Three: Citing Sources (07-11-2022)
I spend a significant amount of my time at work not working and instead perusing wikipedia. Wikipedia, as a cultural item, has a pretty solid role as the final arbiter of information for most people. Academically, wikipedia is considered a weak and flawed system of community contribution without need for personal credentials. For a very long time, the song went that wikipedia was lacking in strength of sources (now mostly untrue), and that its free-to-edit model allowed rampant vandalism (always untrue). It's likely that wikipedia articles face more peer-review scrutiny than most academic articles.
A regular reader of wikipedia will undoubtedly notice its quirks. Writing quality varies widely, and there's almost always undue weight given to Japanese culture on the English language wiki. The citing of sources is spottier than expected, with an immense disdain for original research and primary sources. This is my primary gripe with the internet, academics, and the culture that encompasses them both. Citing of sources is no longer a necessary step in the process of proving credibility, nor is validating or even possessing any professional credentials- a result of the democratization of information and the choice to value subjective experience and personal comfort over rational pursuit of objective truth (itself a knowingly fruitless effort).
On wikipedia, the citation of a source is an effort to validate information and demonstrate to the academic establishment that wikipedia is a valid repository of information. This means that wikipedia's obsession with cross-reference and informational provenance is derived from academia's self-proscribed dogma of citation. Writing collegiate essays and research papers familiarizes most adults with how this dogma is employed- use of an online library portal or physical library catalog to gather sources, the conversion of titles, ISBNs, and DOIs into cryptic standard format citations, and the random sprinkling of in-text citation and footnoting after paper completion to create a facsimile of a journal paper. Of course, throughout this process, there is an economic machine driving subscription sales of journals and books and technologies to universities, which downstream this expense, as well as the additional administration costs, to students in the form of tuition.
The reason academics are so obsessive about citation, if not for their own financial gain or simply to maintain the status quo, is a desperate attempt to validate the actuality of their job. It has long been true that experience can outperform formal education, and with information readily available to the industrious internet user, this is increasingly true and increasingly damaging to the academic establishment. Nothing taught in a college classroom cannot be found on wikipedia, YouTube, Library Genesis, or any number of smaller website operations or free learning services. The encoding of certifications and the requirement of professional degrees for licensure in many disciplines circumvents this ease of learning and makes formal education inescapable. However, shifting cultural attitudes combined with diminishing economic opportunities will mean that in time many will choose to pursue careers in fields that require neither formal education or licensure, leaving the fields that maintain this requirement to face a shortage of workers or the need to adapt.
In contemporary society, the paranoid compulsion to adopt social signals to display the authenticity and necessity of oneself, particularly in regards to career, is present in almost any industry older than the internet. Professional services firms using outdated fonts, per last Friday's post, academics insisting on citing sources, and the encoding of formal education as a prerequisite to work are all clear examples of this phenomenon. Fear over the outdating and outpacing of one's career by technology and economy is a parallel occurrence to the democratization of knowledge and information, with information being now so ever-present that the previous need to justify or verify is no longer a useful exercise. If someone makes a claim that seems untrue or sensational, it is not their responsibility to present a source or credentials when every member of the audience has access to tools to, for themselves, verify or disprove the claim. Presentation of sources in refute is more effective than presentation of sources in support, unless original claimants resort to ad hominem, but nevertheless.
So, I'll never cite sources. If something seems untrue, it very well could be, but you can check for yourself. If citing sources and acquiring myriad credentials is critically important to you, it may mean you bear some anxiety about your own inability to compete with technology. I bear no such anxiety, nor am I a master of the technology that surrounds me. Bare minimum technical literacy is all that is needed to navigate the world without falling behind the economic race.