THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 67
BOOKS
WHAT DO YOU KNOW?
Wikipedia, “Jeopardy!,” and the fate of the fact.BY LOUIS MENAND
ever chatbot you use, can get you that
information in nanoseconds. Remem-
ber when, back in the B.D.E. (Before
the Digital Era), you’d be sitting
around with friends over a bottle of
Puligny-Montrachet, and the conversa-
tion would turn on the question of when
Hegel published “The Phenomenology
of Spirit”? Unless you had an encyclo-
pedia for grownups around the house,
you’d either have to trek to your local li-
brary, whose only copy of the “Phenom-
enology” was likely to be checked out,
or use a primitive version of the “life-
line”—i.e., telephone a Hegel expert.
Now you ask your smartphone, which
is probably already in your hand. (I just
did: 1807. Took less than a second.)
And names and dates are the least of
it. Suppose, for example, that you sus-pected that one of your friends was mis-
using Hegel’s term “the cunning of rea-
son.” So annoying. But you don’t even
have to be sober to straighten that per-
son out. As you contemplate another
glass, Siri places in your hand a list of
sites where that concept is explained, also
in under a second. And, should the con-
versation ever get serious, Hegel’s entire
corpus is searchable online. Interestingly,
when I ask Siri, “Is Dick Van Dyke still
alive?,” Siri says, “I won’t respond to that.”
It’s not clear if that’s because of the Dick
or the Dyke. (He is, and he’s ninety-four.)
There is also, of course, tons of in-
stant information that is actually useful,
like instructions for grilling corn on the
cob, or unclogging a bathtub drain. And
it’s free. You do not have to pay a plumber.
Leaving the irrefutably dire and dys-
topian effects of the Web aside for a mo-
ment, this is an amazing accomplishment.
In less than twenty years, a huge percent-
age of the world’s knowledge has become
accessible to anyone with a device that
has Wi-Fi. Search engines work faster
than the mind, and they are way more
accurate. There is plenty of misinforma-
tion on the Web, but there is plenty of
misinformation in your head, too. I just
told you what the atomic number of haf-
nium is. Do you remember it correctly?
The most radical change that instant
information has made is the levelling of
content. There is no longer a distinction
between things that everyone knows, or
could readily know, and things that only
experts know. “The cunning of reason”
is as accessible as the date Hegel’s book
was published and the best method for
grilling corn. There is no such thing as
esoterica anymore. We are all pedants
now. Is this a cause for concern? Has it
changed the economic and social value
of knowledge? Has it put scholars and
plumbers out of business and made ex-
pertise obsolete?I
n the early years of the Web, the hub
around which such questions circled
was Wikipedia. The site will be twenty
years old on January 15th, and a collec-
tion of articles by scholars, called “Wiki-
pedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete
Revolution” (M.I.T.), is being published
as a kind of birthday tribute. The au-
thors survey many aspects of the Wiki
world, not always uncritically, but the
ABC / EVERETT consensus is that Wikipedia is the major
Alex Trebek hosted “Jeopardy!” for thirty-seven years, until his death, this month.I
s it still cool to memorize a lot of
stuff? Is there even a reason to mem-
orize anything? Having a lot of infor-
mation in your head was maybe never
cool in the sexy-cool sense, more in the
geeky-cool or class-brainiac sense. But
people respected the ability to rattle off
the names of all the state capitals, or to
recite the periodic table. It was like the
ability to dunk, or to play the piano by
ear—something the average person can’t
do. It was a harmless show of superi-
ority, and it gave people a kind of spe-
cies pride.
There is still no artificial substitute
for the ability to dunk. It remains a val-
ued and nontransferrable aptitude. But
today who needs to know the capital of
South Dakota or the atomic number of
hafnium (Pierre and 72)? Siri, or what-