The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (11 page)

• • • • •

When we grip our phones and tablets, we’re holding the kind of information resource that governments would have killed for just a generation ago. And is it that experience of everyday information miracles, perhaps, that makes us all feel as though our own opinions are so worth sharing? After all, aren’t we—in an abstracted sense, at least—just as smart as everyone else in the room, as long as we’re sharing the same Wi-Fi connection? And therefore (goes the bullish leap in thinking) aren’t my opinions just as worthy of trumpeting?

• • • • •

Traditionally, expertise was a one-way road. A book might upset or even outrage a reader, but the most anyone could do was scrawl a feeble, “Not True!!!” in the margins of its pages. I’ve done it myself and felt the sense of impotence such ejaculations produce. What’s important there is the brevity of the response. Amateurs may well have had some clever ideas that discounted the book in their lap, but they wouldn’t bother to write them out because, alas, no one would read them (least of all the author, happily oblivious and working on his or her next, equally galling book). Today, however, that same author cannot escape the vicissitudes of mass critique. In the words of technologist David Weinberger, this messy transition is a move from

credentialed to uncredentialed
. From certitude to ambivalence. From consistency to plenitude. From the opacity conferred by authority to a constant demand for transparency. From contained and knowable to linked and unmasterable.

Linked and unmasterable. That’s us. Sounds a little like a gang of primary school kids. But also like a phalanx of rebel warriors. And in that twin identity, we struggle toward a new conception of “the valid opinion.” Or, rather, “the
validated
opinion.”

This uncredentialed, ambivalent plenitude of opinion is something the elite have been trying to tamp down about as long as we’ve had communication technologies. Historian Jonathan Rose puts it bluntly: “For as long as writing has existed, the literate classes have attempted to preserve a closed shop through exclusionary languages.” In ancient Mesopotamia, he notes, scribes would regularly tag a smug epigram onto the ends of their clay tablets: “
Let the wise instruct the wise
, for the ignorant may not see.” Today’s academics aren’t so crass about it, but specialized jargon remains, so that outsiders will often get the impression it’s not their wits that aren’t up to the task, but their ability to use
en vogue
terminology. It is easy to smirk when authority is wrenched from such an abstract elite. Less so when it’s wrenched from us, as I learned.

• • • • •

For several years, and without any supporting credentials at first, I wrote theater reviews for Canada’s national newspaper
The Globe and Mail
. I would attend about three plays a week, rarely publishing the nasty things I scrawled in my notebook to keep myself awake during duller productions. There was a modicum of authority about this task, as one’s own opinions, being published in the country’s paper of record, were elevated to the level of expert utterance ipso facto. I had no formal training in theater, though, and no abiding obsession with it, either. I had a little learning, and a little curiosity, and that appeared to be enough. Specialists, after all, can kill the interest of a general readership by virtue of their myopia. I was serving, by contrast, as a kind of thoughtful everyman—but one who had the sanctioning stage of the
Globe
from which to voice my opinion. It was fun, and certainly an ego boost.

But then, along came everybody. When did it begin? Perhaps 2008? I remember looking over an advertisement for a play I had reviewed, idly wondering if I’d been quoted in its list of accolades, and I narrowed my eyes instead at a hyperenthusiastic comment that was credited to a certain local blog (how gross, it seemed, to print a Web site address beneath a rave instead of the hallowed, italicized title of a magazine or broadsheet). This struck me as disturbing—maybe even a little disgusting—because that blogger had no authority backing his opinion, and therefore, what was the value of it? Who
cared
what this mouth breather thought about the play? My naïveté went hand in hand with my hypocrisy; there was no real reason why my own opinion mattered, except that it appeared in the
Globe
. It was symptomatic of my own frail position that I felt threatened by online usurpers.

In the case of arts reviews and restaurant reviews, social media and blogs have more or less blown up opinion monopolies. Even while Google and Facebook use intense data mining to monopolize certain kinds of knowledge (kinds useful to advertisers), we also get a proliferation of amateur judgment. The new technology “frees up” the voices of more people, even while it standardizes and controls other kinds of information.

This isn’t a new dynamic. For example, while the printing press’s most famous child may be the sacred and authoritative Gutenberg Bible, it also allowed, as Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, for

the duplication of the hermetic writings
, the sibylline prophecies, the hieroglyphics of “Horapollo,” and many other seemingly authoritative, actually fraudulent esoteric writings [that worked] in the opposite direction, spreading inaccurate knowledge.

Benighted medieval worldviews were, in a sense, more available to the literary set of the sixteenth century than they had been to those in the medieval world. (Porn, too, of course; someone ought to write a good book on the explosion of pornography that Gutenberg’s invention ignited.) Historians are fond of saying that the printing press eventually gave rise to the clean rationalism of the Enlightenment (and it did), but the machine was indiscriminate and had no particular fondness for the writings of Newton and Voltaire; it was just as good at spreading backward or “immoral” information as forward or “noble” stuff.

• • • • •

By the late 1800s
, newspapers opened “correspondence columns” that allowed everyday readers to turn into writers. “The distinction between writer and readership is thus in the process of losing its fundamental character,” worried critical theorist Walter Benjamin. “The reader is constantly ready to become a writer,” he noted, adding that literary authority had become (shudder) “common property.”

