Changes in the Organization of Knowledge

“Invisible collages” seem to function like other aspects of a community which are informal. They are a place to communicate ideas and thoughts without the usual hierarchies that are implicated in any social organization. Like in real life communities we have formal and informal arenas, within which we learn to act and interact accordingly.  

Knowledge is constructed and communicated in a very piecemeal manner. It doesn’t just appear; rather it evolves slowly and precariously, until all the participants internalize parts of its structure and then replicate them so that they seem ‘natural’ and ‘objective’ to the group.

Thus all knowledge is a collaborative project, even if it seems compartmentalized. Modern cyber-networks weaken the ‘objectivity’ of any one claim; lessening its power to form self-sustained, reliable and established ‘truths’. Because knowledge is being transformed at an incomprehensible rate it is virtually impossible to understand as a whole. We only perceive miniscule parts of it as our minds are constituted in such a way that they only allow a certain amount of assimilation to be realized.

We like to think that technology aids our cognitive abilities, when in actual fact it probably inhibits them. When once we had to remember and memorise countless stories in pre-literate times we now have information at the touch of a button (stored in a database). This has implications on the literal nature of knowledge. Before we wrote things down, they were remembered through mythologies and allegorical stories. Now statistics and facts flood the internet in the form of ‘neutral’ information without any mediating significance or metaphorical substance. I am interested in what implications this has for human ontology. As human beings we seem to be driven by meaning and meaningful interaction. Although it would be impossible to prove, I would debate, as many other sociologists have, that modernity, and to a more pronounced extent postmodernity, offers us very little epistemological stability within a unified symbolic order (if we can even use these terms anymore). Meanings are fluctuating constantly in postmodernity, which means our identities are made hyper-reflexive. We can obviously still communicate, but this interaction is emotionally limited, rather than enhanced by many new technologies, in terms of its existential significance for humans. Our ontological foundations disappear leaving us floating, lost in an endless sea of empty signifiers.      

~ by jem8 on January 26, 2007.