The Encyclopaedia Britannica's going out of print marks triumph of information on tap, never mind reliability
By Clarissa Oon, The Sunday Times, 18 Mar 2012
Imagine a world where half-truths or falsehoods masquerade as fact, and bloggers have more intellectual clout than PhD-decorated academics. Where grown men and women spend all their time in virtual reality caves, feeding each other's brand of bigotry through an incessant exchange of one-liners and news sound bites.
What might have been the premise of a science fiction novel 10 years ago is now only a slightly far-fetched version of the status quo - given how Google, Wikipedia and Facebook have changed the way we read and process information, and upended the premium placed on accuracy and scholarship.
The announcement last week that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print hammered yet another nail into the coffin of traditional knowledge-gathering.
Mind you, I do not have a personal attachment to the 32-volume, leather-bound gold standard of all encyclopedias. While I grew up at a time when encyclopedias were seen as the ultimate reference sources, the Britannica was always out of my family's reach with its $1,000-plus price tag.
At home, I had a cheap children's encyclopedia called The Great Book Of Knowledge, which was fine for my purposes. As a child, I read the historical entries so often that I could remember all the kings and queens of England and dynasties of China in chronological order, while steering well clear of topics such as 'algebra' and 'photosynthesis'.
(You could say my encyclopedia-reading habits were a harbinger of my educational path; I did well in the humanities but performed abysmally in mathematics and the sciences.)
Sure, there was always something slightly snooty about the Britannica, found in the homes of the well-heeled and in the best school and public libraries.
But what cannot be denied is the authoritativeness of the 244-year-old encyclopedia, meticulously edited and written by teams of scholars. It has an intellectual density that demands you read an entire entry carefully, instead of skimming through or zooming in on selective facts.
The Internet, however, conditions users to expect information on tap and free of charge, whether reliable or not.
It was only a matter of time before free online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia - constantly updated by legions of anonymous contributors - sounded the death knell for printed tomes such as Britannica, which has seen sales in the United States dwindle from 120,000 sets in 1990 to 8,000 for the latest 2010 edition. It will now only be available online, at a subscription fee of US$70 (S$88).
Political scientist Benedict Anderson once famously described the daily act of reading a newspaper as creating 'imagined communities', bound by the shared content.
If print creates discrete communities, the Internet is constantly fracturing and reconfiguring them because users do not read in a linear fashion but wander haphazardly through a sea of hyperlinks.
In short, if there is a party going on, the host is missing, guests are moving in and out of the room and everyone is just doing his own thing.
The absence of hierarchy and deference inherent in the online medium often translates into a certain anti-intellectualism, New York Times columnist David Brooks noted two years ago in a penetrating look at the differences between the literary world and the Internet.
Wrote Brooks: 'The Internet helps you become well informed - knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends.
'But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer's world.'
Ideally, one should be able to toggle between the two modes of learning - the quick snapshots offered by the Internet and the more immersive experience offered by print reading.
The problem is that the Internet is much too seductive for most of us who rely on it for work and play on a daily basis. The instant gratification it offers whittles away our capacity to absorb longer, weightier material that is best read in book form, rather than off a screen, with a myriad other distractions such as e-mail and YouTube videos on the side.
My husband and I spend far less time reading long-form fiction or non-fiction than we did three years ago, before smartphones, iPads and tablets came into our lives.
If we are succumbing, what more digital natives like our daughter, who as soon as she learnt how to walk at 13 months, started making a grab for our smartphones. Now, two months later, she fingers the touch screen like a pro, and goes into ferocious meltdowns when denied her fix of Japanese cartoons on the tablet.
We are fighting the good fight, of course. We read cardboard books aloud to her, and she enjoys them enough to have her favourites.
Much later on, we will probably get a subscription to Britannica Online, so that she will at least have a concept of an accurate and scholarly reference source. Let's hope that the Britannica team does not itself compromise on standards and give in to the dark side.
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