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The new impermanence (slow return)

The March 5 edition of The New Yorker includes a correction that, while probably not unprecedented, is surely still new and troubling. One of the many issues which ended up unread and in recycling apparently housed a long piece on Wikipedia -- that perplexing, troubling, oddly gatekept online encyclopedia which is occasionally helpful -- which quoted a Wikipedia site administrator by the handle Essjay. Essjay was (self?) described in the piece as "a tenured professor of religion at a private university" with "a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law."

Or not. The correction reveals Essjay to be a twenty-four-year-old named Ryan Jordan who holds no advanced degrees and does not teach, but was, regardless, recently hired by Wikipedia's for-profit cousin, Wikia, as a "community manager." The last line in this nearly column-line correction reads, in part, "...Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay's invented persona, 'I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it.'"

One of my quiet rebellions as the adult child of an academic (a phrase I steal with permission from the photographer Alice Wheeler) has been to embrace the work of autodidacts: Henry Miller, Steve Earle, Howard Finster. They speak with a kind of clarity that the academy rubs away. Still, we are all, to some extent, self-taught, particularly those of us who seek to keep learning as the years wear on. One of the shortcomings of the self-taught, however, is that one learns only those pieces of things which come to hand, which one finds interesting, and, sometimes, which fit within closely held convictions.

So Mr. Jordan's resume is of comparatively limited concern, though I tend to wish matters of the law, of theology, and of medicine (in particular) to be adjudicated by the most educated party available. What is fascinating (beyond the peculiar reaction from Mr. Wales), however, is the need to adopt an online persona, and the willingness with which that mask has been embraced.

One of the useful lessons from Henry Miller, and from new journalism (that old thing), was the necessity of presenting the authorial voice as honestly as possible. If I understood the new journalism as something more than confessional self-adulation, it was as an attempt to counterbalance the inherent unfairness of impartiality, for we are all partial and select details in the telling of stories so as to tell the story we think needs telling. Which, in aggregate, if we're lucky, sometimes resembles the objective truth. If there is such a thing.

I am sometimes told that I write just the way I speak, and am always pleased by that. I want the reader to know who I am. Not to stop by for coffee, but to read those words which appear near to my byline with a sense of who I might be, what I believe, what my prejudices are, and what my framework for examination is. I struggle to be as clear about who I am as possible, in no small part because it forces me to be clear with myself about who I am. I do not wish to invent a public someone who is better than I am; I wish to be better.

That is, apparently, a very old paradigm. Reality is a marketing campaign. Who I am is not nearly so important as who I can pretend to be and my failure to grasp this reality is one of many reasons I fit so poorly in Los Angeles during my 16-month exile there in the mid-90s. And our new cultural dismissal of expertise does nothing so much as fuel the know-nothings presently running our government.

Shall we do better, or is the battle already lost and irrelevant?

Addendum: The New York Times is reporting this morning that Essjay is from Louisville, KY, has attended a variety of colleges around the Commonwealth, and has been obliged to resign his position with Wikia.

Posted by grant on March 3, 2007 6:27 PM | Permalink

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