Triumphant Return to the Blog: Palin and Wikipedia

So it seems that my "brief" break turned into the entire summer. This is probably normal in the academic calendar of blogging, and it was amplified to a large extent by my exam reading. Well, I'm happy to report that the written portion of my exams are complete, and with the return to school this week, I now have more of an obligation to be tapped in to the world outside my own head. Hopefully regular updates will ensue.

In that spirit, a return to the kinds and quality of scandal that media can generate (and to which media can respond) these days with a word on a story that broke yesterday about Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. No, I'm not referring to her pregnant teenage daughter. I'm referring to the quality of information that is circulating on the net about her. The International Herald Tribune reported yesterday that a single Wikipedia user made massive edits to Palin's Wikipedia profile ... exactly one day before the announcement that she was chosen as McCain's running-mate. The user later revealed him/herself anonymously as a volunteer in the McCain campaign. Noam Cohen reports of this semi-scandal:

While ethically suspect, the idea that a politician would try to shape her Wikipedia article should not come as a surprise. In modern politics, where the struggle is to "define" yourself before your opponent "defines" you, Wikipedia has become an important part of political strategy.

I find this situation incredibly problematic for a number of reasons. Theorists such as Henry Jenkins (in his book Convergence Culture, among other articles) have lauded Wikipedia as a potential source for the democratization of knowledge, the formation of a "knowledge community." Moreover, such genuine communities were unable to be formed without the technologies provided by Wikipedia's Web 2.0 interface, which allows all users to continually edit one another's work in order to create the best possible knowledge. The interface also provides several tools to track any changes made to individual entries over time, tools that some idealists ironically find to be overly authoritarian, potentially limiting the kinds of changes that can be made to knowledge over time.

And yet, this is an instance in which timing is clearly everything. The linked article above reports that another regular happened to be editing the entry at the same time, and was thus able to neutralize some of the more overtly partisan language in the first user's edits. Some might see this as a vindication of the kind of communal construction of knowledge that Jenkins rhapsodizes about, or, at least, as an instance of the kinds of small transformations in the interface that allow it to produce what Alan Liu describes (in a lecture given at Indiana University last Spring semester) as "good enough knowledge."

However, I see it as something of a cautionary tale that the way in which we frame discussions about Wikipedia and other "convergence" media has veered too far in the direction of posing epistemological questions without proper consideration of the larger political commitments embedded in the kinds and qualities of knowledge that we choose to valorize. Along with Rick Johnston, I have argued recently (in an article to be published in a forthcoming volume about South Park and culture) that a consistent fallback position in recent years for conservatives is an appeal to a perfect end justified by a knowledge that "feels" right: what Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness" has the consequence of generating a kind of affective knowledge that is deployed more often than not for culturally and politically conservative ends. The problem here is that so many of us forget that Colbert is not calling for a return to a crude rationalism: his focus is less on "facts" than on how such constructions are mediated in politics, the press, and popular culture in general. In other words, because of the focus on "fact" that inevitably becomes entwined with conversations about "good enough knowledge"--because of the focus on accuracy--we forget to examine how such knowledges--whether "good enough" or even "best"--are deployed culturally for specific political purposes.

This instance shows yet again the lesson the Left should have learned a long time ago: that the political Right is better equipped to deploy knowledge in an effective manner. Certainly, we know that a single user added thirty entirely positive edits to the post (and we know this, ironically, because of those very tools that at first glance seem to be most authoritarian and controlling), but the damage was already done: as the above article reports, there were 2.4 million views of Palin's entry the day her candidacy was announced, and the knowledge that those millions viewed was coded in a politically partisan manner.

While knowledge communities in web environments like Wikipedia may prove a potential forum for contesting the kinds of knowledge that count as "good enough," it also proves a forum over which the political implications of these contested knowledges are also fought. In some ways, this is a reminder of the kind of "control society" that Gilles Deleuze describes, in which the breakdown of a central authority over discourses results in the continual and instantaneous political control over knowledge from multiple vantage points. Rather than becoming "disciplined" into objective fact for specific ideological purposes, knowledge is affectively controlled in a constant ideological contestation. Such control society thus certainly poses the possibilities for the kinds of utopian promise Jenkins sees, but, as in this case, it also offers the possibilities for more indirect and anonymous control in the constant battle to curry ideological favor. There was some corrective in this case, but just imagine if the knowledge under question was something more important than the "definition" of Alaska's governor....