Too Big to Know

But of course to know the world, we need much longer chains of argument, for the world is a complex whole. We should be able to start at A and reason our way to Z, in careful, measured steps. This long-form argument is what we’ve taken to be human reasoning at its best.

So, what if the Internet is shortening our attention spans? Suppose we can no longer even get from A to B without being distracted by a catch-the-monkey ad or a link to the latest gossip? How we are ever going to think the thoughts that step us well beyond what we already know?

If we’re going to worry about losing long-form thinking, we should be quite clear about what it looks like. One of the greatest of long-form works was published in 1859. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is a single, magnificent argument, spread out across fifteen chapters. Here it is in summary, with chapters marked:

[Introduction] We’ve had various ideas about the origins of species. Let’s take a new look. [1] Farmers breed new varieties of domesticated animals by selecting parents with the traits they want. [2] There’s also lots of variation in wild animals. [3] The variations that help wild animals to survive better enable them to have more offspring, passing along those variations. This is natural selection, much like the artificial selection done by farmers. [4] Natural selection operates in small steps, and explains why even apparently useless features have developed. [5] There are some laws about how variations occur.

[6–7] Some may object to this theory. Let me address those objections. [8] Natural selection can also explain the development and inheritance of instinctive behaviors. [9] While it’s true that this theory cannot explain why hybrids are sterile, since sterility is the opposite of a reproductive advantage, there is another explanation. [10] While we don’t have fossils that show the complete record of evolution, there are good reasons for that. [11] In fact, the fossil record, understood correctly, supports the gradual evolution of species by natural selection.

[12–14] The variation of species over the face of the earth confirms that species adapt to their environments. And here are four more pieces of evidence that support my argument.

Finally, [15] “As this whole volume is one long argument, it may be convenient to the reader to have the leading facts and inferences briefly recapitulated.”

A successful long-form work lays out the argument in careful steps, it deals with objections, it provides support, it concludes. On the Origin of Species is as brilliant a piece of literature as it is a foundational work of science.

Even so, it suffers from the weaknesses of all long-form arguments. For example, in Chapter Four, Darwin writes: “He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory.” Part of the genius of the book is Darwin’s awareness of his reader’s desire to jump off the bus before it pulls into the station. So, Darwin spends a full six out of fifteen chapters addressing objections he imagines his readers may have. How could natural selection explain the loss of features, such as the nonfunctioning eyes of some bats? Why don’t fossils show transitions between species? Darwin presents the objections of his colleagues, as well as anticipating criticisms not yet raised. Brilliant.

But brilliant within the constraints of the medium available to him. If you’re writing a book, you have to have a conversation with yourself about possible objections because books are a disconnected, noncon-versational, one-way medium. We have had to resort to this sort of play-acting not because that’s how thought should work but because books fix thoughts on paper. We’ve had to build a long sequence of thoughts, one leading to another, because books put one page after another. Long-form thinking looks the way it does because books shaped it that way. And because books have been knowledge’s medium, we have thought that that’s how knowledge should be shaped.

For example, Robert Darnton, a renowned historian of books and director of the Harvard University Library, makes this point in a 1999 essay of his reprinted in The Case for Books:

Any historian who has done long stints of research knows the frustration over his or her inability to communicate the fathomlessness of the archives and the bottomlessness of the past. If only my reader could have a look inside this book . . . all the letters in it, not just the lines from the letter I am quoting. If only I could follow that trail in my text just as I pursued it through the dossiers, when I felt free to take detours.... If only I could show how themes criss-cross outside my narrative and extend far beyond boundaries of my book.... [I]f instead of using an argument to close a case, [books] could open up new ways of making sense of the evidence, new possibilities of apprehending the raw material embedded in the story, a new consciousness of the complexities involved in construing the past.²

In fact, in this essay, Darnton described how a book might incorporate these capabilities: “[S]tructure it in layers arranged like a pyramid.” ³ At the top would be the “concise account.” Second, there could be “expanded versions of different aspects of the argument.” Third, there could be documentation to support the top two layers. Fourth, include “selections from previous scholarship and discussions of them.” Fifth would be teaching tools. The sixth layer would aggregate reader commentary and exchanges.

