Imagine a statement of fact. Imagine that it divides itself in two like a cell. Imagine the two identical statements side by side. Imagine they both begin to move and then abruptly walk away in opposite directions. Let’s follow them both and see their fates. One becomes an anecdote, a singular detail significant for its existence in a singular story. The other becomes a citation, a statement that circulates far beyond itself such that the fact of its circulation forms an anchor of significance.
It is difficult to stay with the knowledge that the two statements remain the same but hold that knowledge because this is not a logic exercise.
Some people claim it certain that facts do not care about your feelings, as though facts derive power from a noble indifference. This personification of facts distorts their nature and misrepresents our relationship to them. We bring the feelings to that relationship. We develop a fondness for some facts, a dislike of others, deny many of them and try to inhabit a few. We arrange them into structures and assign them purpose. For instance, when someone tells you that facts do not care about your feelings, it almost always leads into their own beloved fact, the one they believe remakes everything. The truth is that facts don’t achieve things any more than they refuse to feel things. Facts exist and sometimes they barely do that.
A quote is a kind of fact. A quote simply claims that a statement exists, and you can verify that claim by following the citation. Here is a quote within a quote from an article titled, “The Birth of Google,” written by John Battelle and published in Wired magazine in August 2005. Batelle tells how a young Larry Page admired the way the social sciences generated value with citations and, “reasoned that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation - after all, what is a link but a citation? If [Page] could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page put it ‘the Web would become a more valuable place’."
Here is another fact: In April 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin published their article, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” It become a citation. According to Google scholar, it has been cited 23,952 times and now 23,953 times with the writing of this essay. Page and Brin’s article launched a thousand ships. Some would say it set an empire in motion. The engine it describes gave meaning to the singular statements floating in the Web’s ether. It also tethered us all to the social scientific project and its perpetual deferment of action.
What happens to Revelation when every statement is a citation in a multi-year study conducted by a billion monkey-gods? What flickering hermeneutic lights it up?
Citations generate value mainly by measuring volume. The value is set by the number of times a statement is referenced. The count is indifferent (so to speak) to the statement’s content, and that radical feature became a bug in Google’s engine. Or else it was a bug that became the feature.
(This is not an homage to the humble anecdote. Remember, the two statements are the same.)
The notion of “impact factor,” refines the metric further by determining the mean number of citations, a calculation that requires determining “the total number of citable items,” which is a truly strange concept made weirder by the Web.
Where citability x volume/time&place determines a statement’s value, it is possible to have a fact of measurable significance that is, operationally speaking, anecdotal. That was almost the case for the water samples that LeeAnne Walters collected from her home tap in Flint Michigan in 2015, a living example of a fact that breaks in two and walks off in different directions, one becoming an anecdote and the other a citation. The lead levels in the samples, as measured by Miguel Del Toral and Marc Edwards, were published on a website, flintwaterstudy.org, and not in a peer reviewed journal with an impact factor. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality cited that latter condition as reason not to grant the data any importance. It’s only thanks to Page and Brin, who made everything on the Web a citable item, that Walters’ water sample became something to cite.
Here is another strange thing: when citations became hyperlinks, information stopped moving. It no longer needs to circulate because we now go to it. This new stationary existence gives everything a kind of anecdotal feel, especially polluted water.
No one can follow all the facts anyway. We chase the ones we like, each of us traveling through our own private Idahos, hunting patterns, unsettled by déjà vu, haunted by the uncanny, following our gut, courting sense, winking. It is terrifying and also wondrous out here, always on the brink of revelation.
Facts merely exist and sometimes they barely do that. Shelter them and then let them go.