Wikipedia (Pop-culture Essay)

          I suffer from an addiction, although my vice is benign.  I, however, choose to consider it an affliction, a disease borne not from my own poor decisions, but a veritable assault of the information age.  I was borne in 1994.  Wikipedia launched in 2001.  I have been on the site so many times that I didn’t need to look that up.  By the time I started to hit the crack, Wikipedia had already developed into the inconceivably large tank of knowledge it is today, and it grows by the second.  I can be looking up Robert Burns and in a series of clicks, with no textual input from me, not a single typed word, I could, and sometimes do, end up at modern Indonesian economics.  It is the only website that I have donated money to because I honestly believe in their creed and like an addict, I need it, and I’m willing to pay when they gently suggest that they need my money.  Why yes Jimmy Wales, I think I will donate to your wonderful site because you made such an eloquent personal appeal, even if it scrambles my brain further every time I use it. 

The internet is just another rung in the ladder up to true connectivity.  The initial step was made before our memory, sometime after fire was harnessed, when a brave Homo sapiens cried out and realized their thought had penetrated the aural sphere of existence and meant slightly more than the bird’s chirping or the wind’s whispering.  Speech brought ideas out of people’s heads, and through a chain of relayed messages, these ideas could be misconstrued and rumors started.  The next step was writing, the visual cousin of speech, which allowed a select few to jot down concocted bullshit and exert control over other people.  This dichotomy still exists, though at a less staggering level.  I know this because only 83.7% of the world is literate.  87% of the world has a cell phone subscription.  My dog had neither of these abilities and died three-legged and happy and none of her species ever went to war.  She did like to eat shit and piss on things though, which is completely gross. 

After people learned to write and declined to teach others below them, a German man named Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press in 1439.  He was from Mainz, which was founded in the late 1^st century BC by Romans as a military outpost due to its strategic location at the confluence of the Main and Rhine.  Afterward, millions of people died in wars prompted by the Reformation, which was in turn prompted by Martin Luther’s 95 theses, of which 300,000 copies were printed within two years of that fateful nailing to Wittenburg Church’s doors.  Sadly, they were burnt along with the most of the building in 1760 during the Pomeranian War, an extension of the Seven Years’ War, known in America as the French and Indian War.  Newspapers, magazines and novels subsequently appeared, derivations of an oft-misused communication system.  The next step was once again auditory.  Guglielmo Marconi (who looked suspiciously like Geoffrey Rush, of The King’s Speech fame, which won four Oscars at the 83rd Academy Awards) developed radio in the late 19^th century and in 1923 joined the Italian Fascist Party and didn’t mind it when Italy ransacked Ethiopia and ousted Haile Selassie I, regarded as the messiah reincarnated by Rastafarians, of whom Bob Marley was a member.  America heard his song “One Love” on Marconi’s marvelous invention in 1977. People sat in their living rooms and listened to music and fireside chats and commercials until television replaced it.  Sound and sight were finally combined and wholesome shows were beamed into our retinas and burnt into the back of our skulls.  The children who grew up watching these shows became the driving force in the world and created tactless shows which my generation is berated for.

           My family didn’t have television service until I was probably seven or eight, at which point we got “rabbit ears,” which is the colloquial term for a set-top TV dipole antenna, which can be fitted with UHF (Ultra-high frequency, electromagnetic waves from 300 MHz to 3 GHz) receivers.  The only stations that I
ever remember watching were PBS (channel 10) and Saturday morning cartoons (channel 9, the WB).  We only received several other channels, maybe 4 or 5.  Eventually, and I can’t remember when (but it must’ve been before junior high) we got the cheapest available cable, adding to my diverse viewing options two Christian channels, Univisión, a fuzzy BET, a station that seemed to only play B-movies from the eighties and provide weather reports for Chicago called WGN, along with lucky number 13 which let me know what was playing on all the stations I didn’t have.  This was a veritable heaven for an agnostic, white, English-speaking child living east of Cleveland.

            The reason for this sardonic commentary is that television and radio were and are patriarchal media, information filtered through a lens fixed by the preceding generation’s will and commercialism.  They are nothing compared to the anarchic Internet.  My personal history with the Internet is far more influential than any other media. First we had dial-up, and eventually the sounds of the mangled evil-robot in its death throes emanating from the computer tower became a welcome reveille for the beginning of a new knowledge devouring session at a speedy 20kb/s.  I had not yet discovered Wikipedia and internet searching never really went further than video-game walkthroughs and the occasional Google search.  Soon, my brother Glenn found a way to steal internet connection from nearby wireless sources during the advent of DSL connections.  He stuck a wireless receiver in a Folger’s coffee tin and hid it in a rhododendron bush in our front yard, a camouflaged cantenna as he called it.  We used this for a long time until we started another legally-questionable operation: siphoning internet access off of our neighbor’s AT&T line.  We split the bill with our neighbors and used it for years.  We finally bit the bullet and got our own cable internet line and can now search Wikipedia in the range of dozens of Mb/s, thousands of times faster than our original dial-up.  This is why I am an information junkie.

