How Digital Perfection Disempowers Scholars

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that the perfection of digital copies, as opposed to the "noise" in analog copies, represents an enhancement of information transmission. Actually, however, that analog "noise" was "signal" to those receiving the analog copies. From the recipients' perspective, the fullness of the signal they once received from analog copies abated with the noiseless digital alternative.When I was a sophomore in college, one of my professors in elaborating what made for an A and what made for a B said that he had no option but to assign the one or the other, that he could not do what he witnessed as an between an A and a B. He remarked to the class that when transcripts of his record were sent out, way before there were computers, the Registrar handcopied this hybrid glyph making sure to reproduce it with its full ambiguity. Such, he said, he could not do for us, for all grades in the mid-'70s were entered into a database and mainframe-generated labels were placed on transcripts of record. What made his story compelling, what held the class' attention, was the cutesy implausibility of someone manually copying such a hybrid grade without resolving it into either of its constituents. In the analog world, such a "perfect" copy was an anomaly. In the digital world, were there such a glyph, it would be the norm.I want in this essay to point out the consequences of the loss of this technological noise to scholars. One of the most difficult to obtain desiderata for scholars who work hard and long on their papers is genuine, helpful, informed, and informative feedback on their work. Too often, such feedback concentrates on such inessentials as the number of references, the length of the paper, and a lot of to-do about pronominal constructs (not just the "he"/"she" controversy, but also the nuanced switching between the editorial "we," the authorial "I," and the autobiographical "I"). The only comments that can ever be helpful to the author are those that did not occur to him - obviously, the author is aware of the length of his submission, the length of his bibliography, and his choice of pronominal constructs. All too often, moreover, such unhelpful comments are delivered with a degree of invective made possible only by the blind-review process.Formerly, authors would often get a polite note of rejection from the editor, denying the paper further review. Sometimes, the short note would cite "a scope of the journal" issue, the number of submissions received compared with the number that could be accommodated, and the like. The next sentence usually informed the authors not to take such judgments as an indication of the worth of their own paper and may even have praised the paper, directly or indirectly. Since editorial review almost always precedes formal review by referees, it is essential for an author to understand what that last sentence means in his case: It may mean nothing, simple boilerplate, or it may mean a simple case of submitting to the wrong place at the wrong time, or it might be genuine encouragement. …