Well, I’m not a pop-culture connoisseur. I’m not really a “buff” of any kind. Music, cinema, literature, television…
they’re all just passing fancies of mine.
I like the distraction and I’ll even delve a bit deeper into something
that is more interesting to me, but not at any level that you could consider
fanatical and usually not into anything that could be considered popular at the
time. I’m just not really in-tune with
the current goings-on. I guess I could
blame that on my digital video recorder.
Pop culture is the life-blood of so much that graces the small screen
between the few television shows that I record and watch, and I simply
fast-forward right past it. But pop
culture goes beyond that. It is
pervasive in all forms of media. The
fact is that I’m just not that engaged.
So the blame really rests on my inner [grumpy] "old-man” who is
increasingly making himself known to all around me with phrases like, “Is that
what the kids are into these days?” or, more directly [grumpily], “What the
hell is that?” So my lack of interest in the subject matter
was the initial reason for my frustration.
Selecting a subject to research and write about in a genre where I have
little interest or knowledge was a bit daunting.
Finally after much searching and deliberating, my partner
and I selected Jake Gold as the subject of our wiki. Gold is most commonly known (at least to me)
for his work as a judge on Canadian Idol.
But through some less-than-scholarly research, I discovered that he is
quite an accomplished and well-respected manager in the Canadian music biz. In fact, he managed the early career of a
band that I had more than a passing interest in during my
post-dropping-out-of-university, pre-finding-some-direction-for-my-life
years. So now I had some connection to
the subject matter, something to get the mental gears grinding. But as I said, that was just the beginning of
my frustration.
We next set to the
task of drafting our article. But this
isn’t as simple as crafting a document in a word processor or even through a
web-based interface such as a blog.
Wikis have their own language, their own rules for presenting and
organizing information. And the
wiki-to-English dictionary available out there on the tangled World Wide Web
isn’t that clear either. I suspect that
it was crafted by a bunch of people in a wiki as well – more insight into my
rationale can be found in the next paragraph.
But after much back and forth
with cheat sheets and less-than-helpful help articles and videos and after many
hours of squinting at symbols and letters in 8 point Courier font, we finally
produced an article that looked and read like something you might find on
Wikipedia. And it had some information
that may have been of some use to somebody somewhere. That was until some of our classmates
provided their contribution. Enter the
next phase of frustration and much Lewis Black-esque ranting and raving on my part.
As others contributed to our article, it became less and
less our own. We had lost control of the
content and the format. One misplaced
backslash by a contributor and I was thrust into many hours of hair-pulling punctuated by exasperated expletives. What’s more, after reading content that I had
re-formatted, I found myself saying, “Is that right?” And after re-researching I found myself
saying, “No, that isn’t right at all!” It was at this point that I arrived at a
revelation: If I had struggled with the
format and content for our article, and others had struggled in their
contributions, what were my contributions to others’ articles like? What were we really creating here?
Knowledge? Not likely.
Manuel Castells, in his 2005 paper, The Network Society: from Knowledge to Policy, takes umbrage with
the term ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’ to describe society today because knowledge
and information have always played a critical role in our society no matter
whether we were progressing from mere survival to agricultural sustenance or
from rural living to industrial life in cities.
Rather, he suggests we now live in a network society broader in reach
and potential than at any other time in our history, aided by communication
technology. And he asserts that we are
now at a crossroads where “unfettered communication and self-organization” are “challenging
formal politics” and creating a dichotomy: we want to “praise the benefits” of a
networked society, but we fear losing control (p. 20). Sound familiar? Well, it did to me.
I felt the sting of that double-edged sword myself: keen to engage in a collaborative effort with
a network of people to construct some knowledge but frustrated by the lack of
control that I had over the final product. My classmate, Ann, provided her assessment of
Wikipedia this week in her blog: “Wikipedia is maintained by thousands and
thousands of volunteer authors and editors and we can now number ourselves
among them. In essence, Wikipedia is an
information repository by the people, for the people.” Wikipedia, she contends, is an exercise in
democracy in this Information Society. I’d
have to agree with her contention. But I’d
also have to add something that many a politician and political pundit have said: democracy
is messy.
