Research is for fun

No, really, it is. People don't seem to get this, all too often. People also don't seem to get that reading is for fun, and after a miserable slog through high school and college English they refuse to read anything at all ever again other than Facebook and fantasy sports materials.

(DISCLAIMER: I haven't the faintest idea what fantasy sports call for by way of paperwork, but I have a mental image of a testosterone-soaked version of D&D character sheets.)

Let's start again, shall we? Research is for fun.

Like Tabitha, I am a geek. I am a proud, if highly specialized, geek: I am neither a Linux addict nor an adherent to dice-based or massively multiplayer online RP, and I don't build computers or use words like kernel outside discussions of botany. But I am and have been for years engaged in freeform online roleplaying of a sort that over time has blurred from canon to original characters through worldbuilding into what amounts to co-writing of a very long novel. Those of you with lives won't have any idea what I'm on about here, but imagine you and a friend in a distant state are telling a story together, and you tell the bits from character A's point of view, and your co-writer does the bits from character B's point of view, and you collaborate on narrative passages and chunks of description and exposition. In order to do this, you need to know a certain amount about whatever is going on in the story at the moment--whether a character's undergoing a medical procedure, or fixing a mechanical problem, or sewing a dress, or conjugating a French verb--in order to write it believably. Here's where the research bit comes in.

I'm old enough to have spent my really awful tween and teen years without the benefit of the internet, and therefore there's limited horribly embarrassing juvenilia sloshing about somewhere out there in the tubes; I can remember when if you wanted to write a scene where a character, say, is tuning a piano, you would need to actually leave your place of residence and physically travel to a library, look up books on piano tuning in a physical (analogue?) card catalogue, and either photocopy pages out of these reference books or write down notes in longhand. Now, if I want to write that scene, I open a new tab in the same Firefox window as my Google Documents draft and google piano tuning, flick through Wiki, follow some citation links, look in Google Books, and write. I don't often find myself going KIDS THESE DAYS DON'T KNOW HOW GOOD THEY HAVE IT, IN MY DAY WE HAD TO blah blah blah, but really in this case I feel it's justified.

Research is, therefore, no longer difficult. It's a matter of typing in a simple query and following links. You don't even have to take longhand notes, you can just copypasta into a notes document--or just bookmark the page. All the tiresome time-consuming stuff is gone, and you can dip into this massive roaring flood of information wherever you find a wifi connection. Brave new world, that hath such packets in't.

You don't even need the excuse of writing a story to do research these days. You don't have to do anything with the information you find other than filing it in your head for the sheer pleasure of knowing things--and here, here is where I think the disconnect occurs, people don't think learning things in and of itself is an enjoyable pastime.

(Aside: It's "pastime." Not "passtime," or "pass time," or "passed time.")

I don't know why this is, or why being "smart" or capable is taken to be a negative idea, but it needs to be changed. There is no reason for you to remain ignorant of subjects you have even the slightest curiosity about now that looking them up is a matter of a few keystrokes. It is now so desperately easy to become informed that refusing, or failing, to do so implies you have some sort of reason for not wanting to know.

There is, of course, the corollary that with great access to information comes great access to utter and complete rubbish, and the intelligent internet researcher will learn very quickly to take a lot of search results with a considerable lump of halite. But the great thing about the branching, open-form nature of internet research is that it is possible to look up the veracity of a previous result. The important thing is to not stop with Wiki and trust that you know all there is to know.

(Those of you who know me will not be surprised at the following digression.)

As students, I think we have the responsibility to follow--even if it is difficult or tiring or discouraging--each line of inquiry as far as we can manage. It is not good enough to search until you find a result you like, a result that supports the conclusion you have already made and wish to convince others to make as well. Relying on this sort of doctrine-of-first-agreement makes you, the researcher, look both lazy and ignorant, and throws whatever you may base on this into question. Take for example a published and highly popular author, who in one of his highly popular publications develops a character suffering from a very specific, extant, actual condition with very specific, extant, actual physical symptoms and limitations, and then proceeds to retain one very minor aspect of that physical condition and discard all the rest of it, including the physiological explanations for the aspect he retains, in order to tell his story. It would have taken no more than five seconds for him to discover a large and serious flaw in his decision to use this syndrome for this character: yet he either didn't bother or does not think his readers are intelligent enough to notice. I'm not sure which is worse. Suffice it to say that if you ever write a story featuring a character with oculocutaneous albinism, do not place this character in a position where he or she will specifically need extreme visual acuity to discharge plot-critical responsibilities.

Research is the very basic, simple skill of making sure you know what you're talking about before you talk. It's not limited to writing papers or novels or magazine articles or blog posts: it's applicable to everything you do. Becoming informed is more and more a responsibility in a world where media no longer waits for film at eleven, where news stories break in real time, where newspaper headlines are not set the night before they're printed. Even if you don't think of it as a responsibility, think of it as an opportunity. You don't have to swallow whatever the news channel says, you can look it up yourself and make your own informed decisions about pretty much anything you care to imagine.

It's a wonderful time to be an inquisitive person.