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

by Michael Harris

  • • • • •

  When my lunch with Carol Todd was over, she fished a few pink silicon bracelets from her purse, each emblazoned with “Amanda Todd Legacy.” I said, “Thanks,” not sure if that’s what you say.

  “Will you let me see this piece before you send it to your editor?”

  “Oh, we usually don’t—” But she stopped me.

  “You understand, I’m still her mother. I still need to protect her.”

  This shocked me a little, because Amanda Todd’s story is now so far beyond the grip of her mother’s care. There are hundreds of Web pages, there’s an ocean of commentary. Yet this does nothing to assuage her maternal instinct.

  As for the daughter who launched those public confessions, I believe she was standing in available light; I believe she was a hurting but blameless person, working with the tools she was given. So are we all. We each struggle through the mesh of communication technologies we inherit—to be heard, to be cared for. And we each forget, every day, how much care we need to take when using our seemingly benign tools; they are so useful and so sharp.

  CHAPTER 4

  Public Opinion

  We all do no end of feeling and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is Public Opinion.

  —Mark Twain

  FOR a number of years, the inventor of the hair iron was a woman named Erica Feldman. The world’s arbiter of truth, Wikipedia, said so, anyway, and that was good enough for most of us. The assertion proliferated across the Internet and, to this day, remains a truth published by a number of Web sites and even, apparently, one printed book. Unfortunately, Feldman (though she may well be a real person) did not invent the hair iron, and on September 15, 2009, Wikipedia was forced to consign the Feldman affair to their growing list of hoaxes. Not a particularly scandalous or even interesting hoax, but such is the banality of error.

  Four years later, I asked Wiki.Answers.com (the largest Q&A site online) who Erica Feldman is and was redirected to a set of crowdsourced “Relevant Answers” that claimed she is both alive and that she invented the hair straightener in 1872 (making her more than 140 years old). I was also informed of the Feldman hairdo, which involves “slicked-back long hair with one strand hanging over the forehead.” These results were displayed alongside a number of hair-focused advertisements. Even the algorithms that choose which companies should hawk things at me when I search for “Erica Feldman” are in on the mass delusion.

  For all its good—and nobody would deny its enormous usefulness—the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (as Wikipedia calls itself) has produced, in its spree of democratic knowledge production, some doozies. Once, the Web site asserted that the English composer Ronnie Hazlehurst penned a hit for the pop group S Club 7 (he emphatically did not). The information sat on Wikipedia for only ten days, yet it led to several news professionals repeating the “fact” in obituaries following Hazlehurst’s death. Those news outlets, of course, could then be cited in turn, so that even people who understand that Wikipedia is only a tertiary source can, in effect, become a carrier of Wiki-untruths when they cite a supposedly reputable source. (Wikipedia itself could, arguably, proceed to cite the sources that once cited it, in a circular appeasement of the original lie.)

  Wikipedia has broadcast information about a princess of Sigave called Tuatafa Hori; details on the great battle of Exahameron; information on Sailor Toadstool (a crossover between Sailor Moon and Super Mario Bros.); and many other people and things that never existed, except in the trusting confines of its own pages. The longest-known hoax of this sort is the person of Gaius Flavius Antonius, who for more than eight years was the real assassin of Julius Caesar. There are even hoaxes about hoaxes: For more than a month in the spring of 2008, one page on the Web site claimed that Margaret Thatcher was a fictitious character.

  All this is hardly surprising given the Web site’s prodigious output (I see there are currently about thirty-two million pages in the English Wikipedia alone). Although it’s impressive to think of the thirty-two thick volumes that made up the final print version of Encyclopædia Britannica (released in 2010), that’s a minuscule amount of content compared with Wikipedia’s efforts. Printing Wikipedia in a book form similar to the Britannica (and without images) would necessitate about two thousand volumes. Online or in print, one simply can’t create that much content without allowing for a margin of error.

