Comments on: Stanley Fish, Wikipedia and My Rotten Soul

By: bets

bets — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:25:18 +0000

I think the feeling of super-authority comes from being a customer. After all, readers are customers, whether we’re buying the NYT, a novel, or researching on wikipedia. It’s in our customer-nature to “shop wisely.” Sometimes that means finding errors and investigating connections that maybe shouldn’t be there. No customer likes to be had.

By: michaele

michaele — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:00:50 +0000

I see it all the time in student papers – but there, the causal arrows face the other direction.

By: denniscass

denniscass — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:24:56 +0000

Lars is on to something. It reminds me of Farhad Manjoo’s book TRUE ENOUGH: Living in a Post-Fact Society (on order but I have read excerpts).

What I experienced was not professional jealousy, but a kind of internet-induced out-of-body experience where through linking I felt like some kind of super-authority.

After all, I’d been doing “research” right?

By: Lars

Lars — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:54:13 +0000

Had one just a couple weeks ago, in the middle of McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.” It occurred to me that while everything in the novel feels very historically accurate, it could also be entirely made up and I’d never know the difference. It’s not like I’m going to fact-check it. This thought percolates for a while, and then I think, hey, maybe he just made up all these people and events and details, you know, like a fiction writer might do. Of course, later I learned that the entire novel was obsessively researched and that nearly every page includes a corroborating historical fact or specific geographical reference.

By: bets

bets — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:33:01 +0000

It’s tough, sometimes, to see the more successful up the ladder from you. I have a friend who was a pro soccer player. I learned from him first that brilliance is 99% hard work.

By: Lindsay Price

Lindsay Price — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:00:05 +0000

It’s always more interesting to think of the distinguished as lazy or something less than distinguished. Then they might be on our level…