Digital/Analog Divide in Academia: My Opinion

One of the themes I attempt to draw attention to on Peasant Muse centers around the Digital/Analog divide- a topic that, I know, has been covered ad nauseam by others more qualified than myself.  The reason I straddle such a weary horse and attempt to plow already furrowed fields is that I occasionally see confusion among different groups as to the continued effects this divide brings on all levels of the cultural-production process and transmission.  I was reminded of this seeming confusion upon reading 'Ideas in the Ascendant' by John Swallow in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  

The brief essay makes the following argument: students are increasingly encountering ideas on their own, free from the explicit guidance of traditionally 'certified' knowledge provided by, to only name a few, advisors and reading lists.  This leads to ideas being served a la carte, providing greater opportunities for creativity and individualism- yet, Swallow argues, without proper guidance students will falter in their capacity to judge and manage ideas successfully.  In this way, Higher Education not only has a purpose but a driven mission to provide this guidance to students in an increasingly digital era where 'ideas are ascendent'.

Catalog of 'received authorities'
Photo via Jessamyn West

Swallow uses the anecdote of working with a student of his, named Adam, in attempting to solve a vexing mathematical proof.  Adam rushes in- (the plucky always do) to explain a new idea that would prove to be the breakthrough in the theorem they had both worked on for the past year.  Here Swallow explains the divergent methods of knowledge acquisition between himself and Adam; whereas Swallow consulted sources by 'received authorities', Adam ignored the structure of books handed to him and picked out only the relevant pieces or was far more open to sources of information beyond those considered the most reliable.  Adam represented for Swallow this new generation of students, soon to be scholars, who fill their ideas pallet a la carte.

I believe Swallow has some excellent observations.  From my own experience, I could not imagine being where I am today without the guidance I received/continue to receive from my incredible advisor.  She has been a valuable sounding board for new ideas, questions over readings, debates on the meaning of the past- in short, for helping me develop into a professional scholar.  I've seen other grad students flounder and fail due to lack of a proper relationship with their advisor.  He also states the importance of teaching students to not just accept ideas or arguments without first considering points both for and against.  Conventional wisdom is not enough to satisfy the most basic level of academic skepticism.  On these points, Swallow has my full confidence.

However, without any personal disrespect towards Dr. Swallow, I could not help but feel the other points of the essay were narrowly focused and the general tone somewhat paternalistic.  Here are some examples of what I mean:

I showed Adam a graduate textbook that I thought might be helpful to our project. What did he do? Just as he might click from Web page to Web page, he flipped through the pages, looking for theorems. If a potentially relevant one used terms or concepts he did not know, he learned about them. Adam's intellectual delivery system was need-to-know, just-in-time.

and this:

Consider the principal fears that trouble observers about the ascendancy of ideas. Nicholas G. Carr, who writes about technology and culture, offers two in his recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010). With access to so much, he argues, students will, ironically, know less. And they will lose their ability to think deeply. I would add a third: In navigating a galaxy of ideas, students will be less able to determine "truth," however we define it.

or this quote, towards the end, discussing the need for these new students, using 'just-in-time' intellectual delivery systems, to perform checks on their sources:

Mathematicians have implicit checks against error. Students in other disciplines need such methods as well. 

I think one word sums up all the concerns expressed by Swallow above; Certification.  This is probably one of the most often cited causes among academics for distrust of many things digital.  Swallow worries that when ideas become ascendent, students will fail to evaluate the sources and counterarguments of their a la carte choices.  As they increasingly seek knowledge outside of traditionally 'certified' sources, they will become increasingly distant from the truth.  But this concern comes across, to me, as a reactionary stance against the encroachment of digital knowledge production on the traditional relationships of academia.  As ideas grow in abundance and increase in their circulation, previous analog methods used to 'certify' knowledge- be that journal articles, reading lists, even presence of monographs- need to evolve in order to accommodate this new potential.  It's not that the older methods are defunct- quite the opposite.  However, the older methods are struggling to keep pace with the explosion of knowledge-circulation digital technologies enable.

Analog Lecture Hall, filled (mostly) to capacity.  The Digital flood of information could fill
this room several times over with participants.
Photo via University of Innsbruck

This debate forms the core of a post on the science-themed blog Genomes Unzipped, titled "Why Publish Science in Peer-Reviewed Journals?" Joe Pickrell, who wrote the post, suggests that established methods of scientific article submission, utilizing peer-review, involve inordinate amounts of money, time (both in reviewing and preparing the article for publication), a fair dose or randomness in that anonymous reviewers can have wildly different takes on the same subject and thus judge its applicability to be published accordingly.  Pickrell does not discount the journal process entirely, however:

...journals do perform a service of sorts: they filter papers, ostensibly based on interest to a community, and also ostensibly ensure that the details of an analysis are correct and clear enough to be replicated (though in practice, I doubt these filters work as intended). 