This sounds like an interesting proposal for structuring a Web site or an e-book, but Darnton in 1999 was proposing a new type of physical book. “The computer screen would be used for sampling and searching,” he writes, so that readers could specify what they want included in a book printed specifically for them, so that “concentrated, long-term reading would take place by means of the conventional codex”—that is, in a printed, bound book.⁴ Why? Because the physical book “has proven to be a marvelous machine”—convenient, comfortable, universally accessible, “a delight to the eye,” a “pleasure to hold in the hand.”⁵

Darnton is a fascinating mix of a connoisseur of physical books and an advocate for progressive library policies.⁶ He’s been outspoken in the push for open access to digital works, and has been a leader in the struggle to get the needs of readers and libraries accounted for in Google Books. And Darnton is right that physical books are not going away. Neither did live theater, yet it’s no longer the dominant cultural form of performed works. Likewise, physical books will no longer be the dominant cultural form of knowledge, if only because the physical book is such a bad fit for the structure of knowledge it’s intended to represent and enable. The historian’s cri de coeur Darnton begins with—“frustration over his or her inability to communicate the fathomlessness of the archives and the bottomlessness of the past”—calls out for a far more fluid, more highly connected, more interactive form that now, well past 1999, we have and that Darnton appreciates.

At last thought has a medium that helps it past the limitations of physical books that brought us to think of long-form thought as the highest and most natural shape knowledge could assume. But what shape does networked knowledge tend toward? Short-form thought? Narrow-form thought? Or, perhaps the idea of shape gets in the way when we’re trying to understand knowledge.

We could outline it as we did On the Origin of Species, chapter by chapter: [1] We all sense that our way of thinking is being changed by the Internet, and we regret it. [2] The brain is remarkably plastic, molding itself to new needs and inputs. [3] Historically, technology has changed how we think. [4] Deep reading and thinking developed historically because of books. [5] The Internet is a new and quite different technology. It is changing how we think. [6] E-books will change how we read and write, from solitary, private concentration to connected, public, hyperlinked frenzy. [7] Science tells us that these changes in behavior and mental abilities are in fact due to the Net’s rewiring of our brains. [8] Google, the dominant and emblematic tool for guiding inquiry on the Web, is taking thought down a bad path marked by the “strip-mining” of meaning and a “pinched conception of the human mind.”⁷ [9] We are not merely offloading memory to our machines. The scientific study of memory reveals that the Web is making us dumber by damaging our long-term memory, impeding the development of conceptual schemas, reducing our ability to pay attention, and, worse, threatening “the depth and the distinctiveness of the culture we all share.” [10] Worse still, this is affecting our very souls.

Reducing a rich long-form book to a single paragraph does violence to a work that needs many more pages to be expressed—if Nick Carr could have tweeted his book, he would have. But the reduction does show that his work has a logical form in which parts depend upon the parts before it. The Shallows is a good example of a modern long-form work.

But how exactly did it assume that form? Carr’s book started as a famously controversial cover story in The Atlantic magazine, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Undoubtedly a complex set of considerations then came into play: It’s a rich topic that needs further development, it might make a successful book, and so on. But the question that concerns us is not Nicholas Carr’s motivations. Rather, it’s how the nature of the book qua book affected the form of its content. For, all this talk—Carr’s, mine, many others’—about how technology shapes thought is far from metaphorical or abstract, as if the Platonic form of the Book molds us to its will through mystical emanations. When you sit down to write a book, the bound pages—the boundness, the page-ness—make demands of you. Of course you could fill the pages with scribbles or use them to start a fire, but you sat down to write a book. So, you begin.

Books have beginnings because bound pages have a first page. You could specify that the reader start on page 135 and read outward, or you could just order the pages randomly, but that’s not what books want from you. So, you think about what is a starting place your readers will accept.

The pages continue, so you continue. That the pages are bound, and thus are in sequence, demands that your ideas have a sequence. So, you continue not simply by writing words but by finding the continuity among ideas.

You finish. The length is up to you, although there are physical limits on how many pages the shop can bind, as well as upper and lower limits on the page count that your publisher will accept. Even if you slop over into a second volume because your ideas are as rich and complex as Darwin’s investigation of barnacles, your book has an end and thus needs an ending. You write a sentence that leaves the reader feeling that you’ve done the job. You imagine the reader’s sigh as she closes the back cover, satisfied that the book has wrapped up the argument, but (we authors hope) regretful that the journey that began on page 1 is over.

The book is published. It is out. It stays constant as the world changes around it.

The physical book’s demands have thus had you reinvent long-form writing. The book develops an idea from start to finish, across many—but not too many—pages. It has to contain within its covers everything relevant to that idea because there is no easy way for the reader to access the rest of what she might need. You the author determine the sequence of the ideas. The book’s physical finality encourages a finality of thought: You don’t finish writing it until you believe you have it done and right.

The physical nature of books thereby enables and encourages long-form thought. “Enables and encourages” because the physical nature of books is not enough to entirely account for it: To a different culture on a different path of thought, bound pages might look like an encouragement to divide thought up into page-sized chunks, as with PowerPoint. There were long-form narratives and investigations before book makers cut scrolls into uniform pages and bound them. We came up with a medium that suited how we were already structuring thought on rectangular surfaces. That medium has remarkable advantages, but it also has characteristics that unintentionally limited and shaped knowledge. Books do not express the nature of knowledge. They express the nature of knowledge committed to paper cut into pages without regard for the edges of ideas, bound together, printed in mass quantities, and distributed, all within boundaries set by an economic system.

