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• 1 2013-07-22T10:34:38-07:00 Dana Montello Journal #6 5 In which we explore wikipedia and knowledge spaces plain 2013-07-22T10:50:09-07:00 Lévy's view that we are entering a new era—an era where the knowledge space subsumes or modifies to some extent all previous spaces—is couched in cautious terms to complement the radical and ambitious prediction of the future. I can't fault him doing as constructing any new era and saying that we are in it invites a fair amount of skepticism. He did this in 1997, when internet Utopianism was giving way to the mainstay of commercial interest, or as I like to think: when the World Wide Web became the Internet. The idea that soon our knowledge credentials and intellectual work will be paramount for our identity in the same way that our names, addresses, and professions are now is dubious. The prior three are necessary for economic activity while our intellectual work provides very little economic compensation for the vast majority of us. While the advent of things like Wikipedia could be the beginnings of a knowledge space, it presents several problems that ensures that the commodity space is still the dominate format. First, without financial compensation, few can claim it as their dominant

  activity, and thus their identity. While we use our names all day, we live at our house all of the time, and our profession usually has us at least half of our conscious time, most people participate in the knowledge space only by a limited amount, usually by necessity. If we were to shift over to an economic system of abundance (where scarce resources are a thing of the past and most people can participate in leisure for a good 6 hours of every day), this could change. The vast majority of humanity is slaving away in professions, at addresses, barely known by names. The second issue is what Rozensweig draws attention to: the citationless nature of the future knowledge space. In lieu of what we know (impossible to put on a resumé), credentialing is our way of incorporating our knowledge into our public identity. With copyright-less, citation-less knowledge source, participation is can rarely give the verified ego the respect that people in the field desire. The identity can only cling to past forms of the knowledge space which has our names emblazoned on dissertations and books. A college will not hire you based upon your contributions to an online database. This is not to say that they are inferior (I agree with Rozensweig that they are the future of codified knowledge), but they deny the continual need for credit that is the heart of identity and especially academic personality. Finally, this doesn't take into account White's criticisms of consumer versus user. Participating in this knowledge space is controlled by the format and those that provide the space—the same people who controlled the previous methods of discourse. While Wikipedia users toil away, they do so in a format that values a false "Neutral Point of View" not because the user agrees, but because Wikipedia owns the discourse. Most contributors work for free, never receiving financial compensation while others use their labor for economic endeavors like creating text books. The culture makes this expected, and though it values free expression, it also diminishes the author's work to where free is the expected valuation of it.

  This is not to say that Lévy's argument is wrong; I do believe we're heading into a knowledge space. Without an alternation of how we view intellectual labor for the masses, however, we can't leave the old commodity space behind.