Earlier today on this blog, Tom Lord offered what I found to be an especially illuminating comment on my post about Beau Friedlander’s article on the differences between the book and the web as conduits of information and ideas. For those who didn’t see Tom’s comment, I reprint it here in full. The first sentence refers to an earlier comment that had cited Jacob Bronowski’s “assert[ion] that Man is the only animal with ‘social evolution’ through language and stored memories in books.”
Language does a lot more than just “store knowledge.”
Language also has a very rich syntax compared to anything other animals have. Comparatively abstract and complicated messages (notice I did not say “ideas” or “knowledge”) can be conveyed.
Homo sapiens can thus (and do) exhibit more complex kinds of social behavior.
That capacity gave rise to “oral traditions”: ways to preserve (with drift) certain linguistic expressions over time, space, and individuals. Full blown writing systems extended that. Then presses. Of late, things like the Internet.
But, notice that I’m very careful to not talk about preserving “ideas” or “knowledge” because that’s only a part of what language does and there’s not even any a priori reason to think it’s a permanent part of what language does.
Language can also convey pure ritual, for example. By ritual, I mean “language games” that a person or group of people can “act out” – translate from just the remembered song or the big tome into some social practice in the real world, people really “acting out” the ritual with no understanding – no meaning beyond “here, we do the ritual.”
Now, consider a particular piece of writing. Could be a procedures manual for running a nuke plant or it could be a teacher’s manual for teaching “Huckleberry Finn” complete with instructions for testing the student’s “literary appreciation” with some multiple-choice and short-essay questions, could be a grocery list, or could be “War and Peace.”
Are those writings the sort that convey ideas and knowledge? Or the sort that convey pure ritual?
Each is both.
It happens in the real human world, all the time, that writing slips back and forth between conveying ideas / knowledge and conveying pure ritual. A school starts teaching Huck Finn by rote and winds up teaching only the ritual of passing the cliched quizzes, for example: knowledge lost, ritual dominant. Maybe new teaching staff notices and reminds everyone of the original intent of the quizzes – of the ideas behind them – leading to a change in practices. Knowledge “recovered” from ritual at the last moment.
It isn’t hard to imagine a society in which, at least for the bulk of the people, all writing becomes pure ritual with the only knowledge commonly held being the practice of ritual itself.
Such a society would first become a kind of “cargo-cult” parody of itself, seeming at first to continue operating more or less normally. For example, the nuke plant staff may steadily lose any sense of knowledge behind their procedures and yet, if the plant was well built and the procedures well designed, initially the rituals keep the plant running whether the people understand how or not.
A “cargo-cult” phase would give way, eventually, to a degenerate phase in which “things fall apart” but the knowledge of how they were supposed to work – the knowledge needed to design repairs – is gone. Oops. The nuke plant mysteriously exploded. Now what?
What of the case of Eliot’s antisemitism quoted in Nick’s piece? What is it, exactly? Is it neatly captured and “taught” by a few sentences in Wikipedia? Or by sampling a few sentences from various on-line theses? Something you can figure out almost instantaneously using Google?
If you think so, I say that that’s a slip from knowledge to ritual. Pavlov’s dog could understand as well: someone says “Eliot,” the good dog does a quick search and says “antisemite!”
Whatever was Eliot’s case it was a real, singular case in a real, specific historical context. Eliot’s case is, if nothing else, rich with detail. We don’t learn about Eliot’s case by hearing it ritualistically dubbed “antisemitic.” We learn about antisemitism in a particular historical period by, for example, examining Eliot’s case.
In the economics of scholarship – good scholarship – we tend to not forget that just saying “antisemitic” doesn’t in and of itself tell us much about Eliot. We tend to remember and remember how to explore that we learn about antisemitism in part by studying the details of Eliot’s case. The Google approach to “learning anything quickly” doesn’t convey scholarship – just quick and dirty call-and-response labels.
In the idealized and perfected economics of Google, people mostly sit around consuming and producing content through the enactment of rituals as encoded in the logic of web pages, indirectly controlling the flow of money and goods. Producers observe the people and compete for their purchases by giving them fractions of the purchase price through advertising. People buy on-line, extract some use-value, and resell on-line. The system is not much interested in preserving and conveying scholarship for scholarship cannot be conveyed “almost instantly” in a few well-selected search results.