To think that knowledge itself is shaped like books is to marvel that a rock fits so well in its hole in the ground.

Sven Birkerts probably would not agree. In 1992 he wrote a book that was a milestone and is perhaps a classic: The Gutenberg Elegies.⁸ He wrote this before the Web, when hyperlinking existed only within closed systems that compiled documents as if they were software programs, which of course they were. Electronic books were things on CDs. Reading The Gutenberg Elegies now, one remembers that before the Web, electronic communication felt like a diminishment—speech reduced to green dot–based characters—and not like today’s overwhelming efflorescence. That makes Birkerts’s perspicuity all the more impressive.

So, I went this afternoon to find my copy of his book. I haven’t read it in perhaps ten years, and I had only a dim hunch about where it might be—not which shelf but which room. Surprisingly, my first guess was pretty much right: I ran my fingers over the collection of books in the corner shelf in my bedroom—mainly vaguely literary titles, with some detective mysteries and travel guides thrown in—until I saw the title I was looking for. I pulled it out carefully, because the bedroom corner bookshelf is more a Jenga puzzle than a library space. I carried the book downstairs, feeling a little proud of myself. While we are adoring the tactile pleasures of physical books, let’s remember that their physicality makes the misplacing of them a common experience; except for the very orderly among us, the more books you own, the harder it is to find any one of them. We don’t count that against books because it is an inevitable consequence of being made of atoms. But now that we have books made of bits that we can find by typing in an approximation of the author’s name, the simple act of looking for a physical book can seem like the slipping of a slotted screwdriver.

Because I hadn’t come across anything by Birkerts for a while, I Googled “Sven Birkerts.” To tell the whole truth, I Googled “sven berk-erts.” But Google suggested the right spelling, and a split second later I had found what I was looking for: the publication date of his book. I browsed down the Google search results. Ah, he wrote an article in The Atlantic in 2009 called “Resisting the Kindle,” but which might have been titled “Is Kindle Making Us Stoopid?” to keep it in line with what seems to be the old medium’s new theme. In it, Birkerts reiterates one of the most interesting and even beautiful of the arguments in the book he had written seventeen years earlier. In “Resisting the Kindle,” Birkerts says that the historical nature of literature is “reinforced by our libraries and bookstores, by the obvious adjacency of certain texts, the fact of which telegraphs the cumulative time-bound nature of the enterprise.”⁹ Although libraries and bookstores tend to make texts adjacent based on topic or alphabetical order, not historical context, Birkerts’s point rings true to me: Books bring forth the past. In the Elegies, he writes: “Say what you will about books, they not only mark the backward trail, but they also encode this sense of obstacle, of otherness.... Old-style textual research may feel like an unnecessarily slow burrowing, but it is itself an instruction: It confirms that time is a force as implacable as gravity.”¹⁰ Beautiful. Indeed, in a library, we have the sense that the past is present, waiting to speak to us, even if we’re there to check out the latest Jennifer Aniston romcom DVD. We have the sense that the library shelves go all the way back to the Greeks, to the Egyptians, to the Hebrews. We don’t have that sense on the Net. The Net is a continuous wave front of presence.

Birkerts is such a lovely writer that I enter a bibliophilic reverie. I am in a classic library—I personally envisage the Harvard Law Library where I work, an elegant epitome of the beauty of book culture—where I’m sitting in a leather-bound armchair reading a leather-bound book by one of those ancient writers I’ve always meant to read. Then I look at the actual book in my hand, a fifteen-year-old paperback of The Gutenberg Elegies. The top—the only part left exposed to the air in my bedroom—is dusty. When I open it, the dried glue crinkles and the pages begin to separate from the spine. I thumb through, afraid to spread it wider than the angle of a twig on an autumn branch. The outer margins of the pages look like they have been dipped in weak coffee. The book smells like an item from the past that was forgotten, abandoned. This is not what Birkerts means by books making the past present to us. This actual book’s past is present in its decrepitude. Instead of enjoying the frisson of connection to our culture’s continuous glory, I have to suppress a sneeze.

We have idealized books. Romanticized them. Some have gone so far as to fetishize them. Our image of them as cultural objects often expresses an odd nostalgia for British reading rooms and dry sherry. But the fact is that most of the books most readers deal with are cheaply made disposable objects. Birkerts’s own book is as covered with marketing decals as a NASCAR car, although Birkerts’s decals are thoughtful blurbs from esteemed figures. It’s not that Birkerts’s cover is especially crass or tawdry. Not at all. It is typical. And that is the point: The books we actually read and live with are not the books we imagine. As is characteristic of nostalgia, we remember the glow of an experience and forget the gloom encompassing it.