After that first occasion when I saw a blogger’s words running alongside those of “professional” critics, it was of course as though a dam had broken. Today, press agents regularly give one-person Web sites complimentary tickets to shows in the hopes of eliciting positive buzz. House managers, while asking guests to turn off their cell phones during a performance, implore them to turn those phones back on during intermission and tweet about what fun they’re having. Five years after I first noticed the shift, my friends and I declare a movie a good bet because of crowdsourced ratings. We’ll choose one pizza place over another while bumming around Seattle because someone shows us a Yelp page on their phone (we meanwhile roll our eyes at the in-person recommendation of some crank at the hotel). And as I’ve watched my friends become more reliant on amateur or algorithmic critiques, I’ve seen them also become amateur critics themselves, seen them eagerly feed the data banks of Yelp and Amazon. Once we get a taste of that sense of enlargement, of mastery over (or at least interaction with) the ocean of information, everybody becomes a pundit. Should we be worried?

• • • • •

When the elitist-ly named (but Pulitzer Prize–winning) William A. Henry III wrote his most famous book,
In Defense of Elitism,
he took to bemoaning how “
the dominant mood of contemporary American culture
is the self-celebration of the peasantry.” Harsh, yes. At times, the text (written in 1994, just before the “peasantry” got its hands on the “self-celebrating” genius of the Internet) is unabashedly snobbish in its desire to separate the supposed wheat from the supposed chaff. But the elitist impulse is worth looking at a second time because it highlights a position—which is the
absence
of opinion, the
scarcity
of opinion—that we chucked when we went online. And that lack of opinion is something we aren’t often encouraged to remember. However, if you believe that some opinions
are
in fact better than others, then you, too, are an elitist of sorts. I remember reading
In Defense of Elitism
at nineteen, with the same sense of shameful transgression that gripped earlier generations when they perused
Playboy
. This was the turn of the millennium, and my university friends were a leftist bunch who would’ve raised more than their eyebrows at me if they caught me reading
anyone
“the third.” Once I said to a particularly severe woman in our group, “Teak furniture is so much nicer than pine,” and she wouldn’t speak to me for a week.

What would poor William Henry III think of the way I select movies and music online? Instead of seeking suggestions from trusted critics, I browse selections that Netflix offers up “because you watched
Legally Blonde
.” (The triviality, the casualness, of our interests and predilections bounce back at us to a sometimes painful extent.) These are algorithmically derived options, based on movies that other people who watched
Legally Blonde
have enjoyed. They are, then, a kind of computerized judgment of their own—a digital version of “Oh, this would be your kind of thing.” And more often than not, I’m a little insulted by the portrait of my viewing habits that Netflix tries to paint—and tries to reinscribe. (One friend of mine, David, complains that Google AdSense “treats me like a forty-three-year-old woman because of my personal choices.”)

We can presume that in the future much more will be selected by public consensus—and that we’ll be vaguely unaware of those selections, too. The computer scientist (and virtual reality pioneer) Jaron Lanier writes angrily against this “invisible hand” in
Who Owns the Future?:

If market pricing is the only legitimate test
of quality, why are we still bothering with proving theorems? Why don’t we just have a vote on whether a theorem is true? To make it better we’ll have everyone vote on it, especially the hundreds of millions of people who don’t understand the math. Would that satisfy you?

This invisible hand is at work each time you search online. When Google delivers your search results, its algorithm (mimicking an academic tradition) assumes that work that receives more citations has a greater authority. Google, then, privileges search results that are linked to more Web pages and shuttles more popular (that is, relevant) results to page one of the 142 million results for “Glee,” for example. Nicholas Carr tells a fascinating story in
The Shallows
that illustrates where this approach can go drastically wrong: James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, compiled a database of thirty-four million scholarly articles published in journals from 1945 to 2005, in order to assess the number and variety of citations that were used. Had the movement of journals from print to online been a boon for scholarship?

As more journals moved online
, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. . . . Scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a “narrowing of science and scholarship.”

The Google-ization of knowledge—that ultimate searchability—creates a great bounty of potential avenues for research. It cannot, however, become a substitute for the strange vagaries of human intuition and creative leaps. We need to insist on a certain randomness, and a large degree of pure, haphazard discovery, in the tools we use to explore our world. The brightest moments of human discovery are those unplanned and random instants when you thumb through a strange book in a foreign library or talk auto maintenance with a neuroanatomist. We need our searches to include cross-wiring and dumb accidents, too, not just algorithmic surety.

And besides the need for accidental connections, there’s the fact that some things, clearly, are beyond the wisdom of crowds—sometimes speed and volume should bend to make way for theory and meaning. Sometimes we
do
still need to quiet down the rancor of mass opinion and ask a few select voices to speak up. And doing so in past generations has never been such a problem as it is for us. They never dealt with such a glut of information or such a horde of folk eager to misrepresent it.

• • • • •

I’m as guilty in all this, as complicit, as the next guy. Looking up a book I’m interested in on Amazon, I can’t help noticing that it’s the 390,452nd best seller available and that “Josie from Phoenix” thought it was “so boring I threw it across the room.” Every product on Amazon—from biscuit tins to baby toys to laptops—comes with its own sales ranking and its own appendage of public opinion. Meanwhile, when a business is too small to manage its own Web site, Yelp often feels like the only way to find its address and phone number; it’s a Yellow Pages for people who don’t care about Yellow Pages anymore.

Yelp’s user base has become quite a mass indeed. When the Web site launched in 2004, it welcomed a modest 300,000 users per month. A few years later, in 2008, that number climbed to 15.7 million users per month. By 2011,
the number hit 65.8 million
. The curve is not linear; it’s verging on exponential:
In 2013, Yelp enticed 117 million unique users per month
. As of this writing, “
Yelpers” have written 47 million reviews
of local businesses around the world (mostly restaurants and shops), all entirely without pay. Every second of every day, a Yelp user either receives directions to a business or makes a call to a business through the Web site’s mobile app.