I have a favourite bookstore – BMV on Edward Street in Toronto, right next to The World’s (Allegedly) Biggest Bookstore. It’s packed to the ceiling with used and remaindered books. The prices are reasonable, a steal sometimes, but it’s the unpredictability of the stock that’s inspiring. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.
Last weekend, it was Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell. There were half a dozen copies, new but marked down, by the front desk. I’d never heard of it, but according to the cover blurb, it’s “a blend of hard science, elegant language and thoughtfulness . . . guaranteed to intrigue both scientist and poet.”
A collection of his essays for the New England Journal of Medicine from 1971 to 1973, The Lives of a Cell examines sociology, communications, entomology, technology and biology from the perspective of microbiology, the web of hidden relationships that powers life at its very core. It’s subject-matter chloroform in the wrong hands, but Thomas’s were absolutely the right ones, pecking profound and poetic and soulful.
He’s sometimes prescient in the specifics. His notes on human pheremones, at a time when it hadn’t been proven we emitted them, make the tongue-in-cheek prediction of an industry built on synthesizing them as a chemical come-on. But his great fascinations were language and pure science, which he often compares to the construction of elaborate termite hills — the individuals move pellets of lignum around randomly, until a column begins. Nothing happens until another column arises nearby. Then the collective creates an arch, and a near-endless series of interconnected arches, as if the group has the architecture imprinted in their being, even though as individuals they barely have two neurons to rub together.
Of the scientific process, he wrote: “There is nothing to touch the spectacle. In the midst of what seems a collective derangement of minds in total disorder, with bits of information being scattered about, torn to shreds, disintegrated, reconstituted, engulfed, in a kind of activity that seems as random and agitated as that of bees in a disturbed part of the hive, there suddenly emerges, with the purity of a slow phrase of music, a single new piece of truth about nature.”
I have to wonder what he’d have made of the current state of information development and dissemination on the Internet, specifically the “wiki” ethic, the blogosphere and the interminable circulation of urban myth by e-mail.
Lewis Thomas was born in New York in 1913, went to Princeton and Harvard, and held academic research posts at a series of prestigious institutions before dying in 1993. I can write this with a level of confidence in its veracity because it comes from the bio notes in the book. These facts have been collected and fact-checked and the unlikely errors corrected with each reprinting of the book. (Although it depends which Penguin edition of Graham Greene’s books you read whether the author was born in 1904 or 1905. Conclusively, Greene died in 1991. Death is always more conclusive than birth. But I digress.)
I have confidence in this information because it has been verified by an organization (in this case, a publisher) whose vested interest lies in accuracy and which has the resources at its disposal to ensure it. This is intermediated information — there is a process between transmission and consumption to weed out the unintended or spiteful errors and omissions.
The same thing can’t be said of Wikipedia, the “open source” online encyclopedia, and its ilk. The very democratic principle which makes it admirable in some ways makes it at best suspect as a source of information: anyone can create, amend and append entries, and no weight is given to the expertise or credentials of the contributor, how can a user have the remotest trust that the information is accurate and not simply a lowest-common-denominator belief? It’s telling that in one case where some libelous references were inserted in the bio of a Robert F. Kennedy aid linking him to the JFK assassination — which lay uncorrected for months — the confessed poster said he thought the site was a joke.
Likewise, while blogs can be useful for areas of special interest, and many are of extraordinary value for news and analysis of very weighty matters. But there’s no blogger seal of authenticity. To know whether to trust the content, you must be able to judge the bona fides of the contributor. They can be implied by reputation (Wonkette), inferred by the continuing credibility of the content (Effect Measure) or, in some cases, dependent on the identity of a blogger who is a known value because of offline roles – you would have a good idea of the applicability and intention of information from blogs by Louise Arbour, Linus Torvalds or Britney Spears, and read with the corresponding trust or trepidation.
These are sources of disintermediated information. Immediacy and access are often higher values than truth or comprehensiveness. If it’s true that history is written by the winning side, everybody wants to be a winner.
So the wise user opts for the compromise of self-intermediated information. One does what one can to verify, independently, the facts before acting on or accepting them. I think Thomas would be disappointed – profoundly humane and hopeful for the potential of man to create and communicate as a social species, the notion of having to systematically draw back from the collective intelligence and confirm it by singular judgment would have little appeal for him.
Or so says I, in my disintermediated fashion. Buy the book and read it. Intermediate for yourself. It’s the only way to draw “the purity of a slow phrase of music” from the online cacophony.
Fortunately, Dave Webb is intermediated to some extent by the editor of CDN – Computer Dealer News.