I’m not criticizing Carr for this. On the contrary. His book is not primarily about the development of our interior voice, and his account of the topic is actually quite good. The problem is not with Carr’s book. It’s the way in which books squeeze ideas onto long, narrow paths that head the reader forward. There are an endless number of influences on developments as fundamental as the interiorizing of thought, and most have nothing to do with the point Carr is making about what we’re losing as we make the transition from physical books to the Internet. Long-form writers are out to move their readers from A to the Z that is the author’s destination. What is not needed to get readers to that conclusion is left aside. In fact, Carr interrupts his own book with a set of short digressions so he can include ideas that don’t fit into his argumentative narrative. He has to position them as interruptions—unusual in books, and structurally awkward—because the physicality of books tends toward sequence, not divergence. Worthy ideas that diverge from the narrative’s narrow path appear as distractions. Books often just aren’t long enough to enable long-form ideas to uncurl into their natural shape.

Further, we’ve elevated private thought because of the limitations of writing. The unwritten law of writing physical books has been “One page, one hand.” The physics of books generally makes writing them a solo project. So, Nicholas Carr tells us that he moved from Boston to Colorado, downgraded to a “relatively poky DSL connection,”¹¹ and checked his email infrequently. It was painful, but, he tells us, “[s]ome old, disused neural circuits” sprang “back to life.”¹² He moved so that he could be alone, as if thinking in public—what we normally would call “talking”—is a distraction rather than a condition for thinking. Of course, no book could be composed by a truly private person because no person can be truly private. As Carr would acknowledge—for one thing, his book has a page of acknowledgments—the public’s contribution to his book is there, if in the shadows. He talked with his wife, he browsed the Internet during his designated hours, he was undoubtedly in communication with his editor, he floated in the sea of publicness (as do all of us) as he composed his initial ideas. Not to mention the publicness of language itself.¹³

I should here confess that my own seemingly erudite comments about Jean de Joinville came directly from an email exchange with Jacob Albert, a summer intern at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Jacob had expressed an interest in the topic of this book, which led to an ongoing discussion. I had never heard of de Joinville when Jacob first mentioned him. The truth is that all I knew about Louis IX was that he very likely came after Louis VIII and before Louis X. Some facts and ideas in Carr’s book inevitably came from similar sorts of interchanges. Thought is never private.

Nor should it be. When Carr’s initial article came out in The Atlantic, there was some wonderful discussion of it among the elite set of thinkers—including Carr—who converse at Edge.org.¹⁴ Danny Hillis, a computing pioneer, agrees that something is making us stupid, but thinks that the “the flood of information” is the culprit. He also points to the role of politics. The writer Kevin Kelly wonders whether Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms” because he started using a typewriter, as Carr says, or if it was because “Nietzsche was ill and dying.” Larry Sanger, co-founder (and then critic) of Wikipedia, agrees that we’re becoming less able to string together thoughts, but thinks we should be blaming ourselves, not our technology. The writer Douglas Rushkoff thinks that Carr is correctly noting a change but is getting his values wrong: This is an evolutionary transformation in which the old fish think those new footed youngsters are up to no good. Edge.org also compiles the discussion that spills across other sites, where it continues in loose-edge ways, sometimes with replies from Carr himself, removing the single-point-of-failure that plagues long-form arguments.

Isn’t this—a network of thought of any length and form—a better way to know our world?

In one sense, Rosen has been engaged in long-form thinking. Not only does he write blog posts that are famously many times longer than typical, but they cluster around some recurring points. For example, for two years, he has written a series of posts about “what the Internet is doing to the kind of [journalistic] authority once easily constructed by objectivity.”¹⁵ Rosen makes it easy to summarize the argument of these posts because at the end of the latest post—he told me he is working on one more in the series—he ran a linked set of descriptions of all six posts:¹⁶

1. Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press (January 12, 2009)

2. He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User (April 12, 2009)

3. The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism (February 21, 2010)

4. Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press (June 14, 2010)

5. Fixing the Ideology Problem in Our Political Press: A Reply to The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder (June 22, 2010)

6. Objectivity as a Form of Persuasion: A Few Notes for Marcus Brauchli (July 7, 2010)

Together, these constitute a long-form argument. Rosen challenges our belief that good reporting must be objective by giving a different, more plausible reading of the journalistic enterprise. In one of the earlier articles in the series, he defines reporting as “gathering information, talking to people who know, trying to verify and clarify what actually happened and to portray the range of views as they emerge from events.”¹⁷ This makes it easier for journalists to accept Rosen’s argument in the sixth post that the real value of reporting is not its supposed detachment from all viewpoints but, rather, the fact that the reporter was where the reader was not. The pretense of objectivity can actually get in the way of the reporting itself. Intellectually freed from the assumption that the value of reporting is its objectivity, readers can now explore with Rosen other possibilities for journalism.

