Distinguishing knowledge from information
They say it’s changing slowly, however, for all the technology and multimedia at the disposal of educators today, I still see them producing people with knowledge that is so compartmentalised that in spite of all their certificates and diplomas, they struggle to think “outside the box”, even at the highest level.
A few weeks ago, during a coffee break at a seminar at a Dutch university, I was standing listening to a senior professor and two associates discussing the sociological dynamics of today's interconnected world. Predictably, the current proliferation of social media and business networking channels was raised.
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| Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg Karmeliterplatz / Christofsgässchen, Mainz, Germany. By Karlheinz Oswald 2001 |
Ok, professors (in spite of what they might tell you) are fallible human beings who burp and fart like everyone else. However, the dons’ discourse, while still steeped in the phraseology of academia, started to sound slightly like one (we’ve all heard them) between three old farts in a pub bellyaching about how “the Internet has made the world so difficult to understand”. As the coffee cups emptied and the second session was announced, the most enlightening conclusion the trio of mortar boards had reached was that today, it is equally easy to disseminate ignorance as it is to disseminate knowledge.
Now you just don’t say “duh!” to Professors (though you might write a three-page essay questioning the value of stating the patently obvious). However, I couldn’t help noticing that they seemed to focus more on the fact that friends and business associates now can and often do remain in contact around the clock and around the world, than in the actual quality and content of the communication.
Having grown up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I’m all too familiar with the attitude that “television is baaaaaad”. After all, it was and still often is accepted opinion among educators and concerned parents. However, over two decades of listening to TV fuddy-duddies, I seldom heard anyone mention the relevance of the content.
Now you just don’t say “duh!” to Professors (though you might write a three-page essay questioning the value of stating the patently obvious). However, I couldn’t help noticing that they seemed to focus more on the fact that friends and business associates now can and often do remain in contact around the clock and around the world, than in the actual quality and content of the communication.
Having grown up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I’m all too familiar with the attitude that “television is baaaaaad”. After all, it was and still often is accepted opinion among educators and concerned parents. However, over two decades of listening to TV fuddy-duddies, I seldom heard anyone mention the relevance of the content.
A TV (just like a computer) is a box of silicone, wires and tubes, with (mercifully) an “off switch”. If it’s used to bring non-stop monosyllabic rap or inane “comedy” that's so funny they have to use canned laughter into our living rooms, then it will suitably lobotomise the viewer. Consider the descent of the English language ability in those generations of South Africans who grew up during the Equity ban, which saw to it that nothing but low-budget (and occasionally mainstream e.g. Dallas) Americana was available for broadcast by a state TV network already beleaguered by economic (and cultural) sanctions. Result? Try using puns or innuendo on someone who missed the whole of Monty Python, Not the Nine O’clock News and most of Blackadder.
But a few hours of BBC, History Channel or National Geographic documentaries can do nobody any harm. Phenomena such as The Learning Channel have been transmitting education material worldwide long before the Internet was ever thought of. What's more, rather than waste valuable lesson time in traipsing one class at a time to an audio-visual room, as the more progressive schools boasted in the '70s, today's educators can simply instruct their students to watch such-and-such a programme as low-resistance “homework”.
Recently, while watching Downton Abbey, I couldn’t help finding parallels with today’s world (and e.g. debates about cellphone radiation) when watching one of the maids fanning the newly installed electric plugs with a feather duster “to remove dangerous vapours”. The concept was an easy sell to any ignoramus with a nose and a memory for that metallic ionic smell that hung around Bakelite.
Similarly, after relenting to introducing television in 1975, the South African government (to ensure that all of their well-aimed propaganda reached its intended destination) spread the story (which was eagerly believed and embraced) that it was “bad for the TV to turn it off”.
The result – remembering also that in the early days, having a TV set was something of a status symbol – is that when visiting many South African homes you are still often subjected to the socially stupefying flickering TV screen with the sound off that constantly draws every eye.
Now, anno 2011, these undeniably venerable academics seemed to be making a similar mistake and thereby missing the point.
Eventually, once the passage of centuries or millennia has shrunk our parochial perspective on the modern age into the type of context by which we today study the Greeks, Persians and Romans, some events that we revere as milestones of our age will probably seem less important to the historians of the time.
For example, just as we tend to speak of the “Peloponnesian Wars”, which ultimately determined a Greco-Roman rather than Persian cultural destiny for Western Europe, they will probably view the period from 1914 to 1945 as “an era of European-led global conflict” rather than two distinct World Wars where, even to today’s observer, the Second can be seen as the result of returning tensions that were inadequately (and ineptly) resolved at the cessation of the First.
I doubt they will ignore the impact of Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg’s first use of movable type in 1439; an event that will arguably be seen as the kick-off of the Information Revolution. It was even more of a crisis then than the advent and subsequent ubiquity of Twitter and Facebook are now.
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| Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg who sparked the 'information revolution'. The inscription on his printed page: "et la lumière fut" (And there was Light). Completed in 1840 by David d'Angers (1788-1856) in Strasbourg, France |
Suddenly, still assisted by the descendants of the roads by which the Romans had disseminated their imperial influence, hundreds of copies of essays, texts, and most importantly, ideas, could traverse the distance between Mainz, Madrid, Manchester or Moscow in the time it took a horseman to ride and distribute them. As readable text became more commonplace, so did the desire to read and eventually literacy. But literate people ask logical questions, which was exactly what the “powers” of the time were at pains to avoid, probably lest it show-up their lack of logical answers.