So let’s take this goal–that of filtering papers based on quality, interest to a community, and reproducibility–as the legitimate service provided by peer-reviewed journals. When phrased like this, it’s simply absurd that our way of achieving this goal involves a handful of unaccountable, often anonymous, reviewers and editors, and takes so much time and money. Certainly the best judge of the interest of a paper to the community is, well, the community itself. Ditto for the best judge of the quality and reproducibility of a paper. (Emphasis in the original)

This kind of language- that the community is the best judge of quality and reproducibility- is anathema to the cause championed by Swallow above.  How can the community, Swallow would argue, understand what is relevant and what is not if they only take their ideas a la carte and, thus, distance themselves further from the 'truth'?  Perhaps, in the 'analog' methods of knowledge certification, this claim could hold water.  Yet in the digital realm, much of this claim falls flat.

Speed of Digital Circulation
Photo via Pierre Yves Lacroix

Why?  Circulation of knowledge in digital systems is exponentially greater than that encountered in current and past analog models.  One of the biggest complaints of the peer-review system of today is that it can take up to a year or more to get one's research into a published journal- for some fields, this year wait is more than an eternity as situations change so rapidly.  The supreme reason many academics hold the 'certification' issue so dear is that, in the analog world, an idea, once published, can take years to correct if proven wrong.  Books last a long time- so do journal articles.  It is entirely conceivable that a person can be in a library, perusing the shelves, pick out a volume of history and be totally ignorant as to the errors in argumentation or use of evidence, especially if corrections to the text come in the form of other books or journal articles which may or may not be close, physically on the shelf, to the offending text.  Under the old system, 'certification' via journals and respected authors became not only necessary but invaluable in acting as a filter, allowing only the most rigorously evaluated texts and ideas to enter the somewhat permanent state of published existence.

At once, the digital revolution has done away with this concern.  When I look up journal articles via digital means, I am far more likely to see the 'conversation' surrounding the work, through comments or reviews by others as to the importance or failures of the text at hand, either in the search engine or social network used to query the information.  This is invaluable data, as reading comments and reviews can somewhat alleviate 'reinventing the wheel' in scholarly pursuits.  If one author sees a flaw in the text, their comments can help me save time in going through the same evaluation process myself.  

Swallow might cry foul at this last sentence, stating that this is exactly the problem with 'ideas in the ascendent'.  Yet Swallow failed to acknowledge a key process that occurs with idea sharing over social networks, something that his student Adam no doubt drew upon in his sampling of ideas a la carte- trust in the opinions of ones peers.  If a colleague of mine recommends a text or article, I am far more likely to actually read the text.  Because of the sheer amount of text in the digital aether, networks of trust must arise if any scholar desires to find quality 'signal' amongst so much other 'noise'.  While many attempts have been made to build a platform upon which these networks of trust could support themselves, (most notably arXiv, Faculty of 1000, and to some extent Google Scholar) not one has gained traction across the diverse disciplinary landscape.  

Despite, or because of, the relatively sparse usage, these nascent attempts have already drawn fire from traditional scholars.  Many of the commentators of Pickwell's post highlighted the little to no feedback received on digital published material produced outside of traditional journals.  They also mentioned that current tenure and promotion systems reward publication in high profile, peer-reviewed journals, demonstrating a value beyond that which most see in digital platforms.  The truth is that these new forms are just that- new.  As these platforms stand currently, there is little value being added by the potential of digital conversation because, sadly, there are so few doing any actual commentating.  Yet there is potential there, a potential to allow more ideas to be explored for their own merit and 'certified' by the community of scholars at large.  Pickwell says there is no 'killer app' for filtering, commenting, and circulating the vast potential of scholarly material.  I have to agree, but we both share the opinion that this fact alone does not discount the potential benefit of the process, once properly conceived and executed.

'Certification' isn't limited to Analog
Photo via Matthew S.

Because the real issue with scholarship and the rise of digital natives, what one might term the digital/analog divide in academia, is that 'certification' for the new breed comes from information that is not only applicable but circulated.  Ideas that are shared, re-shared, commented on, modified, used to build new ideas- this is what 'certifies' knowledge in the digital world.  The older methods do a superb job of producing quality, filtered work- but they do so at a painfully slow pace, compared to the speed with which the digital age moves today.  Moving away from the traditional methods of information 'certification' and embracing digital means has the potential to augment, not replace, the current scholarship produced.  Will errors occur in a more open 'digital' method?  Of course- even in today's peer-reviewed world mistakes are made and once sacred arguments come under piercing scrutiny by new thinkers.  Swallow worries that these 'ideas in the ascendent' will lead to students actually learning less, even as they consume more.  I say this ignores feedback mechanisms inherent in the digital circulatory process, that community efforts funneled through a network of trust can produce high-quality results. 

Already I see promising developments and ideas towards building these networks of trust.  The recent debut of Google+ and its use of 'Circles' to define relationships, I believe, will allow greater professional sharing across informal networks.  Another source of inspiration is that of Longreads- the community sourced long-form reading recommendation service.  Users, upon finding a noteworthy read, submit their link with Twitter, including #Longreads in the tweet, to promote the find.  Both Google+ and Longreads demonstrate the ease with which community involvement can be leveraged and utilized to sort through the digital mass and find the gold nuggets within.  While Swallow may worry that students sampling ideas fail to evaluate those ideas, I believe that digital platforms and evaluation systems are developing to address the need- yet there will always be a need to train would-be scholars in critical evaluation of the sources they select.  Adam's 'just-in-time' intellectual delivery system isn't a cause for alarm- it's a call for scholars to evaluate how they will interact and circulate their ideas in a new digital landscape.