[Air-l] information and knowledge - III

[Charles Ess]

Finally, the discussion on HUMANIST focused on whether or not humanities
folk's experiences with computing might have changed previous notions (such
as those implied by T.S. Eliot) about knowledge, information, etc.  I
offered the following -

I'm tempted to think that computing has changed people's perceptions - in
the direction of what O'Leary and Brasher in their 1996 essay have
identified as a form of Gnosticism:
==
One issue raised in computer-mediated communication that we find
particularly troubling is the extent to which the new media reduce all
discourse to information. This can result in a contemporary analogue of
Gnosticism, the mystical quest for the knowledge that saves. Physicist Heinz
Pagels puts the problem succinctly:

<quote>Some intellectual prophets have declared the end of the age of
knowledge and the beginning of the age of information. Information tends to
drive out knowledge. Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge
has semantic value. What we want is knowledge, but what we often get is
information. It is a sign of the times that many people cannot tell the
difference between information and knowledge, not to mention wisdom, which
even knowledge tends to drive out. (1988, 49) </quote>

 If our traditions cannot keep knowledge and wisdom alive, these
distinctions will disappear as all is reduced to information. The cyborg's
spiritual quest would become an endless search for the information that
saves-a quest doomed to failure, an endless and eternally restless
manipulation of signs and numbers that, like the search for the
philosopher's stone, can never produce the gold or the semantic value that
we seek. When the ambitious dream described by Richard Lanham in The
Electronic Word is realized, and the whole record of human culture is
digitized and available on computer databases connected to each other by a
global web, our spiritual crisis will remain and even intensify, for we will
be forced to confront the fact that no electronic alchemy can turn
information into knowledge, or into the wisdom that will teach us how to
live.
==
Pagels, Heinz. 1988. The Dreams of Reason. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Cited in O'Leary and Brasher, The Unknown God of the Internet: Religious
Communication from the Ancient Agora to the Virtual Forum, in Ess (ed.)
Philosophical Perspectives on Computer-Mediated Communication (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press), 262.

As a last note - Bill McKibben's _The Age of Missing Information_ (1993)
argues much the same point, primarily vis-à-vis TV, drawing on the work of
phenomenologist / philosopher (and closet theologian) Albert Borgmann,
McLuhan, and others, along with his own experience of watching several
thousand hours of TV collected from a day's broadcasting of the nation's
first cable system of 90+ channels in Fairfax, VA.  Well worth the read,
IMHO.

cheers,
- c.

Charles Ess

Distinguished Research Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies
Drury University
900 N. Benton Ave.              Voice: 417-873-7230
Springfield, MO  65802  USA       FAX: 417-873-7435
Home page:  http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html

Co-chair, CATaC'06: http://www.catacconference.org
Co-chair, ECAP'06: http://www.eu-cap.org

Professor II, Globalization and Applied Ethics Programmes
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway
http://www.anvendtetikk.ntnu.no/pres/bridgingcultures.php

Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23