Mark Bauerlein: Authority Figures

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University, a blogger for Brainstorm, and author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008).

As everyone knows by now, the print version of Britannica has ended. "Britannica Yields to the Digital Age," the Los Angeles Times editorial announced. Similar stories appeared in many newspapers, but Britannica itself played down the change. A blog post at the site by Britannica editors stated, "A momentous event? In some ways, yes; the set is, after all, nearly a quarter of a millennium old. But in a larger sense this is just another historical data point in the evolution of human knowledge." They titled the post "Change: It's Okay. Really." No doubt financial factors played a role in the decision, but in explaining it to The New York Times, Britannica's president, Jorge Cauz, invoked digital-age mores: "Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it's much more expansive, and it has multimedia."...

...The old Britannica entry is a static statement, the Wikipedia entry a fluid conversation. As the writer and entrepreneur Seth Godin put it in a blog post, a print entry on Rick Santorum in the former "seeks to end the quest for information. The Wikipedia entry, on the other hand, starts the question. There are more than a hundred outbound links in the page, all designed to help the student explore and discover."...

This is the tyranny of the present and the decline of the sage. The English professor Morris Dickstein co-authored the "American Literature" entry in recent print versions of Britannica, working on it in 1994 and again in 2002. When he first examined the existing entry, he realized it was outdated, "the expression of another time," he told me over the phone last week. But the editors knew that, too, and they relied on Dickstein for the critical judgment and discrimination he'd shown in superb books and essays on 20th-century American literature. "I was writing for a middlebrow readership that looks for authority," he recalled, "an intelligent general audience attracted to knowledge." That made his task more arduous, not less, for "I thought the entry would be engraved in granite, and I spent nine months on it." When asked what it meant if one's words might be revised within a month of their composition, he commented, "We're losing the authority."...