Welcome To The New Dark Age

Two newspaper articles this week highlight a growing problem: lots of people with opinions, but not necessarily much information. One is a local story and the other is a global one. And underlying this issue is the fact that a growing number of organizations, both mass media outlets (newspapers, television, and their web presences) and what I'll call non-media (everything else), feel compelled to give voice to every "Tom, Dick, and Harry" out there. And some are way out there.

The AP article starts by talking about the shouting going on at the climate change conference in Denmark this week. The author points out that there is little of traditional debate left in the mix, with both sides largely shouting at each other, beating each other with opinions. Facts, and science, are left in the dust. "And public debate shifts from the provable and the empirical toward the spectacle of argument."

There has long been a bias on the part of the public against intellectuals and science, and some feel this was because the public simply didn't trust intellectuals and scientists. This carries over to public perception of intelligence in general, and spawned those bumper stickers that read "My kid can beat up your honor role student." The pursuit of mediocrity at best.

The spawn of the Internet has made things even worse. Our electronic communications encourage the expression of opinions, whether or not the opinions are based even a little bit on fact. Facts and information are kicked to the curb in favor of "beliefs" and judgments, and truth is irrelevant.

"What you have is the (presumption) of expertise by ordinary people who feel their opinions are as valuable as anybody else's. And at the same time, you have experts behaving like gods beyond what they know," says Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent and author of "Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?"

The second article is a story about a library in the Chicago suburbs that implemented a new online catalog of its holdings. Part of the new software provided for patrons to "tag" books "with terms they think other readers might find useful." All patrons have to do is sign up with a user name and email address and they can tag to their heart's content. The "news" in this case is that someone tagged the library's collection of Anne Coulter's books with the term "hate speech." This in turn, made another patron very upset. The upset patron felt that the library was letting people make "political statements" on the library's site and felt that was wrong. The library doesn't closely monitor the tagging and will only remove tags that are "explicit materials or racial slurs."

My question is why does the library feel it's a good idea to have patron tagging of books in their online catalog? Just because the new software enables this, what point is served? Does the library really thing it's a good idea for patrons to peruse one or two word "tags" in order to decide if they want to read a particular book? Not only is this not encouraging critical thinking skills, it's pandering to the lowest denominator. Other libraries allow tagging, but require the submitter to also provide a book review, which might at least be an indication the commenter actually read the book.

What makes a patron qualified to recommend or criticize a book or author with word tags? What makes a newspaper article reader qualified to expound about why the article is all wrong? What qualifications do either bring to the table?

My 11/22/09 post also dealt with this issue of ignorant opinions and news outlets.

The ignorant comments of the public after news articles (about ignorant comments of politicians) are even more worrisome than the politicians' statements. The anonymous public vitriol tends to discourage rational discussion, and is little more than online bullying. For an excellent post on what's wrong with the public comment sections of news related web sites, read Steve Dahl's excellent 11/11/09 article "Everybody is a know-it-all these days."

This issue is not going away and I remain convinced that society needs to find a way back to the process of debate based on facts. We need to abandon our apparently growing penchant for encouraging ignorant shouting by people unconcerned with knowing anything about the topic at hand. I'm not very hopeful.

Greil Marcus, an American cultural historian and co-author of "A New Literary History of America," remembers watching TV in the 1950s, "when there were all these TV dramas about science vs. religion." And, he says, "science always won."

No more, Marcus says. Instead, cacophony now prevails and the right to be heard trumps what is being said. "Welcome to the new Dark Ages," he says.