The Enlightenment gets “defined” lots of different ways and I’m not much of one for definitive definitions but here’s one way to define it:
The Enlightenment is the convergence of a set of important ideas: the idea of individual freedom; the idea of rationality and of the limits and problems of rationality; the sense that an aware-of-the-problematics employment of rationality is not only compatible with but necessary to individual freedom; the sense that the social and economic order is what reproduces the Enlightenment across time and space and what can fail to reproduce it. (Thus, for example, it leads directly to the American Revolution.)
As we more and more intrusively let the Net redefine “friendship,” “reputation,” “freedom,” “collaboration,” and “knowledge,” we are turning our attention away from the real social order and we’re turning our backs on the Enlightenment entirely. We’re giving up all of that to play a video game, with Google, complete with Real Prizes. We’re picking ritual over ideas and knowledge.
-t
Thank you for the kind words, Nick.
-t
Tom’s comments deconstructs an argument I did not make, and missed my implicit argument that encloses his.
But more than that, he reminds me quite vividly of why I loathe poets. And Postmodernists.
Charles,
People don’t generally agree about the meaning of words like “deconstruct” or “postmodernist” and so all we are left with here is that you issue invective.
You made no argument but you forwarded an argument of which you were reminded. That argument was that humans are set apart from other animals by language and in particular by language’s ability to store knowledge. In those terms, I countered that surely language is at least as much about mindless ritual and I pointed out ways in which mindless ritual is also plausibly a survival characteristic. I don’t think there’s any high-falutin’ post-modern-gaga foo there. I picked up your own terms and drew out their trajectories.
-t
Nick,
You cannot write a post saying blogging is becoming superficial, photo and tags driven, and then throw us a bone that juicy: that’s just unfair priming.
Tom,
Kudos on your post, and on calling ‘post-modernist’ an invective. I’d call ‘deconstruct’ a joke, though — but that’s just me being oxymoronic.
I’ve heard this argument before, that Google and instant search are destroying connected thinking. While it’s probably true in some cases (They’re are all sorts of people, and all sorts of thinking “styles”), in my case, and probably for many other people as well, I think the opposite is true.
Google and the web in a broader sense makes, or can make, EVERYTHING available, including most of the world’s books. For example, I am an Entomologist, which is a Biologist of sorts. In the past several months I have downloaded around 100 full-length books from the Internet Archive and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. These include most of the major classics in Biology, as for one example, all of Alfred Russell Wallace’s books on biogeography; or, for a second, books by Weismann, Mendel, Bateson, and Morgan on Genetics. This is all stuff I never thought I’d see, period, much less be able to read for free at my leisure on my own computer. As an aside, most of these books are very well illustrated by what I take to be woodcuts (but could be some other kind of printing). Most of the “woodcuts” from the 19th century books put both photographs and simple drawings from todays books to shame.
In fact, I’ve been so impressed by all the free material I’ve been able to download, that I’ve been wondering how modern booksellers will keep in business.
I’ve also been wondering if this onslaught of old reading material is going to change the way we think. Just a few short years ago people were more or less trapped in the present in a way that the web is exploding forever. For example, earlier today I was reading “Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan” detailing John L. Stevens 1840’s discovery of Mayan ruins in Central America (the illustrations are fantastic). I got this off of the Internet Archive. It was scanned from a mid-19th century copy. Do you think I could have read that in the library? And if I could, it certainly wouldn’t have been as easy as pulling it up on my computer screen. And why would I buy something when I’ve got this, and thousands of others like it?
A long while back I read Spengler’s “Decline of the West” (in hard copy — I’ve still got it). he mentioned something he called “pseudomorphosis.” By this he meant the unnatural warping of one culture by another. That concept could have applicability here. The past could warp the present. Or rather, culture from the greatly-enhanced past, conveniently available in a way that it never was originally, could drown the home-grown culture of the present.
Even if this happens, however, the result will be much different from the media-starved culture for which most of these books were written. Marshall McLuhan makes the point in “Understanding Media” that media cannot be viewed in isolation from THEIR context: the type of mind that is going to be produced by a steady diet of reading in an 1840 farmhouse is going to be much different from, say,
the type produced by a steady diet of reading today, even if the material is exactly the same.
