Britannica adjusts to the digital age

The owners of Encyclopaedia Britannica have announced that they are suspending the print edition and will be concentrating on their online edition, with paid access. That should give us some cause for pause.

The Britannica was the standard encyclopaedia for me for a long time. I would trudge to libraries and spend endless hours flipping though its pages for material to write papers, right through my college years in India.

It was a great place for summarised knowledge. It had the pride of place in most libraries, too — gold-lettered and leather-bound.

Some librarians guarded it with their souls. And depending on the library, you could not just pick it from the shelves. It would be on a shelf behind the circulation desk and you had to fill a separate slip requesting use of a particular volume.

Your library card would be held hostage while the suspicious librarian would hand it out to you looking over her glasses, with a look as if to say, “You don't deserve to be looking through this.” And when I returned it, the librarian would casually flip through the pages, just checking to see if my greasy fingers had ripped out a page.

Wikipedia, final nail

Being around for over 240 years, the encyclopaedia grew to 32 volumes by the time of its final 2010 print edition. For many middle-class families in the US, it was a required investment sitting proudly on a separate shelf in the living room.

Door-to-door salesmen would visit neighbourhoods and sell the sets, which could be bought in an instalment plan. In the 70s and 80s, it was also a way for students to earn some extra money selling these sets while at college.

The coming of the World Wide Web with its free access to information brought the Britannica down a few notches.

However, it still retained its respectability in spite of several other print encyclopaedias that were on the scene.

If it was in the Britannica , that was the last word. They were careful in what they included within the pages, and apart from their own small staff, leading experts in the field contributed content.

I think the final nail must have been struck with the growing popularity of Wikipedia. Not only was it free, it also covered any topic you could think of under the sun and did not have to go through the rigorous (and snooty?) process of a bunch of experts deciding whether it was important enough to be featured in the pages of the Britannica .

And, horror of horrors, the Wikipedia took democracy to its limits. Anyone could contribute, and anyone (sort of) could also revise what was in it. The free play of market forces, and the ‘wiki' process was what would now determine whether something made it into the encyclopaedia or not. If it was not credible, the open community of scholars could do something about it by correcting mistakes or biases. Gradually, Wikipedia became the most frequently cited source in many of the student papers I see.

The shift from print to web access has also given reach when researching for information. The list of references at the end of the page of Wikipedia gives sources one can just click on and read further into some specific aspect.

Other links take you further and further into connected fields till you realise you are far away from where you started but enjoying every minute of it.

The flip side

Unfortunately, the free availability of information on the Web has also caused confusion in the minds of many, between facts, scientific conclusions and opinions.

Clever marketers are constantly figuring out how to use the right key words that will get their Web site in the first page of search results.

When I turn to the end of student papers nowadays to examine the list of references, I increasingly find only Web sites of suspicious provenance and not a single book or authoritative source. The Web sites are usually opinion pages from newspapers and magazines rather than research journals.

Surely, some know-it-all pontificating (like me!) on life is not as valuable as carefully designed research studies. But the student in a hurry, does not often go beyond the first page of the Web results.

Opinions are relevant, too, as long as one realises that's what they are. The Sanskrit word jnana stands for all kinds of cognition, irrespective of whether true or false.

On the other hand, ‘knowledge' stands only for cognition that is true, which the Sanskritists call prama . And, of course, our ancients with plenty of time at their disposal went on to make further fine distinctions of truth of knowledge, its practical value, whether it is in harmony with other experiences, and so on. If they had gotten down to write an encyclopaedia, I imagine they would still be working on it.

Another problem with the easy access to information is that, I think, it has blunted conversation.

I still remember the time when you could sit with a group of friends arguing and debating for several minutes about who acted in which movie, or which politician was in power when something happened.

This led to spreading the time between sips of something strong, and also brought in the prospect that one could revisit the conversation at a later date with “You remember the time when you said xx was the actor in yy movie. Well. I read in this magazine just this week … ” and so on.

Unfortunately, now, as soon as such a query arises, there is some smart-aleck in the room with a smartphone who quickly accesses the Web, does a search, and pronounces the right name of the actor. That, for sure, puts an end to that stream of talk.

So what do we talk about next? Time for another sip. These sips are becoming more frequent.

(The author is professor of International Business and Strategic Management at Suffolk University, Boston, US.)

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