinion, mostly via academia and the press) has always been heavily controlled by professionals and significant commercial interests. Fringe contributions remained fringe unless endorsed by an established commentator.
That's not so true of the web, where contributions stand or fall on their quality: many are anonymous, most are not serving a specific commercial interest (though they may be funded by googleverts) and, crucially for this thread, "contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus" (JH, quoted in the op). That's the point, isn't it, that we judge your posts just the same as those by the uneducated, which is why you put some sort of badge up so we know you're an intellectual and need to be taken seriously. It's a bit tragic, all that time served, all those letters after the name, all that greasy pole clambering towards tenure just to have your posts read in the same light as those of someone who left school at 16, but there it is.
(ie- you can't critique Habermas without learning the correct language to do so- why- because no-one who's interested in Habermas will take you seriously unless you do so. I don't agree with this, but your rabid anti-intellectualism isn't the way around this either.)
the language is one of those badges. Who should be taken seriously here anyway, you with your dense and unapproachable language (offset by 'mate' and the odd expletive), the op with an unreferenced quote which claims that allowing us, the less educated to be heard, "
actually undermines intellectual life" as though that's a bad thing. That smell is coffee: ideas, whether they're yours or mine or from Europe’s most influential social thinker, can now be tested and dissected and taken up or discarded by more or less anybody. If they're found wanting that's because they don't stack up, not because the audience shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near them.
apologies: too long, not vibrant, deliberately not complex, and probably not very well reasoned.
