Wikipedia's one-day blackout offered a faint reminder of a time before smartphones, writes DONALD CLARKE
THE FIRST words of this column are normally written on Wednesday evening. It hardly needs to be said that it is fashioned on one of these newfangled computer things.
Like most contemporary hacks, this correspondent is now barely able to write his own name with a pen. When I happen upon such an item, I tend to poke it round the table like an orang-utan confronted with an oddly shaped twig. The computer helps with your splelling, apparently. It enables you to redraft as you go. Most importantly, it allows you to pretend you know the capital of Burkina Faso, the author of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the B-side of Shaddap You Face. What would we do without Wikipedia?
That question was rendered a little less rhetorical this week when Jimmy Wales, founder of the online encyclopaedia, shut the site down in protest at proposed Bills aimed at inhibiting internet piracy. It is mildly astonishing that any newspapers were published on Thursday morning. Obviously, we weren’t forced to actually consult a real book or call a living, breathing source. But we were compelled to find a new online crib-sheet. What an outrage.
The blackout, which ended blissfully on Thursday morning, did not give us any firm impression of what life would be like without online reference sources. There were plenty of other places we could go to get the wrong answers to important questions.
But it did, at least, offer faint reminders of the time before our brains gained these useful digital appendages.
Can you remember? You are in one of those now-defunct "pubs". In the middle of a conversation about classic children's television, some wiseacre argues that Ian McKellen once appeared standing on his head in the 1970s show Playaway. A furious debate ensues. Some Shakespearean actor did feature alongside Brian Cant in that amusing series. But it wasn't McKellen. Was it Brian Cox? Could it have been Anthony Hopkins? An entire evening is taken up with speculations as to which sometime Richard II sang the alphabet song while dressed as a novelty bear.
You rustle up a 10p piece and phone one of your sadder friends. He or she (almost certainly "he") doesn't know, but a neighbour owns a copy of that once invaluable tome the Penguin TV Companion. Eventually – some hours after the question was posed – a reasonably reliable answer is delivered. Of course it was Jeremy Irons. How could we have been so stupid?
When Wikipedia became available on smartphones, an entire school of debate was permanently shut down. It is now difficult to not know stuff. Lines of conversation that begin with a misheard statistic or a jumbled fact get no further than a speculative opening phrase. Every second person has a Royal Library of Alexandria nestling in their breast pocket.
There have been some serious repercussions. The pub quiz is in peril. As most readers of this column will agree, people who cheat in such competitions – or, worse, don’t take them seriously – constitute a kind of subhuman underclass that shouldn’t be allowed to vote or own property. The decent quizzer can be trusted not to access his handheld device when pondering the source of the Zambezi.
To prohibit sociopaths behaving in this manner, organisers now often demand that phones be handed in before hostilities commence. “Why don’t I just chop off one of my less essential limbs,” outraged entrants don’t actually say, before heading for the exit.
More depressing still, the advance of the ubiquitous online information source is fast rendering reference books obsolete. The single-volume encyclopaedia, once an indispensable item on any sensible person's bookshelf, is now about as essential as a listing of rural farriers. Anybody who cared about film used to eagerly rush out and buy the latest edition of Leslie Halliwell's Film Guide(despite the founder's disturbingly reactionary views on the medium). The Internet Movie Database long ago plunged a stake in that legendary tome's ailing heart.
Obviously, any paragraph that begins “studies have shown” should be immediately dismissed as half-assed gossip, but a book by one Nicholas Carr argues that such instant access to information dissuades users from thinking in a satisfactorily creative fashion. (Unwilling to bother with any creative thinking myself, I looked this up on Wikipedia and found an article largely rubbishing Carr’s thesis. Then again, they would say that. Wouldn’t they?)
Oh well. Nobody has ever managed to invent a piece of game-changing technology without damaging hitherto cherished institutions and ideals. No doubt gnarled men in 15th-century taverns agued that filthy Johannes Gutenberg and his stupid printing press would make life unliveable for the wandering storyteller. Milliners surely feared the rise of the umbrella.
We’re better off with the portable digital brain. But I do miss those heated arguments in pubs. Come to think of it, I miss the pubs.