The key element we need to take from the new information environment is that it does not operate by the rules of what we have traditionally viewed as "scholarship." No extensive prior education, no agreed-upon culture out of which exchange of ideas takes a precise form, no peer review, and no notion that this environment has to answer for its errors. As such, it is exciting and liable to further social movements of all kinds (take ISIS for example, which is rich in social media).

I never saw myself as a traditionalist, but fractal chaos scares the willies out of me. While it is fabulous that so much of the world has a new voice to speak into the issues of our day, we got to this point in the whatever we view as human development because we relied on expertise, peer review, and the authority of those who know better than we do. While that, indeed, created vicious power structures that oppress many to this day, it also gave us medicine, law, democracy and the ability to feed and house ourselves.

Our students need to grasp that the new information structures (or deconstructures) have their valued uses but don't replace the information environment that has turned chaos into stability. Ultimately we have to live in this world and survive the vagaries of revolution, informational or otherwise. Scholarship is not really a misleading distinction from popular. It is the distinction between knowing where we are going (or need to go) and flying by the seat of our pants.

Thanks again, Barbara, for a great post.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment!

One thing I found really intersting in Coleman's analysis was that she didn't take the chaotic anything-goes ethos of Anonymous at face value. Members (while abhoring behavior that appears to be attention-seeking or brand-building) are very attuned to the status of various participants. Those who are smart and knowledgable get credit for that. Those who are good at organizing an operation are respected. Though there is no power structure as such, there is a kind of peer review at work and there is recognition of expertise. It's actually a bit like shared governance in a different cultural milieu.

I was just reading a piece by Steven Bell at LJ on "trust culture" which jangled in a weird way with a story I had read a few minutes earlier about a police officer who had been arrested after allegedly stalking women who had outstanding warrants or other reasons to not trust police. The arrest came after a black woman without a police record was raped and did what most white folks would do - she called the police. Seven other victims were not in a position where that was a safe option. Authority and trust come with complex rules.

The whole issue of authority as a factor in finding and creating knowledge is a fascinating one. One of our jobs, it seems to me, is to lay bare how authority works in academia - not just how to recognize publications that flowed through a particular channel but how it actually works - and also help students understand how authority is established in other contexts, which will be important in their continuing education and development as individuals and citizens.

Three statements stand out to me.

The first, from Barbara Fister: "While students need to recognize what scholarship looks like so that they can learn about the ethical practices underlying scholarly discovery, the world of information exhibits its own fractal chaos that makes the oversimplified categories 'scholarly' and 'popular' misleadingly naïve."

The second, from Bill Badke, "Scholarship is not really a misleading distinction from popular. It is the distinction between knowing where we are going (or need to go) and flying by the seat of our pants."

The third, again from Barbara, "One of our jobs, it seems to me, is to lay bare how authority works in academia - not just how to recognize publications that flowed through a particular channel but how it actually works..."

I think that all three of these statements can be synthesized into the question, "What's worth my knowing?"

In the first part of that question, the idea of "worth" carries with it the possibility of our zeal in its pursuit. In the second, the idea of "knowing" carries with it an understanding of the authoritative source backing up a given truth.
Bound up in this triune idea of knowledge, its corresponding authority and our zeal in its pursuit is the understanding that we become through this process of discovery, in the way that the knower becomes what he or she knows, an authoritative source in our own right.
We know not only where we are going, but we are further on the path to that point than others who might follow us, and we consequently draw others in (which I think is the key to our authority) to the worldview we come to embody, to the knowledge we come to represent.

In relating the distinction between what is knowledge (and I'll label it as that which is authoritative) and what is not (and I'll label it as that which is opinion, even reasoned opinion), Mortimer Adler explains, "Knowledge consists in having the truth and knowing that you have it, because you know why what you think is true is true. Whereas opinion consists in not being sure that you have the truth, not being sure whether what you say is true or false."
Perhaps the boundaries between knowledge and opinion, between authoritative and non-authoritative, are more porous than Adler allows, especially in the hard sciences, in which new discoveries are continuing to be made often by those defenders of obsolescing paradigms. Perhaps, further, given this rubric, the theist has more in common with the atheist than with the agnostic.
All this is to say that I would not ascribe Authority to an anonymous collective simply because I would not ascribe Knowledge to it. An anonymous collective generates only one thing - data - and data isn't knowledge; it's data. It begs for interpretation by nature and can be variously interpreted.
A good friend of mine, Charles Willard, once told me that if one takes five poor libraries and puts them together, one doesn't end up with one good library - just a much larger poor library. I find truth in understanding the aggregate of Anonymous - those whose collective opinion has more of an authoritative weight than that of the individuals within the collective - is like one big but poor library. The political power it gathers is compromised by its uncertainty.