"You should have kept the book longer to meditate over..." (Giorgio - Passion, by Stephen Sondheim)

On the tenth birthday of Wikipedia, commentators are remarking upon the way that, despite its flaws, it has democratized knowledge. I've sensed, in the media, a tangible air of celebration and an overriding acknowledgement that Wikipedia has been, and is, a jolly good thing.

Academics too are becoming increasingly interested in the wikipedia phenomenon. Kittur et al. comment that "although Wikipedia was driven by the influence of "elite" users early on, more recently there has been a dramatic shift in workload to the "common" user." If Francis Bacon's famous aphorism "knowledge is power" truly stands, then Wikipedia is surely a concrete site of the way that power is increasingly spreading and shifting away from an elite centre.

Perhaps of more interest is the way that wikipedia symbolises our obsession with being permanently 'plugged-in' to information. As Alain de Botton recently remarked on Radio 4's 'A Point of View', we have a tendency to favour 'consumption' over 'absorption' and 'reflection'. In a restaurant with my family on Saturday evening, I had a television - showing the news - over my left shoulder, and a table of two girls - both with permanently buzzing blackberries - over my right. Information is all around us and we seem to thirst for it. 

It seems I too am guilty of this info-lust. I hate the idea of discarding books, or passing them on to others. I like to keep them, and display them. Ostensibly, so that I can return to them and meditate on their many truths... Perhaps more truthfully, so that I have a sort of visual archive of my remarkable consumption on text-after-text.

In Sondheim's Passion it is the ugly, sickly, outcast 'Fosca' who sings:

 

I do not read to think. I do not read to learn.
I do not read to search for truth.

I read to fly, to skim -
I do not read to swim.

I do not dwell on dreams.

And yet, in this connected world of Wikipedia and smart phones, Fosca's admission does not contribute to the minority status that crystallizes from her physical appearance, to the contrary she describes an increasingly 'normal' condition, and in so-doing, shifts herself closer to the mainstream, not further from it.