The six posts combined contain 110,000 words, which make the series longer than The Shallows, and about one and a half times as long as this book. Of those 110,000 words, Rosen wrote only 15,000—about twice the length of this chapter. The rest are comments left by readers. Rosen’s posts, however, attract high-quality comments. No “You rock!” or “You suck!” replies. Rather, the comments tend to be well-developed and thoughtful. Rosen told me, “The second most common reaction I have had to my blog (after Why are your posts so long? . . . ) is, ‘No offense, Jay, but the comments are often better than the post.’ It has something to do with the tone the author (that’s me) is setting in the original post.”¹⁸ He does not review comments before they are posted, and the only ones he removes are outright spam.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to doing long-form thinking in Rosen’s public way.

I can think of nine advantages:

First, the argument assumes a natural length. Rosen doesn’t have to worry about stretching his ideas from 15,000 words to fill a 60,000-word book container. Nor does he have to worry that the comments are getting too long to include in a single volume, about which he’d have to have a losing argument with his publisher.

Second, the argument is more responsive to the ground it covers. Readers point out topics that the author then realizes he must address.

Third, the work becomes embedded in a loose-edged discussion that more naturally reflects the messy, tangled topology of topics.

Fourth, readers are given fewer reasons to get off the bus midway. When Darwin writes in Chapter Four that “[h]e who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory,” he’s opening the door and inviting passengers to get off. If Darwin had published Rosen’s way, he would have discovered unanticipated objections, and he would have been able to meet at least some of them. This seems like a much more natural rhetorical form than holing-up authors in garrets or in cottages in the wilds of Colorado so that they can imagine the objections readers might have.

Fifth, Rosen’s ideas get out to their public far faster than the old write-in-private, publish-when-done model.

Sixth, the ideas more successfully escape the grasp of the author so that they can change the world. The networked nature of Rosen’s writing means that the ideas get passed around easily and may be taken up by people who have never heard of him.

Seventh, readers are more intellectually and emotionally involved because now they can be part of the discussion.

Eighth, the author’s authority gets right-sized. Rather than speaking in a Solomonic voice because a publisher has handed him a scepter, Rosen has authority because of what he’s saying and because of how others are visibly responding to him. Simply seeing the author engage with readers through comments tells the great percentage of readers who do not leave comments that Rosen recognizes that his words are more tentative than their inscription makes them seem, that his authority goes no further than the worth of his ideas. This changes the source and meaning of authorial authority.

Ninth, it’s not just the author who is no longer alone in his wilderness cabin. The readers are also now connected. We can see some of the effects of the writer’s words rippling through the culture. We can see that journalists are weighing in on Rosen’s site, that other sites are linking back to Rosen, that jayrosen_nyu has 37,000 Twitter followers. We used to have to be told that ideas have effects. Now we can see ideas spreading, like watching on a monitor as dye injected into the bloodstream traces its path.

But there are disadvantages:

For some, the voices of readers may function as noise, as a distraction.

Second, some arguments work better rhetorically if they are presented all at once.

Third, some ideas won’t do well commercially if developed in public for free. It’s not clear that our assumptions here are correct, though. The fiction writer and activist Cory Doctorow, among others, has succeeded commercially, as well as in the impact of his ideas, by giving away online access to his books even as he sells paper copies.

Fourth, the published book is a traditional token of expertise and achievement.

Fifth, it’s harder for us to know what to believe when many voices are audibly in contention.

So, nine advantages to five disadvantages. If only determining the winner were as easy as counting. For example, the fact that webby long-form thinking makes it harder to know whom to believe is not necessarily a disadvantage.¹⁹ But it’s not as if long-form and web-form arguments are in contention, and one must be vanquished. There’s plenty of room on the Internet for traditional multi-volume long-form works, as well as arguments conducted purely in tweets. At the very moment that Nicholas Carr’s work is flying off the shelves of bookstores, Carr can be in the midst of a hot and heavy Web chat fest. Long-form works are discussed on the Net even when they’re not available on the Net. This is a both-and, with an extra and-how.

