Why do the encyclopedias fail?
Why indeed all attempts to collect, classify and manage knowledge end up in disappointment?
There were so many attempts to classify and capture all of the world's knowledge. But the stock of knowledge always grew faster than any attempt to catch up. Before the French and German encyclopedists finished their volumes, the pamphlets overwhelmed them. The Internet has accelerated the speed - what used to happen in years now happens in hours.
The usual reaction to expanding knowledge stock was to attempt to control its growth through authority. The Church, the state, the media, the universities - the experts are assumed to know best. But this is the classic Encarta-vs-Wikipedia case: The expert opinions almost always meet their match in the wisdom of the crowds.
The history of knowledge can be read as this cat-and-mouse game: The race between human attempts to impose order and human attempts to defy it. Societies want structure just as imagination pushes the boundaries. The truth always proves to be a multi-layered thing, and each generation finds its own. Encyclopedias, useful as they are, stand for attempts to reduce knowledge into a static, ahistorical thing, which it never becomes.
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We should remember this as we deal with the current onslaught. The trade-off between managing knowledge and embracing its growth has become central to public consciousness since the Internet scaled the dilemma many times over. But, now, something else is happening: For the first time in history, the gatekeepers are winning! The ability of the crowds to change the conversation is reduced when the conversations are controlled by the platforms, multi-billion dollar corporate enterprises with their own agenda.
Is this the moment of revenge of the encyclopedias? But we are now getting this in the inverse: Instead of knowledge being the source of power, now power is the source of knowledge. Perhaps it was always that way. This is perhaps why books such as the Bible, sanctified by the Roman empire, did much better than the encyclopedias. One is either with the crown, or with the crowd.