Before I get into the meat of the question, I’d like to set up what I think of the term “objectivity”, specifically that objectivity is an asymptote. This idea isn’t new, it’s bounced around journalism and philosophy circles for years, but I think it’s crucial for me to explain the idea before I jump into the question.
Ok, so, I realize this is a Lit course, and that the reason you’re in this field of study may be because you encountered asymptotes (or any other bit of mathematics vocabulary) sometime in High School and thought, “never again”. No worries. I’m in the same boat. But it’s hard to pass up the analogy. It’s great. Bear with me.
So, for those who forget, what’s an asymptote? An asymptote is an imaginary line. That’s it. Just an imaginary vertical line. Next up is the line you’re working with (in our case, a piece of literature). This line will get as close to the asymptote as it possibly can, but it will never touch. It will get infinitely close, in fact, but no matter how high up the line travels, it will never touch the asymptote. (Think of dividing the number 1 in half. Half it again. Half it another million times. It will be very small. But it will never be zero.)
Ok, you can open your eyes now, math talk is over. So the idea I subscribe to is that objectivity is the asymptote; that, first, it is an imaginary idea, and second, that no matter how hard a piece of literature tries to be objective, it will never truly make it.
Before the advent of social media, media and literature were largely guarded by a few interests. Because I’m so young, the internet has virtually always been a part of my life. It’s hard for me to really visualize a time when the flow of information was completely skewed to those who made their living on that flow of information. It’s also hard to visualize how few strands of information there were because of this.
How does this relate to asymptotes? Well basically, if you’re looking at your vertical line back in the days when newspapers were still selling, you’ll see very few strands on the graph. Some of those will be trying for that asymptote, and failing. Some of them will be on a completely different side of the graph, often an unabashed political paper or book with no intention of objectivity.
Now, with social media, those strands are astronomically more plentiful. Some still try to hit their objective asymptote, some don’t. But what’s interesting about these new opinion strands is that they’re propelled by a variety of new motivators. Before, business model was largely the indicator of how from the objectivity a piece of media would fall, especially for newspapers. But now, the reasons for speaking out on Twitter or Facebook are just as plentiful as the opinions themselves.
Personally, I think that there are two reasons that this massive influx of opinion is important to discourse. First, it’s much more important to take the democratic average of these strands of opinion than to falsely try to follow one “objective” news source. And second, the outlying opinions are often the ones that I find most interesting and most innovative for the discourse on the topic.
My thoughts on hypertext work in a similar way. Before, when reading an article in the newspaper, you only had the choice to agree or disagree with what the journalist was trying to argue. The reader had relatively little to go on: you could either blindly believe or not believe the article based on your principles on the matter, or you could judge it based on the principles of the newspaper itself. Hard to truly be swayed.
Hypertext changed that. Yeah, it’s interesting to fall through the rabbit hole of the internet by continuously clicking on links in the story you’re reading, but what’s more important is what those articles say about the writer of the piece. It’s a lot easier to judge a piece when the reader can view their source. Are they taking a quote from a radical website? Maybe the piece doesn’t have a specific political lean that the reader can detect, but the sources do. These become somewhat meta strands on your graph of objectivity. The piece may seem objective to the casual reader, but what does the data behind it say?
Anyway, this is the last you’ll read of me trying to equate (ha) math ideas to literature ideas. Breathe easy. Comment below.
BBC News UK. “The politics of UK newspapers.” BBC News. BBC, 30 Sept. 2009. Web. 23 May 2014. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8282189.stm>.
noreyanafernando. “Objectivity vs. Transparency: let the jury of journalists decide.” Media Indy US. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 May 2014. <http://noreyanaindependent.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/objectivity-vs-transparency-let-the-jury-of-journalists-decide/>.
🙂
Hi Patrick,
Interesting thoughts on social media and hyperlinks in relation to objectivity. I’d never heard the asymptote metaphor before, but I think it’s great! In my Majors Seminar last term, I led a discussion on an article about perspectives in journalism, and brought in perceptions of objectivity in different genres. I put several different genres up on the board (news, non-fiction novel, fiction novel, opinion piece, film) as well as a scale with “least objective” on one side and “most objective” on the other, and had the class discuss where they though each genre would fall on the spectrum. Our discussion basically concluded that objectivity is completely out the window, as even the seemingly most object genres still have a degree of objectivity. I think the asymptote analogy clearly reflects this.
I think it’s interesting that you consider hypertext as making it easier for the reader to gauge the reliability of the writer. From what I understood, your perspective is that hypertext can make a piece less reliable because you can easily see the writer’s sources and make better judgements of the writer based on those sources. Do you think hypertext can also serve to strengthen the credibility of a writer’s opinion/argument because there is that transparency in sources?
Hey Lian, I couldn’t tag you in my reply, but I wanted you to get a notification or something telling you I briefly included you in my comment below. Thanks!
Hey Patrick, I thought the math reference was well explained to another english lit major. You definitely guessed right that my math career stopped in high school after I cried during a final. But I think it paints a great idea of objectivity in relation to literature. Lian, I’m not too sure that objectivity is completely out the window. I really like the asymptote analogy because it suggests that some sources get close, or at least, their goal is to try and achieve objectivity.
Patrick, I think it’s interesting what you said about their being more strands of information now that media has developed so drastically. But I feel like I’m divided on the idea that in the past the “flow of information was guarded by a few individuals”, implying today, we’re more likely to see unguarded mass information. I think it was definitely easier for the big wigs who held monopolies on things like newspapers to convince the masses of their objectivity when there weren’t anarchist websites to debunk them (just an example), but what about the monopolies in social media today? Facebook may be a place for individuals to express their own opinions, unpublished, and uncensored, but what we;re largely seeing is people “sharing” other pages directly because the button is provided, or are linking other pages to their own facebook pages. These aren’t original thoughts, and they may very well be as far from objective as the political propaganda during WW2, but the public is being sold on the idea that they are, and the people are being used as a front to further sell these ideas to their close friends, who don’t question the source, because the source seemingly looks like it’s their friend who posted it.
Here’s an example that happened a few months ago:
On National Women’s day, a friend from my women’s studies class back at Langara posted this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk to her blog. I viewed the video, teared up, and immediately reblogged. I wasn’t necessarily questioning the source, because the immediate source, or rather secondary source in hindsight, was my trusted feminist friend. A few months later, while talking to a coworker about Dove, she offhandedly mentioned that Dove and Axe were owned by the same company. So I looked into it. And I made sure to look at academic sources, and not just some angry person’s website. Sure enough, they were owned by the same company. It’s interesting, that objectivity is not made clear until you actually research how credible sources are. But what happens when those sources have something to gain from their misleading objectivity?