Nevertheless, the Net does not leave long-form argument unaffected. You can certainly write 70,000 words that are hermetically sealed by the logic of their interconnection. You can be Spinoza, who wrote a work of ethics that’s structured like a work of deductive geometry. But if that work is going to have any effect, it’s going to be put into a network where the discussion around it, and through which readers now come to it, will violate its pristine logic. The stoopidest of the stoopid will misunderstand it entirely and call the author the N or C word, no matter the author’s race or gender. Bright but twisted minds will get it just wrong enough to make the author look plausibly like an idiot. Self-interested experts will find it threatening to their position on the professional ladder and will whistle while quietly filing away at the rung it stands on. College students will randomly copy entire pages, claim them as their own, and not understand how they could ever have been caught.

Welcome to the life of knowledge once it has been taken down from its shelf. It is misquoted, degraded, enhanced, incorporated, passed around through a thousand degrees of misunderstanding, and assimilated to the point of invisibility. It was ever so. Now we can see it happening. When the process of knowing occurs online, in our midst, with a comment section and abundant links to other opinions, it’s no longer possible to separate knowledge-at-work from knowledge-as-itis-understood.

So, what is the shape of this new knowledge? What is the opposite of long form? That is the wrong question. Networks of knowledge on the Net have no shape because the Net has no outer edge. Besides, it doesn’t stay still long enough.

Shape matters. When knowledge was a pyramid, when it was based on firm foundations shared by all members of the community, when it consisted of contents filtered by reliable authorities, when we knew what was in and what was out, when it had a form and shape, knowledge had an easy authority. The shapelessness of knowledge reflects its reinvigoration, but at the cost of removing the central points of authority around which business, culture, science, and government used to pivot. That change is in itself a serious issue, of course, but it is the result of a change in what traditionally has grounded knowledge: its basic relationship to the world.

As an example of the problems with objectivity, let’s take the coverage of a scripted event by two reputable newspapers that lean the same way politically:

In 2004, Ted Kennedy, the Lion of the Senate, delivered a much-anticipated speech on the second night of the Democratic National Convention, in his home town of Boston.²¹ The front-page report in the Boston Globe began:

The second night of the Democratic National Convention featured harsher criticism of the Bush administration, with Senator Edward M. Kennedy accusing the president of making the world a more dangerous place for Americans.²²

The front-page coverage at the Washington Post began without even a mention of Kennedy’s speech:

On the second night of its national convention, the Democratic Party introduced two newcomers to the nation to set the themes that John F. Kerry hopes will help him win the White House in 2004.²³

The headlines in the two newspapers reflected the deep differences in how they saw the night. The Boston Globe’s headline featured tradition and aggressiveness: “Kennedy Leads the Attack: Convention Speakers Rip Bush in Shift of Rhetoric.” The Washington Post’s headline stressed new voices and unity: “Democrats Focus on Healing Divisions; Addressing Convention, Newcomers Set Themes.” There is no overlap between the quotations from Kennedy’s speech in the Post and in the Globe. There is little overlap in what they paraphrase of it. They disagree about whether the speech was inspiring or disastrous. Two major, highly professional newspapers. Both liberal bastions. At the same event. A scripted event. With the scripts literally handed out before the event. And yet, even granting that Kennedy is a Boston hometown favorite, their straightforward reports are close to diametrically opposed.

Many of us who reject objectivity as anything except an “aspiration”—a common idea among journalists—will still find the extent of the difference in the Post and Globe’s reporting surprising. I did. Our traditional worldview attributes the differences in our reports about that world to human limitations: biases, incomplete information, subjectivity. ²⁴ Objectivity makes the promise to the reader that the report shows the world as it is by getting rid of (or at least minimizing) the individual, subjective elements, providing, as Jay Rosen (echoing the philosopher Thomas Nagel) disparagingly calls it, “the view from nowhere.”²⁵

Objectivity rests on a metaphysical description of our relation to the world: Real events are experienced by individual minds that strive to create an accurate inner representation, which is then expressed in words presented to others. But objectivity arose as a public value largely as a way of addressing a limitation of paper as a medium for knowledge. For example, America’s first magazine, The American Magazine, in 1741 promised to “inviolably observe an exact neutrality” because “several colonies have no printing press” and thus “it is difficult to obtain publication for any but a one-sided view of a subject.”²⁶ The current widespread belief that news stories need to be balanced—resulting in what are derided as “he-said-she-said” stories—springs from the same motive: If a single objective account is not possible, then at least give the reader both sides so that the report is complete enough to serve as a stopping point. Objectivity and balance thus address the same limitation that drives long-form arguments: Paper is such an inconveniently disconnected medium that it’s important to include everything that the reader needs in order to understand a topic.

