Random thoughts on blogging and science
As ye will all know I am the original Luddite, a sullen, notch’d and cropp’d scrivener who, plucking a quill from a screaming swan, is wont to scratch his quaint thoughts in squirly hieroglyphs on stained papyrus. I am not unaware, however, of the e-thereal life beyond, where brittle egos fritter away their lives in the fabled blogosphere.
Enough whimsy. I don’t think it is old-fashioned to offer a critique of something we take so much for granted that it is now institutional rather than revolutionary. I speak, of course, of the online media. Almost by accident rather than design I have become a member of five social networks (someone sends you a message by e-mail, your piqued natural curiosity makes you sign in to find out what it’s all about). How does anyone find the time to plug into and juggle these various outlets or do they sit at the centre of a giant social-network-web, press one button and transmit every ickle utterance to all locations simultaneously? It reminds me of when people began intense love affairs with their mobiles and started texting each other ad nauseam with such earth-shattering information such as: “I’m on the bus or I am going into the chemist or I have just bought a book...”
All this is harmless enough and occasionally quite amusing. Blogs are another matter as they open up forums for complete strangers to squweam and shout and have verbal tantrums about all and sundry. “Man, proud man, most ignorant of what he is most assur’d.” Quite. Blogs are, on the one hand, arenas for observations and ideas; they are also often places where irony goes to die and where context and intelligence are perfect strangers. Ideas are miniaturised into sound bites whilst some of the threads read like voices yelling into a void. Threads is a good description – one thinks of something that snaps easily. No-one seems to read what others have written. In cyberspace no-one can hear you think. Whereas real conversation in real time with real people is about reacting and thinking on one’s feet and written thoughts can be mulled over, revised and couched in a considerate, perhaps even aesthetically pleasing manner, this, often anonymous heckling from the sidelines, is more an anti-social exercise to see who can shout loudest in an orgy of self-righteous puffing. We are the Wikipedia generation, drinking shallowly from the Pierian spring. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much, wisdom is humble that he knows no more… Because we can talk to thousands, even millions, of people we think we are more important than we are and that our opinions have greater validity.
If you open up web sites you naturally run the risk of abusive gatecrashers. Reading reviews of restaurants that I know intimately I have come across entries that were at best misinformed and, at worst, downright lies - possibly based on malice. I was once told by a restaurateur that two potential customers came to have dinner, but, as there was no-booking policy they were informed that there would be a probable wait of an hour (standard for this deservedly popular establishment). They left immediately and ate in a restaurant just across the road. The next day the restaurateur was surfing the net and, to his amazement, found a review of his place by those selfsame people criticising the food, the wine and the atmosphere. And I have dozens more similar examples of web saboteurs. Freedom of expression does not mean that there shouldn’t be monitoring of potentially actionable statements. A lie is a lie for a’ that and now that the lie can be read by thousands of people until it turns into a viral infection.
Lopsided restaurant reviews are relatively trivial, the ill-informed, racist anti-Obama blogs that are designed to whip up a frenzy of hateful prejudice illustrate how a medium designed to reinforce democratic communication can be hijacked by special interest groups to propagandise their own unpleasant agendas. The medium becomes corrupted by the message. Progress is not the internet as a tool; it is the ability of people to use that tool productively, creatively and ethically.
My disenchantment with opinions on blogs stems from the contributors who claim science (whatever that is) as their private household god. These are the invariable scoffers and inveterate naysayers using bogus methodology to make their point. Recently, I have read sceptical scientific commentary about subjects such as terroir and biodynamics. These contributions normally seek to discredit an entire theory on the basis of a single survey or disprove something on the basis that it is not scientific (i.e. not verifiable). Q.E.D. not! The same scientists who have never dirtied their hands in a vineyard tend to claim that biodynamics has no effect whatsover on the health of the vines and consequent quality of the grapes and the wine. It is not an intelligent argument to create a straw man out of an argument that you don’t like and set fire to it. This creates more heat than light in every sense. Invoking the name of science is not being scientific; being endlessly rational to a fault, reductive, derogatory and non-committal is not a sign of intellect it is irresolution, even vacuous nihilism. We know, after all, so very little about so many things. We cannot make a leaf and yet we make godlike pronouncements about the natural world. Knowledge, as Ambrose Bierce, wrote, is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.
In our efforts to demystify the world around us (which some would say is human nature) we risk becoming wearily cynical. “Sadly, human beings lose their sense of wonder all too early: Keep me away from the wisdom that does not cry, the philosophy does not laugh”. (Kahlil Gibran) Science need not dwell in a straitjacket: it can accommodate intuition, enjoyment and playful uncertainty.