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 see something certain in the belief 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 and 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, the person almost always does so as a lead in to 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.
The present time reverberates with a desire for revelation. Our collective feelings for facts stem from this old searching mission. But this time is different, impatient. We’ve taken matters into our own hands. We’re living Revelation made manifest by the Information of a billion gods. What flickering hermeneutic lights them all up?
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 writes that Larry Page, “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 has 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 idea launched a thousand ships. Some would say they set an empire in motion. Their engine gave meaning to the singular statements floating in the Web’s ether.
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.
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. Such was the case for the water samples that LeeAnne Walters collected from her home tap in Flint Michigan in 2015. 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 fact as reason not to grant the data any importance. No one can follow all the facts. Like, which of the facts from this paragraph would you choose to follow were each one to break in two and walk off? What reason would you give for your choice? Support your claims with correctly formatted references.
Here is another strange thing: when citations became hyperlinks, statements stopped moving. They no longer need to move. Now we go to them, each of us mystics traveling through our own private Idahos on fact finding missions. We’re all divining in the Information Age, hunting patterns, unsettled by déjà vu, haunted by the uncanny, following our gut, courting sense, winking. It is terrifying and also wondrous out here on the brink of the sublime.