Knowledge as a Conversation
D. Weinberger has a fascinating post regarding how the exchange of information at the speed of light has changed our understanding of the world.
We used to believe that the world was divided into those who believe the truth and those who don’t. Our job was to convert them, kill them, or let them live their lives peacefully unaware they were about to plummet into an eternity of fire for believing the wrong things.
Then we were able to communicate at the speed of light rather than at the speed of wind, so we learned more about other cultures. At least some of us grudgingly concluded that those other people were entitled to their contrary beliefs. The world, we admitted, was unsatisfyingly relativistic and we attempted the impossible task of believing that beliefs for which we were willing to die were no better than their contradictions. Different strokes for different belief systems.
Then the Internet happened and the world fell into conversation. It’s no longer a matter of getting reports back on the strange beliefs of distant lands — “Why, in China crickets are considered to be smart and monkeys to be dumb…Believe it or not!” — but an immediate awareness that we’re all living within a single conversation space. We may not actually be IM’ing Chinese Communists or Jihadists, but we at least know that what’s being said in one corner of the Web is being refracted elsewhere. And we know that we can pick up the Skype phone and actually talk with a Communist. Where there aren’t actual conversations, there is now the constant awareness of the potential for conversation.
Read the whole thing here.
And, “transformative potential of deep connectivity”? Well, it’s an interesting read, whatever it means.
His explication of knowledge as neverending conversation resonates deeply with the kind of discourse that sits at the center of political behavior. The image of the town meeting, in which all are given the opportunity to express their points of view embodies that political discourse for me. In those conversations, minds are changed, knowledged re-formed, relationships deepened. This is why I believe in the transformative potential of deep connectivity.
And Savage Minds elaborates:
Weinberger is something of an Internet utopianist, so his post leans heavily on new technologies that have provided conduits for the wide transmission of ideas—as he says, you may not be IM’ing Chinese Communists or Jihadists, but the conversations others are having in out-of-the-way corners of the network are refracting through the whole. But I think his comments can be abstracted from the technology issue to encompass a way of looking at social communication in general. As noted here and elsewhere, the model of cultures as bounded entities is highly unsatisfactory as a way of looking at the modern world (and possibly of looking at human history at any point).
