Tonight’s PBS broadcast of John Adams’ and Peter Sellars’ opera Doctor Atomic was amazing. It’s being rebroadcast on January 4th and if you can possibly catch it on your local PBS station, you should.
As I was reading through my Friendfeed and Twitter streams, an exchange from Act II came to mind. As the date for the first test of the nuclear bomb approaches, nerves are raw, on edge, and everyone is second-guessing themselves. As the time is set and the test put in motion, this exchange occurs between Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer (Oppie):
Teller:
In July, three years ago
I made some of the initial calculations,
and my figures indicated
that the bomb would, indeed,
create enough heat
to ignite the earth’s atmosphere
Oppie:
You’ll remember that
I immediately called a halt
to those meetings.
We asked Bethe about your numbers.
His calculations showed
that even the extreme pressures and temperatures
reached in the interior of our explosion
will not be high enough
to fuse the hydrogen with either
nitrogen or helium.The Gadget won’t set fire to the atmosphere.
Teller bows to the conclusion and Bethe’s authority with regard to the numbers.
In similar fashion, the Twitterati and/or Friendfeeders are all clustered around the question of authority this week, who has it, how it’s measured, and whether it even should be measured.
The Dr. Atomic exchange reminds that authority is not a designation bestowed as a result of the number of followers, noise generated, or other plastic metrics that mean less to others than they do to the person claiming authority. It’s earned, through trust, interaction, and accuracy. Oppenheimer was certain that The Gadget (what an understatement, eh) wouldn’t ignite the atmosphere. He had the authority of his education, his knowledge, and his position behind that assertion. And yet, the final, agreed-upon authority for the conclusion came from Bethe’s calculations.
For all the twisting about whether blogs are dead, Twitter is important, Friendfeed is Twitter and vice versa, the bottom line is that authority is in the mind of the beholder, and not subject to algorithms or other gaming techniques. You read this blog because…well, presumably because you want to. You either agree or disagree. You decide on your own whether you should believe me or not, and if you do, you might believe me the next time.
I’m willing to bet that when you read and agree, it has absolutely nothing to do with the number of followers I have on Twitter. It might have something to do with what I read, or what I share in Google Reader, or who I follow on Twitter and Friendfeed (and regard as authority), or my personal experience in my career or personal life or something in which I’ve demonstrated expertise, but popularity is not part of the equation.
No matter how hard the ones who wish to measure authority as a function of popularity try, they will not set fire to the atmosphere. Their gadget will only be as valuable as the underlying calculation.
(Hat Tip: Cliff Gerrish, to whom I ascribe much authority)
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