As we have lost faith in objectivity (a process that began before the Net arrived), transparency has begun to do much of the work formerly accomplished by it. Transparency comes in at least two flavors. Transparency about the reporter’s standpoint has been a topic in journalism at least since the “New Journalism” of the 1970s and the “gonzo journalism” practiced by Hunter S. Thompson.²⁷ For example, Jay Rosen’s blog not only takes explicit stands, it has a prominent link to “Q & A about the blog’s POV” that lays out his point of view about journalism and tells us that politically he’s a “standard Upper West Side Liberal Jewish babyboomer.”²⁸ The ease with which readers can look up information about an author can make their standpoints transparent even if they don’t want them to be.

The second type of transparency—transparency of sources—is more disruptive of the old system. Paper-based citations are like nails: If you wonder why the author made a particular claim, you can see that it’s nailed down by a footnote. Paper-based citations attempt to keep the reader within the article, while providing the address of where the source material resides for the highly motivated researcher. On the Net, hyperlinks are less nails than invitations. Indeed, many of the links are not to source material but to elaborations, contradictions, and opinions that the author may not fully endorse. They beckon the reader out of the article. Links are a visible manifestation of the author giving up any claim to completeness or even sufficiency; links invite the reader to browse the network in which the work is enmeshed, an acknowledgment that thinking is something that we do together. Networked knowledge is thus less a system of stopping points than a web of temptations.

And this points to a second problem with objectivity. The first problem is that humans inevitably understand their world from a particular standpoint. But suppose the problem is not merely human. Suppose the world is itself not as much one-way-and-not-another as we’d thought.

For example, as revolution spread from Tunisia to Egypt at the start of 2011, a controversy arose about how much credit social media such as Facebook and Twitter ought to get. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point, had written a New Yorker article in October 2010 arguing that social media are overrated as tools of social change because they enable only “weak ties” among people, instead of the “strong ties” activists need in order to put themselves at risk.²⁹ When a few months later some media and bloggers credited social media in the Mideast revolutions of 2011, Gladwell posted a 200-word essay asserting that the influence of social media was “the least interesting fact.”³⁰ Gladwell’s comments were a corrective to those who carelessly referred to the events as “Facebook revolutions” or “Twitter revolutions” as if they were the sole cause, but he also disputed those who thought social media played a significant role at all. Given Gladwell’s standing, and the fact that The Tipping Point is about the importance of social networks, his position surprised many. But my point is not that Gladwell is mistaken (although I think he is). It’s that even if we do accept that social media played a role of some significance, it’s not at all clear what role they played. The more one looks at the question, the clearer it becomes that we don’t even have an agreed-upon explanatory framework within which the question might be resolved. And this is true not only of questions touching the Internet. For example, a couple of months after the New Yorker ran the original Gladwell piece, it published an article by Louis Menand that similarly wondered how to gauge the social and political effects of books such as Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique.³¹ We look at social media at work in civil unrest and we wonder how much the media shape us. How does it happen? Does media influence have the same effects on all cultures? On all strata of society? How much of social unrest in general (and in particular countries) comes about as the result of having access to information? How much as the result of communication? Of sociality? If there were no social media, would the revolutions have happened, and, if so, how might they have been different?

The problem with knowing the role of social media in the recent Mideast revolutions is that the events themselves are the result of a complex cluster of details that defies predictability and complete understanding. The same is true for human events overall, which is why we’re still arguing about whether the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery.³² The world is too intertwingly, to use a word coined by network visionary Ted Nelson—too complexly interdependent and entangled to be fully comprehensible.³³ The messy web of links that transparency gives rise to reflects that intertwingularity. It should lead us to wonder if one of the problems with objectivity and long-form argument is that they aren’t a good match to the structure of the world. Perhaps intertwingly networks reflect the world more accurately than does an “objective” news report or a walk along a long form’s narrow path.

Even so, WolframAlpha is not a stopping point exactly like the older stopping points of knowledge. If a result on the site surprises you, you can click on the link that WolframAlpha always provides to see its sources. If you think the site made an error, there’s a blank box brightly labeled “Give us your feedback” at the bottom of the page. And there are links to related searches you might want to explore (“Volume of moon versus earth?”). Of course, the old almanac listed its sources and may have given you an address to send corrections to, but it was a slow, one-way medium with a dash of communication thrown in. WolframAlpha assumes a far greater level of engagement and assumes that you may want to turn your result into a link itself. So, while WolframAlpha uses the old paper-based techniques of authority, it does so within a network that changes the nature of the authorities presented as stopping points. When the authorities were functionally invisible to us—the editors of the encyclopedia, the authors of the textbooks—it was easy to imagine that the chain of authority simply ended there. Now we can see that the people in the box are not the end of the story. They are in linked networks themselves. The chain of authority has no end. We will accept authorities for many of the old reasons, as well as some new ones, but more than ever we know that authorities are stopping points because we choose to stop with them. Transparency shows us that we could choose to go on.