I’ve probably said enough to joggle some brain cells and start a discussion, but before I sign off I want to reproduce a paragraph or so I posted on my own blog over a year ago on a closely-related subject. It was buried in a much longer post with a different title. Here it is:
“Speaking of distraction, it was once claimed that hyperlinks on the world-wide-web would end linear connected thought as we know it, because people would click on the links, prior to finishing reading the entire piece. Their train of thought would be broken, just as described for TV and newspapers. I personally think the opposite has happened. I do occasionally click on a link before finishing the paragraph it is in. But it is just when I can see that the link goes to a definition and/or photo, and I don’t know enough about the word to make sense out of its use. In these cases, I come back to the paragraph, and read it again from the start. My understanding has been enhanced, not crippled. In fact, I think hyperlinks make it possible to focus while reading, much more than with books. Part of this stems from the vast wealth of information available on the web, that can instantly be brought to bear on understanding a particular piece. No private library can possibly compete in either extent or convenience. Part also comes from another fact that is really a subset of the first–most web pages are illustrated with photographs, in a way that until very recently was too expensive for most books. It is easy to take a picture and intersperse it with text on the web, and costs less as well. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ I personally have made sense of so many things in the last several years with the web, that were previously disconnected or not linked properly in my imagination. Of course, I’m speaking as someone who has been saturated with books and print culture long before the web existed, and have read of or memorized names for a great many things I have never seen. Maybe hyperlinks affect the younger generation differently.”
I’ve got to look at what I write more carefully. In reading my post over I discovered that I made two huge errors in grammar, one in what I wrote today, and one in what I quoted. It must be the medium ;->.
Nice thought piece, but, and this is a big but, it propagates a huge piece of non-thinking.
“Oops. The nuke plant mysteriously exploded.”
Not gonna happen.
Cite: http://tinyurl.com/5fdnm5
If you are arguing about critical thinking and language, you probably should practice it.
Whilst Tom makes excellent points about the duality of learning through both ritual and knowledge and the cyclical nature between the two, the fundamental premise that easy access to information leads to ritual could be levelled against the introduction of mass printed books, encyclopaedias and even the Dewey decimal classification system.
Whilst I can understand the argument that “learning anything quickly” tends to lead to ritual, easy access to information is not the same thing. If anything, easy access to information provides a wider range of participants in any discussion and levels the inequality between the distribution of opportunity to be involved and study a subject and the distribution of ability to contribute to that subject.
I can rote learn “Huckleberry Finn” or gain knowledge through either the book or the internet version. Certainly the easier it is to gain information, the more likely I am to wander but the advantage of the internet age is that it provides a means by which I can contribute and study, no matter who I am.
As with the open sourced world, if you have the ability to contribute then you have the opportunity to do so. Such a state of affairs should be with all walks of life and scholarship and the assignment of authority by self selected quangos is a ritual which needs to be challenged.
I understand Tom’s points and also the concerns that you have raised over the dangers but surely the benefit of levelling the inequality and the removal of barriers to participation are worth it?
I’m not entirely convinced by Tom’s distinction between knowledge and ritual, mainly because I don’t think ritual is usually that *dull*. Not so much ‘Here we do the ritual’ as ‘Here we do *this specific* ritual for reasons which are *really important* (even if we can’t explain them)’. How that maps on to rote-teaching and rote-learning I’m not sure.
Stephen:
“The past could warp the present. Or rather, culture from the greatly-enhanced past, conveniently available in a way that it never was originally, could drown the home-grown culture of the present.”
In music, it’s been happening for a while now – see
http://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2006/01/21/started-slow-long-ago/
Wow! Thank you for a series of interesting comments.
Stephen: Yes, one of the virtues of the net is that many previously obscure materials are becoming digitized and more widely available. And I agree with you that the “free association” way of exploring the net can most definitely lead to deeper insights and to recognizing previously obscure connections between lines of thought. (See below, however.)
Patrick: you are too hasty with your put down. You pointed to a web page that explains that nuclear plants generally don’t “explode like a nuclear weapon,” and used that to make fun of scenario of an exploding nuclear plant. There are other ways for things to explode besides “like a nuclear weapon”. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, you may recall. In large part it exploded because of operators performing bureaucratic and technical ritual without understanding what they were doing. (Chernobyl was, in fact, the inspiration for my example.)
Simon: You wrote “[…] the fundamental premise that easy access to information leads to ritual could be levelled against the introduction of mass printed books, encyclopaedias and even the Dewey decimal classification system.” The problem is that nobody (not even me) has accepted that premise in the first place. It’s not simply “easy access” that I’m talking about but, with Stephen, please see below (for a clarification).
Phil: The distinction between “knowledge” and “ritual” is not intended to be part of any grand epistemological theory but just a plain spoken “you know it when you see it” distinction. Whether the topic is postmodernism or nuclear power plants it’s easy enough to spot a clear enough distinction between people playing word games, and people with a point (if you catch my drift :-).
