Author: John Rogove
This presentation involves thinking about the connection between the uses of anonymous online sources and information gathering in students’ writing and research, and what it means for them to appropriate a text/author, and how this appropriation (or lack thereof) affects their appropriation of themselves as authors of their own writing, and their own thought. Specifically, I want to explore the specific effect of one very personal exercise I assign them – one that obliges them simultaneously to enter from a first-person perspective into a morally intimate thought experiment proposed by Plato, and to reflect on the moral consequences of anonymity.
Recent generations of students have been weaned on new media technologies, and an immediate, previously undreamed of access to an often undifferentiated mass of information on every conceivable topic. One of the primary tasks of a liberal arts education, above and beyond instilling a basic cultural literacy with some historical depth to it, is to teach students how to sift critically through the elements of even this historical information that they receive: to differentiate a good argument from a bad one, a worthy end from an unworthy one, or judgments of fact from judgments of value. The omnipresence, and seeming omniscience, of the internet can tempt students to believe they have short-circuited or circumvented the necessarily arduous acquisition of these skills. Michael Friedman once quipped that “Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires,[1] ”. In a sense, the internet’s omnipresence – especially in the lives of those who’ve never known, or had to think and discover in, a world without it – has made, despite or perhaps because of the immediacy and the totality of the information it makes available, the difference between wisdom or understanding and mere bits of information even more obscure. While I forbid computer use in class, its absolute accessibility and totalizing presence outside the classroom only makes the internet’s tidal-wave of undifferentiated information all the more tempting a replacement for actual thinking, or at least for the process of sifting and active differentiation inherent to the research process.
Over the course of the semester, my Social Foundations students are assigned a short 1500 word paper at mid-term, a long 2000-3000 word paper at term’s end, and a series of targeted short writing assignments which take the form either of personal reflections on the reading or of in class short-essay quizzes on the reading. In the case of their papers, I’ve had to figure out strategies for dealing with the issue of source-citation and of explaining – and indeed of figuring for myself – what constitutes an appropriate source. While overcoming my knee-jerk Classicist’s skepticism of any Internet source whatsoever, I decided to draw an explicit line at the use of Wikipedia as a source, forbidding its citation but not its use; that is, forbidding its presentation as an exclusive epistemic authority but not its use as a tool amongst others to discover other sources – the sources on which the collaborative encyclopedia itself relies, albeit without any methodological control. I usually advise my students to see Wikipedia as having more or less the same epistemic authority as a guy in a bar: while whatever he’s shooting his mouth off to you about might very well be true or contain valuable information, it’s still best not to let the epistemic buck stop with him, but to verify for yourself!
Meanwhile, I’ve tried to observe the influence of the use of the Internet as a source on students’ writing – their tendency simply to search, more or less randomly, for information online. This information usually ends up being used indiscriminately, or rather, used and selected according only to the Google search-engine’s algorithm for classing sites according to popularity, which is obviously a circular criterion for evaluating the significance, relevance or reliability of information. But moreover, it seems to work at cross-purpose to my goal in SF of inciting students to have a personal encounter with texts and authors that have been chosen for their very singular voice and contribution. The undifferentiated, authorless anonymity of a Wikipedia page – where not only is no-one epistemically responsible and can no-one be held to account, but where there is no work, in which something is conveyed through a singular, identifiable style as well as through a singular, identifiable argument – seems to have repercussions for the students’ own ability to develop, in their writing, their own style and their own arguments, for which they can be held to account, and through which they can put their own singular imprint on the world. The critical, mirroring effect, which for me is a sign of a successful read-encounter-with and written-appropriation-of a text, is compromised by the anonymity of the undifferentiated source.
With these issues in mind,I’ve chosen here to present one of the written assignments I give my students in the middle of the Fall semester, in which I ask them to try to imagine what they would likely do with the powers of invisibility and anonymity granted by the Ring of Gyges. The story of this ring appears in two of the texts we read, both in Herodotus’ History and in Plato’s Republic, and appears, with important variations according to the argument and world-view of each author, as both a parable and a thought-experiment concerning the effects that anonymity has on our sense of responsibility and moral self-ownership. The assignment’s purpose is to incite a fusion between the author’s purpose in proposing the thought-experiment and the students’ understanding of themselves not just as readers and as writers/thinkers, but also as moral subjects. With it, I hope to encourage them to think about both writing and face-to-face engagement with sources as ways of leaving a visible, accountable trace of themselves on a page, or of understanding how the very act of writing could construct a mirror that would allow them to see themselves in a text. Overall, the aim of the assignment is to examine the connection between two phenomena: 1) students’ ability to make the leap from textual analysis to an understanding of their own personal experiences and 2) the influence of Internet in all its forms, but primarily as an information source, on this process.