Just as we still need stopping points, we still need long-form writing. But the same sort of thing is happening to it. Long-form writing is often a better instrument of understanding when it is embedded in a web of ideas, conversations, and arguments, all linked and traversable. The writings of Charles Darwin, Nicholas Carr, and Jay Rosen are more useful, understandable, verifiable, and up to date because of the links that point into them and out from them. The links not only let us easily engage with the works, they show us how the rest of our culture is engaging with them. Long-form writing is by no means unnecessary or “dead.” But the fact that it is improved by being placed into the Net’s web of connections means it is being dethroned by that web as the single best way to assemble ideas.

This is far from all positive.

We trust WolframAlpha, NYTimes.com, Britannica.com, and the Center for Disease Control site because we know that, as with our old authorities, qualified, credentialed people exercise strong editorial control. But the majority of sites on the Net have no professional editors. We rely on them—if we do—for a wide variety of reasons: because what the site says makes sense to us, because it links to sources, because the author has some traditional credentials, because the site is held in high esteem by others in our circle of trust, because the site has a reputation system like Amazon’s or eBay’s, or perhaps because we’re fooled by the author’s brazenness and choice of fonts. We can unknowingly find ourselves in a circle of pointers among sites that don’t have a grain of truth among them, each reinforcing the others with scholarly looking footnotes. We can put ourselves into echo chambers that repeat lies until they seem obvious. As Cass Sunstein says, there are “information cascades” of false and harmful ideas on the Net that not only gain velocity from the ease with which they can be forwarded but gain credibility by how frequently they are forwarded.

But we’re not here going to resolve the question of whether the Net is good or bad for knowledge. It is too intertwingly. Besides, we don’t want to fall into the technodeterminism that believes that technology has only one outcome. We can learn how to use the Net to help us to know and understand our world better, or we can not. More important, we can teach our children or we can not.

Whether it is good or bad—whether we choose to respond in ways that make it good or bad—it seems clear to me that the networking of knowledge is working some fundamental changes in the nature of knowledge and long-form thinking’s role in it.

First, although authority still is a stop sign, authorities are no longer primarily a special class of credentialed people producing a special class of works. Rather, authority is being defined more functionally: An authority is the last page in the linked chain you visit—the page whose links you choose not to click on.

Second, hyperlinked works establish an ecology of temptation, teasing us forward. When the temptations diverge from our aims, we think of those links as distractions. But we could just as well consider the new form of knowledge to consist of content that simultaneously settles an issue for us and baits our further interest.

Third, the authority of a work of knowledge is no longer a badge granted by its publication, but is continuously negotiated within the systems of editing, reading, reviewing, discussing, and revising that are now all aspects of one continuous and continual system.

Fourth, the edges of a topic are no longer marked by the gentle thud of the closing of a book. Rather, all topics, ideas, facts, and knowledge are embedded in webs of reference, discussion, and argument that put them to the test and to use.

Fifth, we have taken long-form works as the great achievement of human knowing because they have the luxury of developing ideas to completion. But now that ideas are freed of bound pages for their embodiment, it turns out that long-form works were never nearly long enough. They find order in the jumble of ideas they’re clarifying, but they do so by imposing a discipline that keeps the reader’s eyes focused directly on the path the author is treading. Released into the wildness of connected human difference, ideas foliate endlessly. There are no isolated ideas, and there never were; there are only webs of ideas.

Sixth, Sven Birkerts is right to point to the temporal nature of books. Paper books are published when they are done, and are done when they are published. They are the author’s past tense: “This is what I wrote then.” Web-form thought embeds knowledge in the present of conversation about that knowledge. The work undergoes revision even if its author never changes a word: If you are interested in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, you will pursue that interest by exploring the fray of links it generates online; to refuse to do so would be to willfully ignore the opportunity to understand its meaning and its impact more fully.

Seventh, if we consider knowledge only as content apart from its new hyperlinked context of conversation, debate, elucidation, and denigration, we will miss the most important change that knowledge is undergoing. Knowledge now is the unshaped web of connections within which expressions of ideas live. It is no longer content that a lonely author conveys to readers sitting alone in their comfortable chairs, or that a professor standing at the head of the class conveys to students sitting in their uncomfortable chairs. If you want to know Darwin’s theory of natural selection, you will find that this knowledge lives not just between the covers of his book, and not in any one head, and not in any one site. Knowledge now lives in the messy web that has grown around it, the way life lives not in our neurons, bones, blood and marrow but in their connection.

Finally, if books taught us that knowledge is a long walk from A to Z, the networking of knowledge may be teaching us that the world itself is more like a shapeless, intertwingled, unmasterable web than like a well-reasoned argument.

Book-Shaped Thought

The Embarrassment of Books

Public Thinking

From Stopping Point to Temptation