Back in the dimly-remembered mists of the 1990s, the two mythical founders of Google, Romulus and Remus Larry Page and Sergey Brin, latched onto the citation system in academic publishing as a way of mapping and, ultimately, controlling the sprawling growth of the Internet. In many ways they could be compared to Capability Brown who turned wild nature into rolling parkland back in 18th-century England.
The legend has it that at Silicon Valley’s Stanford University, Page saw literary citations as a software opportunity for the Web. Nowadays, it’s hard to see beyond the system he produced: first BackRub, a way of measuring backlinks to articles and sites, and then PageRank, the most addictive element in Web oneupmanship. Has that system really served us well?
Academic books, monographs, and journal papers have become vast collections of citations. Many books are now almost unreadable, since their sole purpose is to show off the reading of the author. University contracts stipulate that dons, lecturers and professors must publish regularly on their subject or face isolation and career meltdown. The necessity to publish or be damned has driven down the quality of academic publishing for years. Compare and contrast an academic book on a specific topic with the trade-publishing equivalent written by a competent professional author. There really is no comparison on quality, readability, range and breadth of aspiration. Authors trounce academics every time.
Many academic tomes are just webs of citations. Why, though, are we better served by knowing what hundreds of other people have written, rather than the authors themselves? Many citations point to arguments absorbed from other sources in any case. So we’re taken round in circles within the discipline covered.
Thanks to Google, the Web now has the same problem. To gain Googlejuice you have to cite and cite regularly and relevantly. The blogosphere, in particular, is a madhouse of clickability. Click, click, clickety-click it rattles on day and night, a cacophonous syncopation counterpointing the melody from Google’s cash tills.
The genius of Google is that it didn’t just transfer the bane of academic publishing onto the Web, but that it discovered how it could profit enormously from the process.
Will the next big entrant — the Google of the future — take us away from the Groves of Academe to a less cluttered way of measuring our worth and relevance? Or is the interconnectivity of the blogosphere in particular, the very essence of what it is?
