Michael Zimmer: “Renvois of the past, present and future: hyperlinks and the structuring of knowledge from the Encyclopédie to Web 2.0”
The first think I did when I started to read Zimmer’s article was to look up renvois on dictionary.com. I was pretty sure our text had nothing to do with expelling diplomats from foreign countries, and the dictionary’s word was spelled without an “s.” I thought I remembered that renvoyer meant to send back, but it’s been twenty years since I studied French so I looked that up too.
Mostly my searches were a waste of time.
I remember reading about Diderot’s L’Encyclopédie in a French literature class I took in high school, but don’t remember reading anything about renvois. I knew that L’Encyclopédie was one of the first encyclopedias, and I wasn’t impressed. Every middle class family in the 1970s had at least one set of encyclopedias. We had four at our house, the regular encyclopedia and three specialized sets. I certainly didn’t regard them as “potential sites of power for the control of knowledge” (97).
As for renvois, if any book had talked about it, I wouldn’t have paid too much attention to that either. Cross-references make sense to me. You learn one thing, but you need to know another, and then another. So you look them up. In the beginning, I used the suggestions at the end of encyclopedia articles, but after a while I didn’t need them. I knew what additional information I would need to develop a deeper understanding of a topic.
In the old days, we pored through big green stacks of Readers Guides, looking for related magazine or journal articles, thumbed through card catalogs, looking up authors and topics, and then walked the aisles of the library, hoping the book was there and had been returned to its rightful place in the Dewey decimal system.
Findings things out is pretty easy now--if I come across an unfamiliar words or phrases, I can look them it up online. If I am curious about a source that was referenced in a book or journal, I can normally find it through a library database. Google is my friend. Sure, not every link is useful, but I can figure that out pretty quickly.
Cross referencing makes sense to me. Everything I learn demonstrates a previously unknown gap of understanding or knowledge so I look it up. The printed word doesn’t really “define and solidify the organization and presentation of knowledge,” as Eistenstein asserted; it merely leads us to recognize what J. David Bolter described as “associative relationships [that] define alternative organizations of knowledge” (96). If we are looking for them.
Not everybody does.
I know that.
But I sort of like being the one who can add needed information to a conversation.
And so I collect all kinds of us seemingly useless information about topics that interest me.
Zimmer’s history of encyclopedias, encyclopedic organization, and the development of renvois, and the role Diderot played in collecting “all the knowledge previously held by a privileged few into one public work accessible to all” might fall into this category except that it reminds me of the many ways that knowledge and the power it contains has been used to control men and women. By including the métiers, he elevated the status of workers across France.
Zimmer suggests that this inclusion led to the political changes that followed in that nation. He quotes Stockwell, who wrote, “By taking craftsmanship seriously for the first time, Diderot helped set in motion the downfall of the royal family and the rigid class system. Suddenly, in the pages of the Encyclopédie, every person became the equal of every other . . .” (103).
Moreover, the use of cross-references allowed him to insert information that had previously been withheld from the public, information that threatened intellectual and religious seats of authority. “For example, comments on injustice to the poor were hidden in articles on such mundane things as salt, while objectionable concepts such as ‘fornication’ were scattered among unrelated terminology in articles of theology” (103).
Zimmer asserts that L’ Encyclopédie was most subversive because its juxtaposition of opposing ideas or arguments, thus exposing “concealed relationships between controversial issues or hidden links between disparate pieces of knowledge” (103). Instead of being told what was true, readers were now required to create their own interpretations “of the differences or contradictions they might encounter” (104).
If only it were that easy.
We are currently living in a time of seemingly infinite sources of information available to us. We are saturated.
The juxtaposition of opposing ideas and arguments is everywhere.
And yet I’m not sure we care.
It’s almost like we only see what we already agree with.
Searching out knowledge and understanding takes time, and we’re not always diligent to examine all sides of an issue.
Embedded hyperlinks are designed to make it easy, to send us to related sources so that we don’t have to develop our own “associative relationships” (96).
Honestly, I rarely click on them. I find them manipulative.
Rather than assisting me in becoming an “active an integral” participant “in the production of knowledge” (Zimmer 97), I feel like they make me a passive follower of predetermined cues.
I don’t need or want an author or an editor to tell me where to look to find answers that may only communicate a single perspective.
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