As the aftershocks of Guttenberg’s revolution resound today and we reach for our smartphone or look for the “like” or “share” link on this blog, even the most learned among us can become so dazzled by technology, we often miss the point and fall into the common human trap of not being able to see the wood for the trees.
Any geek will tell you that there is NOTHING that you can do at the touch of a button on a smartphone or Tablet today that any techie with the right hardware and software couldn’t do (albeit comparatively slowly and by jumping through several complicated cybernetic hoops) 15 years ago. The iPhones, Samsungs, and most recently, the Tablets of this world have simply provided the novice user with an easy no-geek-required interface.
Likewise, writing and the alphabet were nothing close to a “new invention” in the 1430s (Guttenberg actually varied his type to intentionally mimic manuscripts). Wholesale production thereof was. So the denizens of Mainz and Strasbourg were less concerned about a contraption – mechanically derived from an Archimedian wine press yet one of the most game-changing human inventions since the wheel – of wood and iron, clumps of lead, piles of paper and gloops of sticky ink. In an age where they were hardly bombarded with technological advancements at the rate we are today, they had the luxury to concern themselves with what it produced, not physically but conjecturally.
Yet today, clearly wise heads are so concerned about the silicone, the software, the speed of the connection and “how beyond them it all is” that they do not have enough time to discuss the impact of one development before another appears on the horizon. Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter might be “all the rage” today, but you can be sure that the_next_big_thing.com is just around the corner.
So it doesn’t make any sense for us to dwell on the nitty-gritty pros and cons of specific programs or communication channels. We need to look at the bigger picture: the increasingly effortless distribution of information, ignorance, data and bullshit over a medium that even the most draconian residual dictators of the world tilt at windmills to control. As just one recent example, during the final days of the Kaddafi regime in Libya, border guards were frisking exiting refugees for data cards lest smartphone-filmed footage of the revolution get out. They failed. It did.
It’s not all that complicated: If I tell you something that is inaccurate (whether intentionally lying or simply sprouting ignorance), it has never mattered how that information reaches you. What matters is whether you lend it any credence or not. And that process occurs independently of any electronic or cybernetic source in the bullshit filter module that has been configured (or has not been admin-disabled) in the supercomputer between your ears. It’s the main reason polygraph test results are usually inadmissible as evidence: They only detect intentional lies – not inaccurate answers the respondent believes to be true.
Thus, in its most obvious guise, “I heard it in the Forum”, “I read it in the newspaper” or “I saw it on TV”, or even “Joe told me” has never had any logical connection with whether it’s true or not. But every day, people all over this scary world give it one (see ABC).
I have infinite respect for our enlightened and liberal Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, but for once, in her 2009 Christmas speech, I significantly disagreed with her. (The 2010 offering was sufficiently mutilated by the dictates of the prevailing political farce to make it memorably forgettable). In broad terms, she laments the impersonality of today’s “virtual interaction” but that is understandably characteristic of her generation. A telephone call never had the same value as a written card to my Victorian grandmother.
The reality is that while 15 years ago, we might have interacted superficially with the person sitting opposite us with whom we had nothing in common but sharing the same train or tram out of boredom (occasionally with undeniably interesting results), today, in the same space and the same time, we're interacting, albeit virtually – with people we choose to interact with – not just with those who circumstances happen to throw in our path, at what I personally perceive as a more “quality time” level.
Anyone who hasn’t (yet) had interesting or serendipitous virtual meetings in cyberspace must be over 70. If you were born subsequent to the sinking of the Titanic, how is the fact that it happens in cyberspace and not on public transport relevant? And in 2011, if you haven’t met a real-life happy couple who initially met in cyberspace, you need to get out more.
This blog alone is a perfect example. It allows a solitary essayist to have his work read by an international forum, without the intervention or formal censorship (whatever its pros and cons) of any traditional publishing infrastructure. Whether you give it any credence is (and always was) entirely up to you. The medium is essentially irrelevant, although my enthusiasm for it quite probably mirrors that which my 15th-Century colleagues must have had for Herr Guttenberg’s adapted wine press… and for the same reasons.
There’s no denying the ego-boost of seeing your by-line in print. However, unless you get a nasty letter (the platitudes at parties don’t count), you seldom have any way of assessing how many people actually read your rag.
New media, call it “Internet” or anything else we might come up with in the future, creates a level playing field for the knowledgeable to share and disseminate their knowledge, and the ignorant to share their ignorance. We are the first generation to see technologies (e.g. 35mm film, telex, fax, PDAs, dial-up modems, and probably soon, massive local hard drives) rise and fall in our lifetimes; as this unfiltered avalanche of knowledge and ignorance descends on even the most simple desktop, mobile phone, or future device we have yet to dream of, it will be increasingly up to us to distinguish which is which.
And the ability to do so will define the new elite.
– AMB
“Intelligence is not WHAT you KNOW...
It's what you DO when you DON'T KNOW...” (from the valedictory speech of an old Cambridge Classics Prof. whose name escapes me but whose wisdom doesn't) |
| Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg Karmeliterplatz / Christofsgässchen, Mainz, Germany. By Karlheinz Oswald 2001 (Detail) |
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