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ADVICE AND DISSENT
This section features discussions on education, learning and teaching, and language with particular focus on English. The primary subjects to be taken up here are notable advocacies and contrary viewpoints in these disciplines and their allied fields. Our primary aim is to clarify matters and issues of importance to language and learning, provide intelligent and useful instruction, promote rational and critical thinking, and enhance the individual’s overall capacity for discernment.
Our flaming love-hate affair with Wikipedia and e-mail
The debate about its reliability as a source of information goes on, but meanwhile, Wikipedia has undoubtedly become one of the most tremendously useful social innovations the world has ever seen. And yet, as Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University and a contributing editor to Foreign Policy, points out in an article in the November-December 2009 issue of the Boston Review, nobody would have bet on Wikipedia not more than a decade ago to become “a highly functioning, über-productive community that voluntarily creates usable (and frequently used) knowledge for others.”
Now a Wikipedia insider who joined the fledgling, two-year-old organization in 2003 has come up with a book, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. Andrew Lih, who became one of Wikipedia’s administrators only a few months after his hiring, recounts and explains the website’s prodigious growth and development since it started on its noble mission to democratize access to knowledge. It is a story that Morozov describes in his review of the book as “strikingly readable and largely free of jargon.”
Read Evgeny Morozov’s “Edit This Page: Is it the End of Wikipedia” now!
A very timely companion reading to The Wikipedia Revolution is “Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out,” an article written for the October 22, 2009 issue of The New York Times by English professor Ben Yagoda of the University of Delaware. Reviewing John Freeman’s book, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, Yagoda finds fault with its author for ignoring the good and useful features of e-mail “in his zeal to expose e-mail’s dark side.”
In defense of e-mail, Yagoda says: “E-mail in particular and online writing in general have their well-known flaws and limitations, but they have also served as cleansing agents for prose, much as journalistic writing did early in the 20th century. That is, while they may disinhibit inappropriate declarations, they also inhibit dull, abstract wordiness.”
Read Ben Yagoda’s “Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out” now!
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