The Scholarship Economy

tl;dr

If you wanted to create anti-scholarship Internet slang, there might be nothing better. I remember the first time I encountered it from someone I won’t name as he delivered a “hot take” reaction to a long and nuanced essay, excusing his off-base, knee-jerk reaction with a cavalier “tl;dr”?

Of course, this individual had a PhD.

The information economy rewards short-form, transitory, and extreme information and brazen exchanges — the exact opposite of what makes scholarship function and different.

It has also incentivized boasts of quantity everywhere, as if more scholarly-adjacent information is equivalent to actual scholarship. Just last week, a Swedish AI company boasted about getting 20 million papers from a variety of sources for a licensing-query transactional deal of some kind. It’s a dog’s dinner of publishing portfolios, spanning physics, biomedicine, humanities, and a moist bowl of other licensed content from a secondary licensing source.

• 20 million articles is better because it’s more, of course.

I’ve discussed how LLMs make scholarship impossible. Some say citations can be generated by LLMs, but are these reliable, repeatable, accurate, or exclusionary? If you didn’t do the work, can you defend it? If you didn’t place the citation, can you attest to its quality and relevance? You can’t because the systems are too opaque, changeable, and unpredictable. Normal scholarly record functions — correction, amendation, retraction — are repelled by the way these systems are constructed and maintained.

Stability and referentiality (context, landmarking, sharing reliably) are some of the keys to scholarship. Our local paper sat on the table the other night, and I regarded it calmly, noting that it would be there in a stable form in five minutes, in an hour, or the next day. I could tell someone with another copy to look at Page 5, and we would have the same Page 5. I could look at it years later, and Page 5 would be the same. Could I do the same with LinkedIn? My search engine? An online news site?

Without citability, stability, and certainty, scholarship isn’t possible.

Nicholas Carr discusses the necessity of an “epistemic architecture” in his book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. Smartly calling back to early sociological research, he mentions how Charles Cooley saw more than a century ago that:

. . . technologies shape the social mind by changing the way influence flows and associations form among people. . . . By means of its media a society promotes values and sets norms, allocates praise and censure, promulgates models of conduct and character, motivates and coordinates action, and establishes hierarchies and other structures of power and status.

Our political discourse is now so poisoned by social media that civil servants are persecuted and threatened with death. Our scientific discourse is now so misaligned with reality that we are seeing diseases causing states of emergency to be declared in the US despite proven methods for keeping them at bay. We don’t even know who is using our communication environment — friend or foe?

In the current communication environment, Carr notes four forces:

1. Content collapses, as analog media’s regulatory regime and epistemic architecture give way to digitization’s totalizing advance.
2. Media technology extends beyond its traditional transport function to assume an editorial role, automating judgments about the relevance and quality of information.
3. People streamline their writing and reading to optimize their efficiency as transceivers of messages on a high-speed communication network.
4. Social media encourages unchecked self-expression, greatly expanding the platforms’ supply of content but producing feelings of envy, enmity, and claustrophobia among individuals.

As he writes:

. . . media efficiency, when pushed to an extreme, so accelerates the flow of information that people no longer have the luxury of careful reading, methodological evaluation, and contemplative inquiry.

tl;dr — all 20 million articles chopped up into some sort of Swedish meatball.

The scholarly economy worked well for so long because there was a carefully built and protected epistemic architecture supporting experts and students and their scholarly pursuits. You can still find traces of it — libraries are generally quiet and full of spaces where people can work in solitude and isolation, universities have campuses set apart from the towns they’re in, and within these campuses there are study halls and offices and reading rooms.

But it’s been breached, and rather gleefully, by the tech transgressives and their minions, all of whom mindlessly tout the benefits of an anti-scholarship technological dominance as they seek actual social and economic dominion — much of which has been secured because of how they control our communication media and dictate terms.

• “We’ve updated our privacy policies . . . ”

In each of these once-scholarly places now are smartphones, effectively erasing the solitude. Computerized search and discovery systems run on increasingly opaque data sources. Digital versions of books are hard to use, defy recall by flattening the reading experience, and make citation difficult if not impossible.

But there are efforts to reassert protected spaces for scholarly and academic work. More and more schools have gone phone-free, and a new study shows this helps students, especially those struggling the most with academic achievement. Stigma around phone use in public is increasing. Physical books sales are rebounding, and social activities eschewing phones are on the rise.

Scholars are also trying to protect themselves from the onslaught of mixed and undifferentiated content. This has led to a new call for gatekeepers, more constraints on information platforming and production, and a clearer need for upstream controls than ever.

It also means changing the downstream economy. What if printed materials or better-built digital materials with reliable landmarks and better retention techniques are required? What if paywalls are needed to keep out the rising tide of drivel? Are we willing to embrace those again? Do we want scholarly exchanges? Or do we want to please the tech overlords? The conflicting goals are becoming clearer with each passing day.

Are we willing to defy narratives about speed, scale, and synthesized information in order to better support scholarly activities and those who pursue them?

Are we building an economy for scholarship? Or aiding and abetting the creating of an information economy that extracts value without supporting the activities and experts that created that value and will create a better future for everyone involved?

I’m optimistic there is a better path forward.