The assignment is meant to be a concrete exploration of the a single idea presented differently in two of the texts we read in class. In Herodotus’ History, Gyges, the loyal servant of Candaules, king of Lydia, is presented as the allegorical embodiment of blind obedience to law and tradition through his horrified resistance to his master’s request to look upon the queen naked. As such, he is the antithesis to Herodotus himself who, not content to take his countrymen’s word for it that his own laws are the best (as opposed to Gyges, who insists that he is content to believe his king’s word that the queen is the most beautiful), sets out on his voyage to lead his own proto-philosophical “inquiry” (historia) in order to “see for himself”. Once the king contrives to force Gyges to commit this transgression of the law by rendering him “invisible” to the queen in their bedroom closet, the queen in turn forces Gyges to kill the king in his sleep and to seize the kingship for himself. Plato takes up this same story at the beginning of book 2 of the Republic and uses it as the pretext for the thought-experiment proposed by Glaucon, meant to answer the question as to whether we obey the law because it is inherently good to do so, or whether we merely do so under constraint, fearing punishment or for our reputation. Here, Gyges is a humble shepherd who, by chancing upon a ring that gives him the power to become invisible at will and thus escape all accountability for his actions, is able to do as he pleases with absolute worldly impunity, and kills the king, marries the queen, and becomes tyrant himself. Glaucon presents this as a thought-experiment allowing for an almost chemical-like separation (like the separation of elements directly provoked by an experimenter) of morality from its consequences, and puts it to Socrates to prove that even were we able to commit evil with impunity, it would still be in our interest to be good. The remaining eight books of the Republic consist in Socrates’ sustained answer to this challenge, and a proper comprehension of the work requires that the reader understand the stakes set up by this thought-experiment.
The assignment itself is simple, and consists in asking the students to carry out the thought-experiment themselves, from a first-person perspective. While most of what the students say they would do with the power of invisibility is rather silly (“stealing designer clothes”, “sneaking into clubs”), a few are disarmingly honest (“eavesdropping on a love-interest to find out what s/he thinks of me”), but the point is to incite them to get inside the text and understand its stakes from this intimately first-person perspective; and while the immediate results of the assignment itself were not overwhelmingly interesting, the exercise seemed to bear longer-term fruit, especially in their final, long papers.
One example in particular stands out: it was precisely the student whose assignment had been the most disarmingly honest who at the last minute had decided to change their paper-topic to “the purpose of the Ring of Gyges”. The paper wasn’t simply the best that semester, it also exhibited a complex and multilayered grasp on both the inner-workings of Plato’s thought-experiment and the end to which it is put in the text of the Republic. It displayed an intimate understanding of the moral stakes of the experiment and of the way in which its results condition the rest of Socrates’ argument, leading up to the very possibility of a just society and of a philosopher-king. I could see, as I read the paper, the conceptual, hypothetical variation of a theme that is the methodological basis of such experiments carefully carried out step by step until it organically reached its conclusion. I can honestly say it is one of those rare times that I actually got deep pleasure out of reading a paper, and that it was so clear and thoughtful that I actually felt like I learned something by reading it – as if the active re-creation of Plato’s thought-experiment, as opposed to its mere description or parroting, helped me to understand it myself on a deeper level. The paper exposed more of those facets that can never be exhausted in a great text or idea and whose living relevance and depth can be, not simply re-discovered, but re-activated with each generation’s personal reading and appropriation of it. The student had previously told me that they were hesitating between pursuing business and law; upon reading the paper I told them that they’d exemplified precisely the type of detailed, sensitive and tenacious hypothetical thinking that would make them an ideal lawyer, and encouraged them to pursue this path.
This and other papers, whose stark improvement on the students’ mid-semester papers I attribute in part at least to this exercise, seemed to embody the transition from the sort of robotic, mental outsourcing of thinking typified by recourse to the anonymity and unaccountability of Wikipedia, which at best might give a description of a text, concept, argument or series of facts but which the student receives uncritically (and, indeed, uncriticizably) from without, to the personal, intimate appropriation of a text, argument or concept – to going, like Herodotus or Socrates, and “seeing for themselves”: experiencing the concept first hand, with their own mind’s eye, and thus “getting” what it might mean for them and for their own lives.
[1] New York Times, June 29 2003.