Karin Wulf takes to The Washington Post to crew the barricades of the war on disinformation, extolling the footnote—or really the power of citation in general, of which the footnote is centrally emblematic.
But nothing could be further from the truth. More than ever, we need what this tool provides: accountability and transparency. “Fiddling with footnotes” is the kind of hygienic practice that our era of information pollution needs — and needs to be shared as widely as possible. Footnotes are for everyone.
Footnotes, Wulf writes, “show how knowledge is a collaborative production”, “teach us how to be active and knowledgeable citizens”, and “enable readers to dive into a topic”. They promote “contextualized information”, and, yes, there’s that magic word I’ve uttered a lot here lately: context, and as Wuhr states, “the digital world makes this easier”.
On the web, our footnote is the humble inline hyperlink. When we left blogging for social media, we abandoned that powerful piece of citational context. But it’s still there, or, here, and all around us. We just have to stop merely “liking” things and start talking about why and how we liked (or disliked) them.