(2017-10-23) Derakhshan Wikipedias Fate Shows How Social Media Endangers Knowledge

Hossein Derakhshan: Wikipedia's Fate Shows How Social Media Endangers Knowledge

This has nothing to do with money.

That happy news masks a more concerning problem—a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website

That trend toward rationality and enlightenment was endangered long before the advent of the Internet. As Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book Entertaining Ourselves to Death, the rise of television (TV) introduced not just a new medium but a new discourse: a gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn meant a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment.

At first, the Internet seemed to push against this trend. When it emerged towards the end of the 80s as a purely text-based medium, it was seen as a tool to pursue knowledge, not pleasure

Wikipedia was a fruit of this garden. So was Google search and its text-based advertising model. And so were blogs, which valued text, hypertext (links), knowledge, and literature. They effectively democratized the ability to contribute to the global corpus of knowledge. For more than a decade, the web created an alternative space that threatened television’s grip on society.

Social Media, though, have since colonized the web for television’s values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals—‘like’ buttons—over rational ones.