So… above I said “see below” a few times. I wanted to try to make a slight clarification.
What first drove me to write the comment that Nick promoted to an article was an earlier comment, from someone else, that asserted (paraphrasing) “you can learn almost anything almost instantly” using Google, etc.
Well, very simply, you can’t. You can learn almost nothing instantly using Google and similar tools. And yet, the claim that you can learn almost anything that way was going unchallenged.
What can Google do? Google can almost instantly give you a page ranked index of pages conforming to a certain search. Google can almost instantly make guesses about a set of ads that it would tend to pay off, if displayed to you. Google can perform surveillance so as to tune page ranking and ad placement to maximize the likelihood of your viewing more ads and of those views paying off — in part Google can do this by encouraging you (even through economic incentive) to “flit about” in your “reading” of the web.
That’s a list of things which Google, very literally, actually does. We don’t need any theories of knowledge or theories of ritual to interpret them. That’s what Google does.
Similarly, you can not “make a friend” by clicking a link on MySpace. Very literally, you can create a database entry on MySpace servers that records that you’ve clicked a certain link. MySpace and MySpace screen scrapers can and do mine and summarize all such database entries in many different ways, quite often for the purpose of improving the economic performance of on-line advertising.
We don’t need any grand theory of the true nature of “friendship” here. We need only agree that a few bits in a database owned by MySpace ain’t friendship.
What impact does this have on society? On culture?
If you are terribly geeky or if you are older and thoughtful then you might not be alarmed. For example, when MySpace calls that “friending” we know that they are trying to use “friend” as a technical term. It’s not “friend” as in “my best friend, growing up”. It’s “friend” as in “has access permission to this data.” (Geeks will recognize a similar use of “friend” as jargon in the C++ programming language.) If you’re older, even if you think MySpace’s use of “friend” is decadent you might think “Well, people aren’t that dumb. Nobody misunderstands that, really.”
Similarly, the geeky and/or the older are less likely to be put off by “you can learn anything almost instantly….” because they understand that to mean that you can find just about any of the information you can access on the web quite quickly, most of the time, using something like Google. (It may or may not be true that you can find all available information that easily but at least the older and/or geeky will understand “learn anything almost instantly…” to really mean “locate information almost instantly…”
The comfort the old/geeky perspective offers, though, doesn’t hold up to reality.
In reality — in our economy and in our society — MySpace’s “friend” is beginning to supplant our older, more lasting notions of the word. Google’s “quickly found information” is being redefined as “the knowable and the known.”
One blatant example is the use of social rankings and of search results by employers when they research job applicants. A hiring agent might quickly discover that an applicant is or is not a “friend” or a “friend of a friend” of a famous computer programmer. A hiring agent might quickly discover information about an applicant’s past. Based on the “knowledge” discovered, almost instantly via Google and similar, the candidate is quickly classified. Google has, for all practical intents and purposes, produced the truth about that candidate.
Another blatant example is the case of the comment above flaming me for talking about exploding nuke plants. The comment produced an (almost instantly found, no doubt) authoritative reference to “prove” me wrong. If a comment like that really catches on — becomes cited enough — it’s the kind of thing likely to influence, say, a public hearing about where to locate a new nuke plant. It becomes, for social purposes, the truth about nuke plants. It operates in society as knowledge, even though upon close examination it is found to be a non sequitor from the science and experience of history that precedes it.
To sum up to this point: we have in Google, in the “Web 2.0” phenom., and in redefinitions like “friend” and “information” a new kind of ersatz Enlightenment. Discourse still resembles Enlightenment discourse: we talk of truth, rationality, etc. Yet, it is not Enlightenment discourse because we’ve redefined truth, rationality, friendship, etc.
And this ersatz enlightenment comes with a business model that is built around getting people to participate in it more and more, as rapidly and uncritically as they can. Show more effective ads more quickly. Produce more user-generated content more quickly.
And that business model is “winning” in the sense that its new definitions of things like “truth” and “reputation” are being picked up and operated on as truth and reputation.
Nothing in the technology of computing, the Internet, hypertext, or search requires those business models or those redefinitions.
Everything in those business models requires the redefinitions and their adoption in “the real world”.
Culture — the Enlightenment itself — is under attack by those business models.
Some people will find this last bit to be a strange tangent but they can go pound salt:
The free software movement is not simply about the “GNU General Public License” (GPL) — not simply about copyright or software patents or DRM or any of that. In its origins and its purpose still it is about the freedom of computer users from the control of computer operators.
