Architecures of Knowledge

I am occasionally asked whether or not it's a good idea to go to grad school. As a matter of objective facts, including salary and career prospects, it's hard to conclude that it is, or could be. If you go to graduate school in the social sciences or the humanities, you will be earning a very small amount of money for a (potentially) very long period of time, in order to become one of the 200+ who will be applying for whatever jobs there might be; four or five years of bouncing around temporary gigs and assembling what used to be a tenure-worthy cv will get your foot in the door. The sciences are better, to the extent that the funding is better and the programs (usually) are shorter. But the successful track to running a lab in, say, the biological sciences, requires at least one and more typically two post-docs, each of three to five years, much of which time will be devoted to writing grants and writing progress reports. Also there are fewer jobs than there were. Also the federal funding which provides for most basic science research is in jeopardy. Watching my friends in the sciences collectively realize this has been disciplinary schadenfreude only matched by watching them write their dissertations, which they initially cannot believe would take more than a couple weeks to pull together.

If I am asked, instead, whether I regret going to grad school, the answer has to be 'no': I met a number of interesting people, including my wife, got the chance to spend time reading, thinking, and writing about much of the stuff most interesting to me, and have an endless supply of anecdotes from my various experiences with teaching and administration.

The actual skill I gained that I think most worthwhile is in the architecture of knowledge. Research in the social sciences and the humanities is a matter of knowing how to phrase a question, and how to look for the answer. This gives me the ability to do astonishing things, like search for the universe of books and articles on a topic and identify which ones might be helpful; the ability to confirm that suspicion on approximately five minutes of reading, sometimes less; and find and digest what's useful in those results in a very limited amount of time. As it turns out, this is a useful skill in all parts of life: how do I know if this cookbook will be any good before I order it? How do I determine which of these potential pieces of furniture is the best value? How do I determine the best way to get from A to B in Durham's maze of streets? Figuring out where you are in a body of knowledge, analyzing what you find, synthesizing it into useable form: all of these make life a lot easier.

Explaining this to, say, undergraduates is quite difficult. On average, they're content to google their way to the answers to questions, accept wikipedia as a neutral and authoritative source, do the minimum amount of research for the assignment. I used to intentionally assign students to find more sources for a paper than were required for the final product, because you could see people prepared to ride or die with the first three, or five, or however many things they found. Discriminations of quality and usefulness were generally lost on them.

Which brings me to this commercial for google:



I think it's supposed to indicate to us how amazing google is at recognizing and answering our questions. A closer look at the result:

Google's great wisdom points us to an answer given by, italics required, mobile.omgfacts.com. Now, maybe omgfacts is a really great, reputable website; maybe their answer is correct. None of that should give any confidence at all that google will return a decent search result. If you're leaving the results of your search for an answer to google, or Amazon, or Facebook, or the local library search engine, you will get the results that someone else thinks best, and that someone is designing a search algorithm with goals that are unknown but not necessarily your own. If you don't know how to tell when an answer is wrong, how will you ever know that it's wrong?

On Lists, and the Popularity Thereof

The internet is filled with lists. Leaving aside economic motives for producing web content that people will find objectionable, good-faith lists have to embody two related requirements: they position the writer within the ranks of people who follow whatever is being listed, and they serve as a signal to people who have no familiarity with the genre what those in-the-know consider to be worthwhile. Lists on Gawker sites exist to start arguments. Lists on Buzzfeed or The Toast exist to make the reader feel hip should they get all the references. Pitchfork's lists are good exercises in both functions: within a community, they signal the willingness to accept or reject the hype for different musicians; outside that community, they function as a comprehensive guide to what is good in certain genres of hipster-approved music. Book rankings, like Modern Library's 20th Century Novels list, or film rankings, like those of AFI or Sight and Sound, are exercises in canon-making, but allow people to make certain claims about themselves based on where they disagree with the ranking.*

Given these two functions, this ranking of Sonic Youth albums is quite odd. The purpose of the list is, as the author announces it, to establish his credibility as a superfan, hip and knowledgable.** If he did not expressly announce this, making Daydream Nation--the generally agreed best Sonic Youth album--#6. One does not bury an obvious #1 unless Making A Statement. The list, however, culminates with Dirty, which contains five or six of Sonic Youth's most accessible, poppy songs. In other terms: it's like making a list that situates itself as bold and contrarian by asserting II to be the best Led Zeppelin album, not IV, or that Steven Spielberg the best director--neither implausible nor original.


*Let me tell you sometime about my feelings on The Best Years of Our Lives, or, say, Faulkner.

**It is also to make the bizarre argument that Sonic Youth is best when it's Thurston Moore's band which, given Moore's recent shredding of the principles he built his stardom around, is an odd choice, to say the least.

An Ur-Theory of the Internet

The internet is not cool. There is nothing cool about it.

Facebook was cool, until it was opened to everyone, thus defeating its purpose as a graphical representation of the people college students and graduates know (ie a facebook); less cool until it allowed pictures to be tagged and thus stopped people from putting photos on Facebook;* and not at all cool as the repository for people's bumper sticker-length political musings, meme images that you would have been embarrassed to receive as attachments in an email from your dad 15 years ago, and attempts to position yourself as someone who reads the news.

Twitter was never cool, as evidenced by the ease with which "Tomorrow is [whatever day tomorrow is]" trends. It has also misguidedly convinced people that their thoughts are best expressed in 140-character bursts. Being inarticulate is not cool, especially if you are articulate.**

The rest of the internet is, more or less, television in the 1980s: wildly popular, with content ranging from boring to insulting, depending on one's preferences. 'This was a mildly amusing use of five minutes' is an argument advanced in favor of well-regarded content. What matters is advertising, and thus web publishing is based around those things that drive pageviews, and increase both the length of time spent interacting and the intensity of that interaction. Thus lists, listicles, nostalgia bait, advice columns--most of which now intentionally lead off with the most sensational questions, oral histories and interviews that are barely-edited interview transcripts, and posts that flatter or outrage the biases of that site's audience.

Mgoblog is my favorite site on the internet because it runs like a bespoke outfit: they clearly have goals about when to post new content, and attempt a set schedule week-to-week, and generally fail to do either. Brian writes his game column and publishes it when it's done. Ideally, that's at noon on Mondays, but if it's done at 11:00, it goes up at 11:00. If it's not done until 2:00, it goes up at 2:00. There's very little that feels that unforced anymore, though it certainly helps if you're already the largest single-team college sports blog.

Like tv in the 1980s, there are exceptions, both of the "things that are good considering what else is out there" and "things that are objectively good" variety, but they are rare.


*I cannot be the only one whose friends have a lot of pictures from 2006-2008 or so, and very few after. Or, at least, very few until they start having babies.

**I know many interesting people on twitter, and almost exclusively through twitter, and this is intended as no slight on them. I am just convinced that however interesting they are on twitter, they're more interesting in longer form.