            Students have become used to teachers disallowing Wikipedia as a source, because it can be edited by anyone.  This is precisely why it is incredible.  At its core, it is an encyclopedia, and like any other, the information provided can sometimes be sparse and unspecific.  Yet this is far better than, let’s say, Encyclopedia Britannica.  Britannica has 228,274 entries and 474,675 subentries in English by 4,000 contributors.  Wikipedia has 4.1 million articles in the English edition alone, and 25 million articles in 286 languages by over 100,000 active contributors putting in 100 million man-hours.  Every fact in an article is cited and linked to the primary source at the bottom of the page.  If there is no source, it says “citation needed.”  Britannica is owned by a Swiss billionaire investor and actor named Jacqui Safra who also owns Spring Mountain Vineyard, a large wine-growing estate located in Saint Helena, California.  To have access to all the articles you must buy the print edition, literally dozens of hard-back books.  To have most of them you must become a paying member of the website.  To read some of the articles you can look at their site and have an ad for Netflix pop-up as a new window on your browser.  Wikipedia has no membership, no ads and no owner.  It is free information in the most democratic essence ever experienced.  Anyone in the world can edit it, making ethnic, racial, and cultural bias far less occurring than Encyclopedia Britannica, which has repeatedly been partial to western culture: all of Bhuddism is covered in one article, whereas Christianity has 14 articles.  Wikipedia is at once an encyclopedia and the collective memory of humanity.  The connectivity is staggering: 4.1 million articles, and each one is linked with all the others in countless inter-weaving paths.  There is nothing isolated, neither in reality nor on the internet.      

            What I am trying to say is this:  I look at attractive women, and my God do I enjoy yoga pants and their minimal obscuring of curves.  Yoga pants are typically made from cotton with a flexible knit which graciously allows them to form fit over women’s legs.  Sometimes rayon, also known as viscose, is used in lieu of cotton in the global textile industry.  Viscose rayon was invented by Hilaire de Chardonnet in 1891.  This happened in Échirolles, a town located in the Isère department of France.  The name in Occitan is slightly different, Isèra.  Occitan is a language closely related to French which is slowly dying, having a predicted half-million fluent speakers left.  In the region of France traditionally associated with the language, there is an enormous fortress town called Carcassonne, picturesque in its quaint medieval beauty and deplorable in its history.  It became a stronghold of the Cathars, a peaceful Christian splinter group deemed heretics by Pope Innocent III.  Their philosophy is reminiscent of Manichaeism, a religion derived mainly from ancient Persian teachings and eventually spread as far east as China and as far west as France.  At the behest of the ironically-named pope, French nobility began a land-grabbing campaign under the guise of religiosity in 1209 called the Albigensian Crusade.  Before the crusaders, led by the Abbot of Citeaux Arnaud Amalric, reached Carcassonne, they besieged a city named Béziers and attacked the peaceful inhabitants, Catholic and Cathar.  In the leader’s own words: “Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt.”  The death was perfectly acceptable because, as the Abbot claimed “Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His.”  They looted the entire city and divided the spoils, out of love, for Jesus, or something...  They reached Carcassonne, cut off the water supply and made all the inhabitants evacuate the city stark naked.  As was almost the entire population of Earth, most of the crusaders were illiterate, let alone fluent in Latin, and never read a word of the Bible or Wikipedia.

             The disjointedness is staggering: 4.1 million articles, and each one is linked with all the others in countless inter-weaving paths.  There is nothing isolated, neither in reality nor on the internet.  This is what Wikipedia does.  It jumbles up my mind into a cosmopolitan, manic-depressive web.  I don’t just see a girl’s callipygous figure, I see that and a dead scientist and a dying language and twenty fucking thousand hacked up corpses and a parade of naked refugees.  I get snippets of everything in existence, a montage hell-ride of history, culture, language, music, art, politics, sex, biology, astrophysics, religion and philosophy.  Encyclopedic shallowness thrown at me with no abatement through a backlit LCD screen (liquid crystal display, the ground works for which were laid down in 1888 by Friedrich Reinitzer, born 1857, Prague, liberated by the Red Army 1945).  I am drowning in a kiddie pool filled with tears.  I am becoming a nihilist who will dominate trivia night.

Works Cited

Wikipedia.

            

Sorry for not coming to class today.  Stayed up really late reading everyone's favorite author Diane Ackerman.  

A couple questions for consideration when you critique my essay:

1.  Does my non-inclusion of any characters besides myself subtly bolster my claim of isolation?  Did you notice?

2.  Am I appearing funny or creepy when I talk about girls' butts in yoga pants? 

3.  How can I better incorporate the theme of communication abuse?  I want to flesh it out.  I only touched upon it I think with paragraphs 2 and 3.

Besides these questions, I would greatly appreciate some feedback from you guys!  thank you for bearing with me and my absences.  I will be e-mailing out my critiques of your pop-culture essays and revised essays today.