Before there was a free software movement per se, early freedom fighters who lived in a world of locked-up mainframe computers were already in the habit of picking locks and giving all users of the computers full control over their own computing.
The modern “Web 2.0” business models are a reactionary response: an effort by industrialists to restore the locks around computing and give computer operators power over computer users. That is why these businesses are basically competing to compel and/or trick users into reliance on each business’ locked-up, centralized, mammoth computers.
And that is why these businesses are so Orwellian in how they speak. “Privacy” means mostly a limit that stops other users from seeing your data but imposes no such restriction on the mainframe operators. “Friend” is not an intimate and human relationship but a relation recorded on an official ledger for the benefit of mainframe operators. “Information” is “what you can quickly find on Google” with someone looking over your shoulder to see what you are reading.
We don’t need those business models for any technical reason. We don’t need those redefinitions for any good reason at all. We don’t need a privileged class of computer operators. We should not have people adopting those definitions and using them in real world decisions as if Google == Truth, MySpace == Reputation, War == Peace, etc.
And yet look around: they’re winning.
-t
p.s.: No, my arguments don’t apply equally well to, for example,
the Dewey Decimal System — don’t condemn it in anywhere near the same
way. The Dewey Decimal System is a mechanism for creating
location-based “hyper-links” mainly among printed materials. You
never hear someone say “You can learn almost anything, almost
instantly, just by following an HTML hyperlink!” Similarly, you
never hear someone say “You can learn almost anything, almost
instantly, just by looking up a Dewey call number for relevant
materials.”
‘The distinction between “knowledge” and “ritual” is not intended to be part of any grand epistemological theory but just a plain spoken “you know it when you see it” distinction.’
I spend my working life undermining plain-spoken “you know it when you see it” distinctions (to the increase of knowledge, I like to think). It’s a small nitpick – it just struck me as odd that the term you used for routinised, meaningless behaviour patterns actually refers to activities that are highly charged with both meaning and passion. I think it might be a case of “all fools bar me and thee, and I’m not too sure about thee” – I engage in philosophical debate, you talk in abstractions, he plays with words.
On your main argument, I completely agree. When I first went online (about twelve years ago) the analogy that immediately came to mind was Asimov’s MULTIVAC – a computer (or rather a terminal) in every home, instant access to the sum of the world’s knowledge served up by a vast, disembodied and disinterested intelligence. I think MULTIVAC’s almost here, but unfortunately it’s called Google and it’s anything but disinterested.
Phil:
What do you call routinized, meaningless behavior patterns that are often highly charged with anti-rational accounts of meaning and which are often acted out with passion? :-)
(Where I come from we call it “the political conversation that breaks out after supper at every family reunion.” :-)
-t
I see Phil’s point, but I think “ritual” is the right word, as it’s flexible enough to cover everything from a routine to a ceremony to a rite. And when Tom originally wrote “no meaning beyond ‘here, we do the ritual,'” I don’t think that that implied meaninglessness. As Phil notes, “here, we do the ritual” can be rich with meaning even though, as Tom notes, it can be empty of understanding. It’s meaning at a very primitive level, which can also be an extremely powerful level. There is a sort of passionate primitivism in the subtle redefinition of knowledge taking place on the Net – knowledge as an elaborate, even fetishistic ritual involving the manipulation of symbols without necessarily demanding any deep understanding. (Aren’t the Wikipedians, in a way, a primitive, if high-tech, tribe?)
I’m intrigued by the analogy between such knowledge routines, played out by people, and the routines of software. Maybe a ritual can be understood as an algorithm through which people compute meaning from meaninglessness? Which means that the programmer becomes, without knowing it, a new kind of shaman, defining the rituals through which we achieve meaning without understanding. Knowledge becomes a kind of dance. Drained, of course, of any physicality – a dance in the mind.
I figured this conversation was over. But things have been churning along in my mind for about a day now. At first I didn’t really get everything Tom Lord meant about “ritual;” it seemed like a stretch to call using Google an exercise in it. I think I’ve finally caught on. You can define ritual as a recasting of something originally intended for a higher purpose into something with distinctly lower one. For example, actions that perhaps originally went with a genuine attempt to commune with the universe, become routine religious chants. Or processes that originally helped to prod real thought, become check boxes on a list. In essence, this is a redefinition — or, and I may be using the term wrong, deconstruction — and in cases like the ones I mentioned it occurs over a long span of time. In that sense, except for the time element, using Google to “learn” IS a ritual, or at least is in danger of becoming one, if not accompanied with some real flesh and blood experience. So is redefining “friend” as a link on FaceBook. Ritual is also a perfect definition of school (and yes, all the way through the doctorate).
