In Respone to Geert Lovink
"Techno-scientific knowledge could fade away as alchemy did a few centuries ago."
I'm intrigued by this comparison to alchemy. Doesn't seem to fit as a good analogy. I mean, alchemy made promises it could never keep. Techno-Science makes promises nobody believes, and then surpasses itself by delivering results beyond our dreams. Well, Our dreams maybe, but the dreams of the generation below me, and of the next and the next, these dreams are unfathomable. They are growing up with influences that were impossible just a few years ago. They see electric cars; that must be normal. They see cell phones; that must be normal. Palmtop computers? Normal. Laptops, portable music libraries, DVD players in the car, instant digital images, microwave ovens, all these things are not only normal, but uber-normal. These are things that have always been, they are the way of the world, and the reason everything works.
With influences like this, I fear what will come in the next twenty years. Which is normal as well. My parent's generation stumbles slightly over computer use, and reads every manual before using the program. My grandparent's generation ( 80+ ) don't use computers unless prodded by their children, and then they have minimal knowledge of the working beyond the specific set of instructions on a Post It (normal) note stuck to the side of the screen. What our world looks like today is a product of designers and architects and builders and cultures. They played with wooden blocks, erector sets, Matchbox cars, train-sets, whereas kids now are playing online tactical battle simulations, and have toys that respond to their voices and display signs of life. Many of these children will grow up knowing, not thinking, but Knowing that all of this and more is normal. Some will question. They will seek knowledge. And they will find it.
Techno-scientific knowledge is transient. Sure. All knowledge is. The Know-ers keep dying, and they only ever tell the next generation, the Know-ees if you will, an interpretation of what they themselves knew. So knowledge is transient, on a longer-then-human timescale. This particular knowledge, the 'techno-science', is such that it preserves itself in and of itself. It will continue to thrive as long as it exists, which means as long as there is power and computers. So the knowledge will have capacity to exist forever. This means that subsequent generations can learn all of what is known and then build from that. Masses will ignore the boring, the un-gilded, the 'old' sites. But masses ignore a lot. That's one of the defining qualities, in fact, of mass behavior. It is individual people who learn. Those who want to learn more can. Not always as much as they would like to learn, or have the means to learn. The knowledge that exists simply as knowledge may get harder and harder to strain out of the general mish mash of things, but it will stay in being, in a discernable form, for as long as the power stays on, and then as long as the solar cells last.
On the other hand, once the original is altered, the new set of knowledge becomes truth, right? I mean, how could we ever know, if what we know is based solely on what we know?
Aw, damn, I dunno.
I'm intrigued by this comparison to alchemy. Doesn't seem to fit as a good analogy. I mean, alchemy made promises it could never keep. Techno-Science makes promises nobody believes, and then surpasses itself by delivering results beyond our dreams. Well, Our dreams maybe, but the dreams of the generation below me, and of the next and the next, these dreams are unfathomable. They are growing up with influences that were impossible just a few years ago. They see electric cars; that must be normal. They see cell phones; that must be normal. Palmtop computers? Normal. Laptops, portable music libraries, DVD players in the car, instant digital images, microwave ovens, all these things are not only normal, but uber-normal. These are things that have always been, they are the way of the world, and the reason everything works.
With influences like this, I fear what will come in the next twenty years. Which is normal as well. My parent's generation stumbles slightly over computer use, and reads every manual before using the program. My grandparent's generation ( 80+ ) don't use computers unless prodded by their children, and then they have minimal knowledge of the working beyond the specific set of instructions on a Post It (normal) note stuck to the side of the screen. What our world looks like today is a product of designers and architects and builders and cultures. They played with wooden blocks, erector sets, Matchbox cars, train-sets, whereas kids now are playing online tactical battle simulations, and have toys that respond to their voices and display signs of life. Many of these children will grow up knowing, not thinking, but Knowing that all of this and more is normal. Some will question. They will seek knowledge. And they will find it.
Techno-scientific knowledge is transient. Sure. All knowledge is. The Know-ers keep dying, and they only ever tell the next generation, the Know-ees if you will, an interpretation of what they themselves knew. So knowledge is transient, on a longer-then-human timescale. This particular knowledge, the 'techno-science', is such that it preserves itself in and of itself. It will continue to thrive as long as it exists, which means as long as there is power and computers. So the knowledge will have capacity to exist forever. This means that subsequent generations can learn all of what is known and then build from that. Masses will ignore the boring, the un-gilded, the 'old' sites. But masses ignore a lot. That's one of the defining qualities, in fact, of mass behavior. It is individual people who learn. Those who want to learn more can. Not always as much as they would like to learn, or have the means to learn. The knowledge that exists simply as knowledge may get harder and harder to strain out of the general mish mash of things, but it will stay in being, in a discernable form, for as long as the power stays on, and then as long as the solar cells last.
On the other hand, once the original is altered, the new set of knowledge becomes truth, right? I mean, how could we ever know, if what we know is based solely on what we know?
Aw, damn, I dunno.
posted by j.b.v. at 6:27 PM
1 Comments:
Fascinating piece. And is it possible to have too much knowledge? Maybe the fact of so much available information in this techno age means that any one person will only access a small part of it? maybe the question will become how to know the whole?
But as to alchemy, if one thinks of it simply as the incorrect idea that we might be able to change base metals into gold, it was a promise it couldn't keep. If you think of it as an early method of inquiry into the tranformative qualities of matter, it becomes the basis for the knowledge that created techno-science, transmitted in the "normal" indirect and tangential way that has been our habit up until this generation.
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