The blog over at Encyclopedia Brittanica started a discussion on Web 2.0 centered around a set of blogposts by Michael Gorman. His first post is titled The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. It presents a list of arguments defenfing print culture against the current online media, blogging, and something he terms as “citizen journalism.” He covers a broad range of points—from biblical literalism to alternatives to Western medicine—in his effort to further strengthen his post. Here is an excerpt:

The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers, in many ways, from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called “citizen journalists”; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernable “citizen surgeon” movement; millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy—the belief that every word in the Bible is both true and the literal word of God, something that, among other things, pits faith against carbon dating; and, scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s Dr. Nathan Null, “a White House Situational Science Adviser,” tells us that: “Situational science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts.”

This is meant to set the argument against a big canvas of social change, but the list is so at odds with the historical record as to be self-defeating.

Now, I do not have enough historical data neither the proper tools to prove this, but a quick search on Google reveals that the number of people all around the world giving into Biblical literalism has remained unchanged if not declined since the 1980s. More and more, nowadays, are content with listing themselves as belonging to ”no religion.” Books/movies/authors continually ask us to revisit and question our faiths and believes. This trend has taken on an aggresive attitude especially in the past few decades.

Even the part of the list specific to new technology gets it wrong. Bloggers aren’t called citizen-journalists; bloggers are called bloggers. Citizen-journalist describes people like Alisara Chirapongse, the Thai student who posted photos and observations of the recent coup during a press blackout. If Gorman can think of a better label for times when citizens operate as journalists, he hasn’t shared it with us.

Similarly, lumping Biblical literalism with Web 2.0 misses the mark. Many of the most active social media sites — Slashdot, Digg, Reddit — are rallying points for those committed to scientific truth. Wikipedia users have so successfully defended articles on Evolution, Creationism and so on from the introduction of counter-factual beliefs that frustrated literalists helped found Conservapedia, whose entry on Evolution is a farrago of anti-scientific nonsense.

But wait — if use of social media is bad, and attacks on the scientific method are bad, what are we to make of social media sites that defend the scientific method? Surely Wikipedia is better than Conservapedia on that score, no? Well, it all gets confusing when you start looking at the details, but Gorman is not interested in the details. His grand theory, of the hell-in-a-handbasket variety, avoids any look at specific instantiations of these tools — how do the social models of Digg and Wikipedia differ? does Huffington Post do better or worse than Instapundit on factual accuracy? — in favor of one sweeping theme: defense of incumbent stewards of knowledge against attenuation of their erstwhile roles.

There are two alternate theories of technology on display in Sleep of Reason. The first is that technology is an empty vessel, into which social norms may be poured. This is the theory behind statements like “The difference is not, emphatically not, in the communication technology involved.” (Emphasis is his.) The second theory is that intellectual revolutions are shaped in part by the tools that sustain them. This is the theory behind his observation that the virtues of print were “…often absent in the manuscript age that preceded print.”

These two theories cannot both be true, so it’s odd to find them side by side, but Gorman does not seem to be comfortable with either of them as a general case. This leads to a certain schizophrenic quality to the writing. We’re told that print does not necessarily bestow authenticity and that some digital material does, but we’re also told that he consulted “authoritative printed sources” on Goya. If authenticity is an option for both printed and digital material, why does printedness matter? Would the same words on the screen be less scholarly somehow?

Gorman is adopting a historically contingent view: Revolution then was good, revolution now is bad. As a result, according to Gorman, the shift to digital and networked reproduction of information will fail unless it recapitulates the institutions and habits that have grown up around print.

Gorman’s theory about print — its capabilities ushered in an age very different from manuscript culture — is correct, and the same kind of shift is at work today. As with the transition from manuscripts to print, the new technologies offer virtues that did not previously exist, but are now an assumed and permanent part of our intellectual environment. When reproduction, distribution, and findability were all hard, as they were for the last five hundred years, we needed specialists to undertake those jobs, and we properly venerated them for the service they performed. Now those tasks are simpler, and the earlier roles have instead become obstacles to direct access.

Digital and networked production vastly increase three kinds of freedom: freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly. This perforce increases the freedom of anyone to say anything at any time. This freedom has led to an explosion in novel content, much of it mediocre, but freedom is like that. Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain are as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline. Experts the world over have been shocked to discover that they were consulted not as a direct result of their expertise, but often as a secondary effect — the apparatus of credentialing made finding experts easier than finding amateurs, even when the amateurs knew the same things as the experts.

This improved ability to find both content and people is one of the core virtues of our age. Gorman insists that he was able to find “…the recorded knowledge and information I wanted [about Goya] in seconds.” This is obviously an impossibility for most of the population; if you wanted detailed printed information on Goya and worked in any environment other than a library, it would take you hours at least. This scholars-eye view is the key to Gorman’s lament: so long as scholars are content with their culture, the inability of most people to enjoy similar access is not even a consideration.

Wikipedia is the best known example of improved findability of knowledge. Gorman is correct that an encyclopedia is not the product of a collective mind; this is as true of Wikipedia as of Britannica. Gorman’s unfamiliarity and even distaste for Wikipedia leads him to mistake the dumbest utterances of its most credulous observers for an authentic accounting of its mechanisms; people pushing arguments about digital collectivism, pro or con, known nothing about how Wikipedia actually works. Wikipedia is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation; the corpus grows not from harmonious thought but from constant scrutiny and emendation.

The success of Wikipedia forces a profound question on print culture: how is information is to be shared with the majority of the population? This is an especially tough question, as print culture has so manifestly failed at the transition to a world of unlimited perfect copies. Because Wikipedia’s contents are both useful and available, it has eroded the monopoly held by earlier modes of production. Other encyclopedias now have to compete for value to the user, and they are failing because their model mainly commits them to denying access and forbidding sharing. If Gorman wants more people reading Britannica, the choice lies with its management. Were they to allow users unfettered access to read and share Britannica’s content tomorrow, the only interesting question is whether their readership would rise a ten-fold or a hundred-fold.

Britannica will tell you that they don’t want to compete on universality of access or sharability, but this is the lament of the scribe who thinks that writing fast shouldn’t be part of the test. In a world where copies have become cost-free, people who expend their resources to prevent access or sharing are forgoing the principal advantages of the new tools, and this dilemma is common to every institution modeled on the scarcity and fragility of physical copies. Academic libraries, which in earlier days provided a service, have outsourced themselves as bouncers to publishers like Reed-Elsevier; their principal job, in the digital realm, is to prevent interested readers from gaining access to scholarly material.

If Gorman were looking at Web 2.0 and wondering how print culture could aspire to that level of accessibility, he would be doing something to bridge the gap he laments. Instead, he insists that the historical mediators of access “…promote intellectual development by exercising judgment and expertise to make the task of the seeker of knowledge easier.” This is the argument Catholic priests made to the operators of printing presses against publishing translations of the Bible — the laity shouldn’t have direct access to the source material, because they won’t understand it properly without us. Gorman offers no hint as to why direct access was an improvement when created by the printing press then but a degradation when created by the computer. Despite the high-minded tone, Gorman’s ultimate sentiment is no different from that of everyone from music executives to newspaper publishers: Old revolutions good, new revolutions bad.