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interesting.
i put this in philosophy because i think legitimation of information is a sociological matter the implications of which get written into philosophical (and other) work. so the mechanisms are social but the outcomes aren't directly so. for example, a conceptual universe in which there's some transcendent god presupposes a community that accepts this premise as legitimate, even as the workings that happen on the basis of that premise don't need to reference the community. quite the contrary. but it's like this in every register.
think about the gap which separates professional philosophy from the idea you get of it from a barnes and noble bookshelf.
professional philo is for better or worse largely a commentary game; b&n philosophy bookshelves a 3-d version of a pot-thot ("what's it all about, man?" "woah, dude" "you think there's like a god?" "what?")
this entails that we are in general information consumers who depend upon intermediaries in order to determine the basic information that enables us to get oriented about what we're reading.
orientation precedes and conditions reading, btw (you find what you're looking for)....
these intermediaries---critics, reviews, syllabii---you know, lists---what's in what's out what's hot what's not---these are modes of exercising cultural power. this exercise presupposes institutional infrastructures (patterns of distributing commodities like "philosophy" or "poetry"; patterns of distributing cultural competences to play the games of "philosophy" or "poetry" and patterns distributing the lists that help those with the competences to play the game figure out which games are happening at any given time.)
(btw this is all straight pierre bourdieu, but compressed for messageboard fun).
if that's the case, then what happens if these systems mutate?
it seems to me that what the articles are pointing to is an anxiety or problem that runs deeper than who's gonna make the money from books (which aren't gonna disappear, btw....there's a proliferation of small presses that are doing books which are very much about the specific materiality of paper and print and glue or string etc.---just as vinyl didnt exactly go away)
it's who's gonna come to control the sifting processes, if those were tied (as they were) to an outmoded system of book production?
more basically, the problem/anxiety seems to be: how are we going to figure out what information is an is not legitimate?
price? what you pay more for must be better?
more basic: how are we gonna know what kind of information is what? how are we gonna evaluate information? who's going to tell us what's what and what to do?
that's not a real democratic question, is it?
are we collectively going to have to rely on our own competencies?
this gets to the real problem:
do we collectively have these competences?
well....do we?
in a way we're back in the problem that spooked alot of ethicists. look around at history. people left to themselves can decide all kinds of stupid shit is true. lots of death and destruction can follow. how do we deal with this? argue that there are transcendent standards (this was one strong argument inside of ethics---of course it doesn't really solve the problem of what they are or where they come from)....same thing here.
this strikes me as odd.
there's something about it that rankles, that bugs my inner marxist which prefers to think that people are basically smart and interesting but are lulled into some passive morass by a system that allows them no power and treats them as consumers to be herded about and otherwise managed....
but what if that's wrong?
i'll stop for the moment, but like baraka noted above there's alot that could be spun out of this.
just thought i'd start with an explanation for why it's in philo...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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