In thirteenth-century English, an auctorite was a text that could settle an argument by virtue of its impeccable standing. The highest auctorite, naturally, was the Bible, followed by the greatest works of the classical world, and words written in the name of the king or church. The word came to English via Old French, but originated in the Latin term auctoritas, meaning “prestige” or “influence.” Auctoritas was derived from the Latin word auctor, meaning a “leader” or “founder”—a word itself based on the verb augere, “to increase or augment,” and which directly led to the English word author.
Etymologically, then, authority is rooted in the idea of tracing something back to its origins: to the person or text who originally caused something to thrive and increase. In terms of power structures, this came in medieval English to be equated with those canonical texts from which all truth flowed, and then with those wielding power in the name of this truth—that is, the king and the church, and all those patronized by them.
Over time, as the feudal hierarchy was challenged by more enlightened and rational thinking, ideas of both authority and authorship came increasingly to privilege those who were forging new expertise and creating new texts rather than simply demanding deference to ancient words and hierarchies.
Perhaps the most significant shift in its meaning for several centuries, however, came with the publication in 1998 of a paper called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” by two graduates in the computer science department at Stanford University: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.105
Brin and Page outlined “a prototype of a large-scale search engine . . . designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems.” To achieve this, they offered an algorithm—punningly termed PageRank—which calculated for every page on the web “an objective measure of its citation importance,” based on the principle that more authoritative pieces of research tended both to be cited more frequently by subsequent research, and to cite each other more frequently.
Brin and Page had, in other words, come up with a ranking system inspired by academic research that was able automatically to calculate the “authority” of online resources—and it was this new principle of discernment that underpinned much of the early success of their search engine, Google, when it was founded later that year.
The principles of Google’s search algorithm are far more complex than a simple measuring of links; and it did not invent the idea of online authority as such. What its huge success has helped demonstrate, however, is a fundamental change in the nature of what it means to offer an authoritative answer to a query in the digital age. Because it is possible, today, to provide algorithmic and statistical responses based upon mass observation to almost all of those questions that once upon a time simply involved locating an authoritative source. Moreover, the very act of seeking out authority has become digitally mediated.
Ask Google a question, and the answers will come back ranked in order of putative usefulness and reliability from one to however many million responses it has located. Search for a word and the number of results will offer an index of its global adoption. Where once authority may have seemed an impervious, God-given (or book-granted) right, it looks today more like something both earned and measured by the ways in which the world does (or doesn’t) choose to heed what is being said.