I will begin by saying that I was more-or-less in agreement with both the readings, and I felt both had strong individual merit. While I’m an avid user of Wikipedia, I still tend to regard it with the suspicion of someone educated to research primarily in the Dewey Decimal System – Wikipedia seems so easy, so at-your-fingertips, so virtual in the sense of the word that means almost, but not quite. Purdy’s article complicated that assumption for me, and created a convincing argument for Wikipedia as a model of good, active research skills. Brent’s play-by-play definition of the “rhetoric of reading” was equally well thought-out, and if we are to believe him that reading is a persuasive act, then his text succeeded for me.
However, what fascinated me most about these two articles was their juxtaposition to one another on our syllabus. Purdy’s Wikipedia vs. Brent’s Rhetoric of Reading. In style and tone alone they are light years apart from one another – Purdy writes cleanly and informally to a student audience, while Brent is jargon-heavy and aiming for academic and professorial readership. Purdy is very up-to-date technologically speaking, while Brent’s article is nearly 20 years old – perhaps not ancient, but certainly dated: 1992 was the year that the internet was first opened to commerce, and still five years before I was to see a computer for the first time.
The fissure in these articles appears to me most clearly in the idea of the author. Brent’s discussion of the “rhetoric of reading” relies very heavily on the background presence of an author. He writes:
“However, texts refer not just to the world but to a world-view; not to an unmediated state of existence but to the author's perception of the state of things. There are therefore two steps between the world and the reader's perception of it: the author's interpretation of the world, and the reader's interpretation of the author's text. The process of reading, then, is not just the interpretation of a text but the interpretation of another person's worldview as presented by a text.”
But what, then, of texts with no author? Wikipedia is so multi-authored that the author ceases to exist – the text is ever-changing and endlessly open. Thus it breaks down the relationship of author to reader as put forth by Brent – there is no authorial perception, because the author cannot be pinpointed. Brent stresses that “the interaction between reader and text must be seen as being in the service of a larger process: making contact with the mind of another human being.” All right – how about a hundred minds? A thousand minds? A million? Wikipedia is an authorless space – no one takes credit, no one defers to anyone else, and the reader has essentially the same power as an author would; the ability to change the text at will.
Furthermore, Purdy discusses Wikipedia’s adherence to the idea of a Neutral space – where does Brent’s ideas of persuasion fit into this? If the text is authorless and purportedly neutral, how can we tweak Brent’s “rhetoric of reading” to resonate with this? The internet is, at times, an authorless space – there is a constant push-pull of sources and an almost never-ending wealth of information. Indeed, haven’t people called this the Information Age?
“It is, of course, possible to read for simple information retrieval,” Brent tells us, “building up a repertoire of disciplinary knowledge for no immediate purpose other than to pass a test. However, the rhetorical model of reading suggests that this method of stocking a repertoire is severely impoverished. We build and modify our repertoires more actively by participating in the "textual economy" of producing and consuming texts in pursuit of answers to questions – in the academic context, by writing papers based on research.”
Perhaps there is a different sort of “textual economy” at work in Wikipedia, then. People trade facts and dates and interpretations back and forth until something is briefly settled, only to be traded again for something newer, better. There is most certainly an active participation, which is one of the things Purdy likes best about Wikipedia – an equal dispersal of power between reader and author, the possibility to impact the text as you read it.
I keep stressing to my students the importance of being active, critical readers –Don’t take things at face value, I tell them. Use your own ideas to assess and interpret the ideas of others. And this is very much in keeping with Brent’s idea of rhetorical reading – the awareness that you are being persuaded will help keep you decide whether or not you want, in fact, to be persuaded by a particular text. It is also relevant to Wikipedia, where anyone can edit information at any time. I’d love to give Purdy’s article to my students and have them troll around the site looking for articles to edit, if only as an exercise in active reading – looking for places where their knowledge can augment or surpass the available knowledge, or even just support it.
The idea of an authorless source is very intriguing. Of course, the anonymity of the internet allows for a certain carelessness of text, but it’s an important distinction, in my mind, that Wikipedia is more than just the traditional communication between a reader and the vast anonymous-other we call Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteOn the "How to" page for Wikipedia, the site tells users:
“Remember – you can't break Wikipedia; all edits can be reversed, fixed or improved later. Wikipedia is allowed to be imperfect. So go ahead, edit an article and help make Wikipedia the best information source on the Internet!”