  And a downgrading of authority. When Clifton Fadiman, a midcentury literary lion and member of Encyclopædia Britannica’s board of editors, realized in the 1990s that the Internet would outdo Britannica, the octogenarian said, “I guess we will just have to accept the fact that minds less educated than our own will soon be in charge.” Fadiman was, in his elitist way, making the same point T. S. Eliot made in 1934 when he wrote, “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Where is the signal amid this noise? In a remarkably short period of time, we’ve moved from the eighteenth century’s “Republic of Letters”—a self-selected group of intellectuals talking among themselves and generally ignoring the masses—to what we might call a “Crowd of Letters” today.

  I don’t know whether Fadiman was overreacting (or how we might test his assertion), but as beleaguered newspapers (and the rest of us) turn increasingly to Wikipedia as a fact-checking source, it’s worth wondering how an encyclopedia devoid of traditional authority structures goes about ascertaining that slippery thing we end up calling “truth.” Human error is hardly the main problem; even the revered Britannica is not free of mistakes. The real trouble with Wikipedia lies exactly where its strength lies: its democratic impulse. In an arena where everyone’s version of the facts is equally valid, and the opinions of specialists become marginalized, corporate and politicized interests are potentially empowered.

  • • • • •

  James Heilman—a tall, bespectacled man, casual and jokey—believes in the Wikipedia mission. He works forty hours a week as a doctor in his small-town hospital’s emergency room, then puts in a further forty hours of unpaid work for Wikipedia, editing and beefing up medical pages in his spare time. Heilman is one of the Web site’s roughly eight hundred active administrators, all working in different locations around the globe and all without pay. He is deeply committed to the task: Recently, he oversaw five months of discussion about whether the lead image for the “Pregnancy” page should show a naked woman or a clothed one. (After one hundred users voted, the final decision was uploaded: clothed it is.)

  Being an administrator is hardly a glorious position. When the title is conferred—after a “Request for Adminship” and a weeklong peer-review process similar to a thesis defense—the badge Wikipedia sticks on your user profile is an image of a janitor’s mop and bucket, highlighting the fact that an administrator is merely a servant to the greater mission. The administrator cannot arbitrate truth, he or she can only mop toward it.

  A few years back, though, Heilman became mired in a battle over the truth of Transcendental Meditation. A peer of Heilman’s had asked him to check out some of the material appearing on the TM organization’s page, and he found that Wikipedia was on the record stating that Transcendental Meditation had significant health benefits. Heilman reviewed the literature, found zero evidence backing up that claim, and deleted the offending text from the page.

  The information quickly reappeared. While Heilman considers TM a new religion, the TM folk consider themselves scientists. The sources they began citing on “their” Wikipedia page were all studies associated with the Transcendental Meditation program.

  Disputes on Wikipedia are settled by popular vote. After a fixed number of tug-of-war revisions between two parties, such votes are simply part of the process. In Heilman vs. TM, though, not enough general editors (that is, users) were interested in voting; a team of editors working with TM (a mere ten or so) was enough to win any vote over wording that came up. They had screen names like TimidGuy and LittleOlive, chosen
specifically (argues Heilman) to portray an underdog.

  “They are, in fact, always super-supernice people,” Heilman told me. “They never exhibit frustration, they always play by the rules. They’re just these nice, conscientious editors that gently, quietly, pushed their point of view onto the page over the course of years. Like all religions, they’re patient and have a very good understanding of psychology.”

  Heilman continued to fight for his own version of the truth, one aligned with the traditional scientific method, and ended up looking for a dodge around Wikipedia’s voting system. Although the vast majority of Wikipedia disputes are settled by popular vote, there is one group that could be called a higher authority: the Arbitration Committee. Two years after founding the Web site, Jimmy Wales invented the committee—he chose a dozen people (there are now fifteen)—to settle intractable disputes among editors. Heilman brought his Transcendental Meditation case before this court of last resort on two occasions.

  To no effect. “The Arbitration Committee,” explains Heilman, “only judges behavioral issues, not factual issues.” Play nice, in other words, and your version of the truth might survive the scrutiny of someone wielding pesky facts.

