I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting27; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
Today’s online writing meets Socrates halfway. It’s printish, but with a roiling culture of oral debate attached. Once something interesting or provocative is published—from a newspaper article to a book review to a tweet to a photo—the conversation begins, and goes on, often ad infinitum, and even the original authors can dive in to defend and extend their writing.
The truth is, of course, that knowledge has always been created via conversation, argument, and consensus. It’s just that for the last century of industrial-age publishing, that process was mostly hidden from view. When I write a feature for a traditional print publication like Wired or The New York Times, it involves scores of conversations, conducted through e-mail and on the phone. The editors and I have to agree upon what the article will be about; as they edit the completed piece, the editors and fact-checkers will fix mistakes and we’ll debate whether my paraphrase of an interviewee’s point of view is too terse or glib. By the time we’re done, we’ll have generated a conversation about the article that’s at least as long as the article itself (and probably far longer if you transcribed our phone calls). The same thing happens with every book, documentary, or scientific paper—but because we don’t see the sausage being made, we in the audience often forget that most information is forged in debate. I often wish traditional publishers let their audience see the process. I suspect readers would be intrigued by how magazine fact-checkers improve my columns by challenging me on points of fact, and they’d understand more about why material gets left out of a piece—or left in it.
Wikipedia has already largely moved past its period of deep suspicion,28 when most academics and journalists regarded it as utterly untrustworthy. Ever since the 2005 story in Nature that found Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica to have fairly similar error rates (four errors per article versus three, respectively), many critics now grudgingly accept Wikipedia as “a great place to start your research, and the worst place to end it.” Wikipedia’s reliability varies heavily across the site, of course. Generally, articles with large and active communities of contributors are more accurate and complete than more marginal ones. And quality varies by subject matter; a study commissioned by the Wikipedia Foundation itself found that in the social sciences and humanities, the site is 10 to 16 percent less accurate than some expert sources.
But as the author David Weinberger points out,29 the deeper value of Wikipedia is that it makes transparent the arguments that go into the creation of any article: click on the “talk” page and you’ll see the passionate, erudite conversations between Wikipedians as they hash out an item. Wikipedia’s process, Weinberger points out, is a part of its product, arguably an indispensable part. Whereas the authority of traditional publishing relies on expertise—trust us because our authors are vetted by our experience, their credentials, or the marketplace—conversational media gains authority by revealing its mechanics. James Bridle, a British writer, artist, and publisher, made this point neatly when he took the entire text of every edit of Wikipedia’s much-disputed entry on the Iraq War during a five-year period and printed it as a set of twelve hardcover books. At nearly seven thousand pages, it was as long as an encyclopedia itself. The point, Bridle wrote, was to make visible just how much debate goes into the creation of a factual record: “This is historiography.30 This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.” Public thinking is messy, but so is knowledge.
I’m not suggesting here, as have some digital utopians (and dystopians), that traditional “expert” forms of thinking and publishing are obsolete, and that expertise will corrode as the howling hive mind takes over. Quite the opposite. I work in print journalism, and now in print books, because the “typographical fixity” of paper31—to use Elizabeth Eisenstein’s lovely phrase—is a superb tool for focusing the mind. Constraints can impose creativity and rigor. When I have only six hundred words in a magazine column to make my point, I’m forced to make decisions about what I’m willing to commit to print. Slowing down also gives you time to consult a ton of sources and intuit hopefully interesting connections among them. The sheer glacial nature of the enterprise—spending years researching a book and writing it—is a cognitive strength, a gift that industrial processes gave to civilization. It helps one escape the speed loop of the digital conversation, where it’s easy to fall prey to what psychologists call recency:32 Whatever’s happening right now feels like the most memorable thing, so responding right now feels even more urgent. (This is a problem borrowed from face-to-face conversation: You won’t find a lot of half-hour-long, thoughtful pauses in coffeehouse debates either.) And while traditional “expert” media are going to evolve in form and style, I doubt they’re going to vanish, contrary to some of the current hand-wringing and gloating over that prospect. Business models for traditional reportage might be foundering, but interest is not: one analysis by HP Labs33 looked at Twitter’s “trending topics” and found that a majority of the most retweeted sources were mainstream news organizations like CNN, The New York Times, and Reuters.
The truth is that old and new modes of thinking aren’t mutually exclusive. Knowing when to shift between public and private thinking—when to blast an idea online, when to let it slow bake—is a crucial new skill: cognitive diversity. When I get blocked while typing away at a project on my computer, I grab a pencil and paper, so I can use a tactile, swoopy, this-connects-to-that style of writing to unclog my brain. Once an idea is really flowing on paper, I often need to shift to the computer, so my seventy-words-per-minute typing and on-tap Google access can help me move swiftly before I lose my train of thought.
Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky describes human smarts34 as stemming from the various ways our brains will tackle a problem; we’ll simultaneously throw logic, emotion, metaphor, and crazy associative thinking at it. This works with artificial thinking tools, too. Spent too much time babbling online? Go find a quiet corner and read. Spent a ton of time working quietly alone? Go bang your ideas against other people online.
Ethan Hein is a musician who lives not far from me in Brooklyn. He teaches music and produces songs and soundtracks for indie movies and off-Broadway shows.
But most people know him as a guy who answers questions.
Tons of them. From strangers.
Hein is an enthusiastic poster on Quora, one of the current crop of question-answering sites: anyone can show up and ask a question, and anyone can answer. Hein had long been an online extrovert, blogging about music and tweeting. But he could also be, like many of us, lazy about writing. “I was always a half-assed journal keeper,” he tells me. “It was like, I should write something—wait a minute, what’s on TV?” But in early 2011 he stumbled upon Quora and found the questions perversely stimulating. (Question: “What does the human brain find exciting about syncopated rhythm and breakbeats?” Hein’s answer began: “Predictable unpredictability. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine …”) Other times, he chimed in on everything from neuroscience and atheism to “What is it like to sleep in the middle of a forest?” (A: “Sleeping in the woods gratifies our biophilia.”) Within a year, he was hooked.
“I will happily shuffle through the unanswered questions as a form of entertainment,” Hein says. “My wife is kind of worried about me. But I’m like, ‘Look, I’d be using this time to play