It’s also the exact thing that Marshall McLuhan addressed in his book “Understanding Media” (which I read) and I think, “The Gutenberg Galaxy” (which I haven’t read). I don’t have my copy of Understanding Media available right now. But I don’t think McLuhan used the word “ritual” anywhere. If I remember correctly the same charge of superficiality was originally leveled against books printed with movable type, as compared to manuscripts; and, before that, against writing on paper, as opposed to cuneiform script; and before that, against writing in general, as opposed to oral tradition. In each case knowledge became more detached from reality, that is, more abstract; in each case this abstraction was accompanied by a great increase in power; and in each case what real knowledge could be encapsulated by the usurping process was greatly democratized. It’s not a big jump to apply all of this to Google and Web 2.0 apps.
If this was obvious to everyone else, I apologize in advance for my equine brutality.
in each case this abstraction was accompanied by a great increase in power
Yes, I think this is one manifestation of one of McLuhan’s most interesting observations: that every technology amputates as it amplifies.
More neat stuff. Thanks. I’ll ramble here rather than be all stiff and formal.
Nick: “programmers as accidental shamans” — well, yeah. There are lots of ways to see that from Lessig’s “code is law” concept to foucault on the relationship between power and discourse. And, it’s in that light that I wind up nagging, for example, Tim O’Reilly. His Web 2.0 narratives are huge drivers of discourse around business investment and around technical decisions made by hackers. His paradigms of Web 2.0 are companies effecting enormous changes and bringing about massive shifts in the intimate behavior of people. You’d think a lot of critical analysis and precautionary principle would be in order but, nope, Tim’s narratives, while not logically all that solid, have a relentless message of “it’s all good” and criticism is excuse for ostracism and a sneer of the “oh, you just don’t get it” sort. And who are the main choreographers of these enormous changes in population behavior — this fantastic degree of submission to surveillance, this redefining of such basic things as friendship, and truth — well, the programmers hypnotized by these narratives. There are the programmers who think it’s all meaningless but at least there’s a paycheck in it. There are the programmers who buy Tim’s stories. If this ain’t a new religion and those programmers ain’t the new high priesthood then I don’t know whatever would be.
Of late he’s on a kick of exhorting people to “work on stuff that matters” and, giving the benefit of the doubt, I want to ask where that guy was for the last 10 years.
Stephen: the flows of discourse and information generally, and the arrangement of bodies in space and time, the conditions of the surveillance of bodies and intervention — all of these things are deeply intertwined. There is “truth” as pertains to power (effective social truth) and there is “truth” as pertains to nature (“That which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it…”) They aren’t disjoint categories, nor quite identical either. The ways in which we can produce, store, forward, and process signals are changing exponentially fast — generally growing by all the interesting quantifiable measures. And that changes the game of discourse and thus changes the game of flows of power. Mr. McLuhan, meet Mr. Foucault. All that’s well and good but now how can we think about the possibilities of resistance and of the freedom of the self? A first step is to be skeptical of uncritical claims that Google or Web 2.0 or whathaveyou represents, well, “progress”.
-t
Tom,
“There are other ways for things to explode besides “like a nuclear weapon”. The Chernobyl…”
Yes, and Chernobyl was a steam explosion. Very bad, hurt a lot of people, etc. It was not a mushroom cloud rising from a bomb. Yet that is exactly the image that most folks have when they hear of any problem at a fission plant. They expected a mushroom cloud over Three Mile Island.
So there is a difference in meaning, propagated by the media and a lack of critical thinking. The sad fact is that the 20 second sound bite is often wrong, and in the Google and Wikipedia world, 20 seconds is all there is for most in-depth philosophical discussions.
Discourse must be grounded in facts, the analysis is built on facts. The common basis of knowledge is needed before we can begin the discussion.
As I said, I liked the piece, but the comment on nuclear power plants hit my internal ears like dropping a platter of pots and pans in the middle of a symphony. Its very hard to go back to enjoying the melody when your ears are ringing.
Patrick:
You remind me that (a) you can’t argue with your readers – they’re always, in some sense, right by definition (especially when they dilute their criticism with flattery); (b) it’s always helpful to learn when and why a particular bit of writing falls flat in some cases.
So, thanks.
-t