  I found this hard to believe, so I tracked down a member of the committee in question. Dave Craven, a thirty-two-year-old IT developer living in the northwest United Kingdom, confirmed Heilman’s assertions. The process, Craven told me, is long-winded and “very bureaucratic,” but, ultimately, “it’s certainly the intent of the committee to deal with user conduct issues, not content issues. . . . The philosophy is quite simply our own fallibility as humans—we’re just over a dozen individuals, and so we’re unlikely to have the qualifications required to make judgments on every contentious issue from medicine to religion and beyond. What we can handle is how people are acting.” Fewer and fewer cases, strangely, are brought before the Arbitration Committee. In 2006, there were 116 cases, and that number has been dropping steeply ever since. In 2013, only 12 cases were handled by the committee.

  The Arbitration Committee is clearly well-meaning and serves its purpose, but Wikipedia’s production of knowledge will always be influenced by insistent partiality from some corner or other—the democratic impulse seems at least as flawed as the elitist. “This is the weakness of Wikipedia,” says Heilman. “With endless patience, a group can substantially alter what knowledge is presented to the world.” To this day, Heilman is displeased with the Transcendental Meditation page’s stance. In the end, he says, “they simply wore us down. I had to give up.”

  Depth, time, patience. These are where the real fault lines of Wikipedia appear. The soft, persistent, and insistent nudging of truth from one reality to another. As this grand, tertiary source is more and more unabashedly employed in the production of knowledge, it’s not the blatant hoaxes or benign errors we’ll need to worry about; nor are profane vandalisms a problem—they’re easily spotted and deleted by computer systems designed to “reduce the burden on human beings.” No, what we’ll need to worry about are the interests of forces that outlive the efforts of single humans like James Heilman. Coca-Cola has all the time in the world. So does every church (with the exception of those promoting doomsday philosophies). If we can see the problem in a scenario like Heilman’s battle with Transcendental Meditation, which played out over just a few years and only a decade after Wikipedia’s invention, then what imperceptible changes might be wrought by such a system over centuries? (Disinformation—active deception—is far more damaging than simple errors.) What uncatchable, unnoticeable changes to human understanding would our collective, incorporated biases visit upon future generations?

  And one final bias to worry about is, of course, the gender bias. The “consensus” that Wikipedia arrives at turns out to actually be a male consensus. In the company’s own 2011 survey, a stunning 91 percent of Wikipedia editors were found to be men. The limits such gender biases create may be very severe. So the idea of pursuing truth as mass agreement still raises the question—whose mass?

  • • • • •

  After our talk at a YVR bar, I watch Heilman hurry off to catch his plane, and my thoughts return to Erica Feldman and her erroneous honor.

  Who, then, did invent the hair iron? Whose throne had “Erica Feldman” usurped? The site Wikipediocracy, which calls itself “a critical review site examining Wikipedia’s flaws and follies,” takes a raised-eyebrow glee in shining “the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with the structural flaws.” I discovered on Wikipediocracy that “the actual inventor” of the hair iron was Madam C. J. Walker. Several other sites confirm the assertion.

  Who? Walker, it turns out, was very much a real person. Born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana, shortly before the Christmas of 1867, she was the daughter of two ex-slaves but grew up to be one of the great business leaders and philanthropists of her time. Walker spent her early life working as a laundress and then, determined to make something of herself, devised a hair care system specifically for black women. “Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower” was sold by “hair culturists” trained in her own “Walker Schools.” The empire expanded to the point where her payroll reportedly exceeded $200,000 per year. She died in New York in the spring of 1919, a very rich woman.

  Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, further research revealed that the assertion that she invented the hair iron was another untruth. For now, at least.

  In our rush to employ a world’s worth of eager amateurs—and build an encyclopedia with entries about school massacres while they’re still playing on the news—isn’t it possible we’re missing something, some pause or just a kind of breath that leads to wisdom? What was that admonishment from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke? “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” But we never do find time for a lack of knowledge. We want to know now. Living a question requires a fondness for absence that appears to be in short supply.

  • • • • •

  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.