My students got me. For the first time in a long time, they actually got me. It took me a few days to realize this. I think it is a good sign that things are going well this semester. Let me explain what happened and then I will say how I was “got.”
I turned my quest about how to peel a hard-boiled egg into a homework assignment for public speaking. I gave the students the list of the sources that I consulted and told them to determine the best way to peel an egg from those sources. The point of the assignment was to learn to think critically about internet sources and their credibility. We talked primarily about two things: you can’t stop at the first hits you get from a Google search and you can’t take a site’s credibility at surface level. Standard stuff.
A colleague who is a librarian mentioned to me that people rarely look past the first page of search engine hits. Moreover, folks rarely look below the fold (i.e., they don’t scroll down). (She got this from Lewandowski, “Search engine user behaviour,” 2008.) This research, of course, makes SEO experts millions of dollars every year. But that’s beside the point.
The students’ natural inclination was to stop with Wikianswers and Ehow, both of which show up on the first page of Google’s search results. The students insisted that Wikianswers and Ehow were credible sources even though they agreed that Wikipedia was not. They reasoned that, since people vote on the answers, the right answer eventually rises to the top. With “how to” questions, many of the voters have tried the suggested method at some point and they weigh in on the answers with their experiences. So, ultimately, the most popular answer is the right one.
As Wikianswers explains, when it comes to indisputable answers like how many yards are in a mile, the answers are relatively reliable. When it comes to difficult questions, you can trust the answers only so far. So with something like how to hard boil an egg, for the students at least, sites like Ehow, Wikianswers, and Yahoo!answers were all valid.
I’m not sure if they reject Wikipedia simply because their English teachers have instructed them to do and they mouth the expected response like well-trained puppies or if they genuinely understand the difficulties of trusting Wikipedia as a source. After all, Wikipedia and Wikianswers work on the same principle so the same logic should apply to both.
Here’s the rub for me. Opensource, crowdsourcing, the wisdom of the crowds, all those Web 2.0 phenomena make transparent the kinds of things folks who study epistemology, sociology of knowledge, and so forth, have been arguing about for decades. As a feminist, I’ve always believed that the critique of expert knowledge is central to feminist theory. The Boston Women’s Health Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves and the women’s health movement is a perfect example of that. The outright challenge to expert knowledge was necessary to advance women’s health and the critique of the medicalization of women’s bodies hung on questions of what counts as knowledge. Smarter folks than I have shown how Wikipedia embodies the “postmodern” or anti-foundationalist critique of knowledge (facts, certainty, whatever).
If I firmly believe all this, then I have to agree with my students, don’t I? And so I stood there in front of them floundering for a response. I did raise the point that if the subject weren’t something you could experiment with on your own to validate the answer, how would you make your decisions?
Conversely, I admit there is comfort in the knowledge of the experts. After all, “Would you want to drive over a bridge designed by a postmodernist engineer?” I can’t remember if it was Stanley Fish or Dinesh D’souza who said that during their dog-and-pony show in the turbulent 90s. (As an aside, I was very lucky to attend that show and then sit in a room the next day with Fish and Catharine Stimpson to discuss political correctness.)
Crowds get stupid, the wisdom of the crowds doesn’t always arrive at the best answer, and making “knowledge making” accessible to all does end up playing to the lowest common denominator (witness the credibility of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin to “the common man”).
The production of knowledge is a complicated thing. I think, though, that I’ve opened the door for public speaking students this semester to understand the contingent nature of truth, which I find to be exciting.
Hey, just catching up on your blog. That assignment is genius! And the question about bridges designed by postmodernists (or feminist airplanes, another common example) is maddening because the person posing the question is just being clever, or so they think.
I would drive over that bridge, or fly in that airplane (depending on the kind of postmodernism or feminism at work). In part this is because I understand technology as a process of making things rather than the thing itself. Relationships that involve people and things in many different ways are part of the process, as are ways of knowing. I would want that bridge or that airplane to be made of good labor relations that pay everybody well and create good working conditions and draw on everybody’s skills and expertise. Design would still be grounded in good observation and knowledge, though maybe of a different kind. And through those processes and ways of knowing it’s still possible to build a solid bridge or an airplane that stays up in the air.
About Wikipedia’s postmodernism: I’m not convinced that Wikipedia has made a break from modernism. While anybody can contribute, editors watch to make sure that contributors keep within the bounds of the genre of the encyclopedia. Collectively, they still strive for objectivity with regard to the writing style and verifying knowledge.
As for voting…ugh. I now consider voting, even in elections, to be more about consumers than citizens.
Have you had opportunities in class to continue this discussion? I’d love to hear more.
Heya Cris,
I really like your response to the bridge analogy! Has Wikipedia tightened its control over the text of entries? I seem to remember that it was much more free-flowing when it first started and now there’s a push for legitimacy by measuring its mistakes against the number of inaccuracies found in encyclopedias. I should check into that.