This J.A. Westenberg article is troubling for writers and bibliophiles like me but also helps explain the origin of the bad behavior rampant in the online world. I mean unsourced quotations, mis-quotations, mis-attributions, false attributions and outright plagiarism. Here is a longish excerpt:
The part of me trained in research methodology wants to scream over verification and provenance and the importance of tracing claims to sources. But I also notice that most people don’t seem to mind. The hunger for documentary certainty, for the well-cited argument, for the carefully fact-checked article, was perhaps never as universal as print-culture intellectuals assumed. Through most of history, most people have been comfortable with a more fluid epistemology: “I heard from a guy who knows,” or “everyone’s saying,” or “my cousin’s friend saw it happen.” The post-truth moment we’ve been living through may be a reversion to the mean rather than an aberration.
What we lose when the parenthesis closes
The Gutenberg Parenthesis gave us real gifts, and some of them may not survive its closing.We may lose linear argument: the book-length treatment of a complex topic, the patient accumulation of evidence toward a conclusion, the scientific paper and the legal brief and the doctoral dissertation and the philosophical treatise. All of these forms assume a reader willing to follow a chain of reasoning through thousands of words without interruption, building toward understanding that’s only possible at the end. That reading is already rare and getting rarer, and it may soon be as exotic as hand-copying manuscripts.
We may lose historical consciousness. When knowledge was fixed in texts, the past remained present. You could read Thucydides and know exactly what he wrote in 431 BCE. You could trace the evolution of ideas across centuries, watching how each generation built on or rejected what came before. Oral culture has a weaker historical memory because each retelling revises the past. The fluid web, where yesterday’s controversy is ancient history and last year’s consensus is forgotten, may produce a similarly compressed temporal consciousness.
We may lose individual authorship. In oral culture, the tribe speaks through every voice. In literate culture, individual thinkers can depart from consensus and have their departures preserved. Copernicus could be wrong in his time and right for eternity. Darwin could write a book that his contemporaries rejected but that later generations would vindicate. The permanence of text allows genius to speak across centuries. What happens when knowledge becomes fluid again, when every idea is instantly remixed into the collective flow, losing its attribution, becoming another element in the soup?