I remember my first Wikipedia contribution. And I remember my total mortification twelve hours later, when bragging about my contribution, to discover I had my facts utterly wrong. What shame! What ignorance! I had polluted the internet with lies!
Except (!), as my tech-savvy friend informed me, there is a checks and balances system within Wikipedia. When you make changes it flags them for other editors to look over. Under the history tab I discovered my "contribution" had lasted less than five minutes.
Wikipedia is built on the knowledge and expertise of (thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of enthusiasts with so much time on their hands they track down false edits within moments of them appearing on the site.
And rather than seeing the complex relationship of authors to text as “authorless” as Emma's suggests, it seems to me a better analogy is that Wikipedia is a authorial monster with twelve hundred heads, and equal number of hands attached to computer screens. The people who devote their time to edit the pages of Wikipedia are, quite simply, the people who care.
To me this is the most important voucher for viewing Wikipedia as a credible way to start the research process. People who contribute to the Wikipedia articles know that readers start there to get the general story and then dig further through old news articles and such, and are devoted to offering them a tool to do just that. If a few errors get made in the process, it is the hope that the immense writer-ship of editors will be on hand to catch and correct.
On the other hand, I completely agree that this lack of accountability makes it a difficult source, but not if used the way Purdy suggests to.
And although Wikipedia provides some opportunities for people to drop the ball, like in the case of John Seigenthaler's alleged involvement in the assassination of J.F.K, if we hold Wikipedia to the same standards we would hold our incredibly educated Grandfather, or best friend's mother, or the genius child next door (as a starting point, a guide post, an introduction) and defer to experts at a later date, than those mistakes, like who did or didn't assassinate whom, become quite hilarious for anyone not directly involved in the incident.
I've always been a big cheerleader for Wikipedia when it comes to looking up an unfamiliar term/concept/person/thing. Most times I'm impressed by its ability to act as a terse overview of the subject and a good starting-off point for further research. I tend to use it for non-academic research. In fact, I don't think I've ever used it for academic research, but I think its benefits (ideas, links to other texts, and search terms), as discussed by Purdy, are real and ought not to be ignored.
ReplyDeleteI think Emma is right that Brent's ideas on rhetorical reading can and ought to be applied to Wikipedia - especially Wikipedia. And when he asserts that a rhetoric of reading treats the transaction between the reader, writer, text, and situation as a persuasive transaction I think he aptly describes my experience with Wikipedia (and any other text, really) every time I use it. In other words, I take what I read with a grain of salt. I've always lauded the benefits of Wikipedia, and I was glad to read Purdy's article. I think he articulates what I've always felt intrinsically about the site but have never actually expressed.
Purdy claims, “My intention here is not to prepare you to contribute a Wikipedia article itself, but rather to use Wikipedia to prepare you to do the reviewing that is part of successful research-based writing” (215). However, I would like to share that a professor in my undergrad did just that. The assignment was to create a page on Wikipedia. My friend in the class found it to be as easy, or as difficult, as writing a research paper. She ultimately nodded gratefully to Kirsi’s “authorial monster with twelve-hundred heads” as they addressed flagged errors on her page with speed and efficiency.
ReplyDeleteI have several students who are having a difficult time organizing their information, and Wikipedia forces you to do just that. I mean, when you click on the section that applies most directly to your subject, you are working from an outline. I am not going require my students to write a Wikipedia article, but I do believe that many of them can benefit from visualizing their research paper as a well-organized, well-researched Wikipedia page. The integration of sources, contribution and revision processes are also addressed by Purdy when he says that Wikipedia is a useful model in helping students understand the process of research.
I am encouraging my students to engage in thorough academic research on their personal academic argument assignment. However, I did have them look at the Wikipedia article on sustainability (I admit I was pretty surprised when Kate had us visit that site on that first day). Several of my students found their topics in doing this assignment, and I quickly found that Wikipedia can be an excellent starting point, the pre-reading in your research. It is a good place from which students can begin to engage with these larger academic ideas, “In other words, looking at Wikipedia as a starting place (for ideas, sources, search terms, etc.) shows the importance of engaging with rather than ventriloquizing sources – of viewing sources as means to spur and develop your thinking rather than as means to get someone else to do your thinking for you” (222).