FI hosted a public lecture today, “Knowledge at the End of the Information Age” with David Weinberger, who I was familiar with through The Cluetrain Manifesto but never realized was a U of T alum. Weinberger is a playful speaker, and as a self-described optimist, has some very warm and fuzzy things to say about the net. I can’t say I take the same tone, but I nevertheless found his observations about changes in how we conceive of knowledge, compelling.

Weinberger began by describing the internet as “weird,” but emphasized that for such a new medium, it is strikingly “familiar” in that we’ve all picked up on its usage - as broadcasters as well as consumers (not necessarily in the capitalist sense) - pretty quickly. Why? Because internet knowledge, unlike traditional print knowledge, is becoming more human. Internet knowledge is messy, fluid, fallible and complex. It’s not a topical text shoved into an exclusive categorization by a removed authority figure; it derives its meaning from social context, the online “conversation.”

This is why I think it’s helpful to consider the internet as a curious medium with both literate and oral properties.* And although you need the ability to read and write to use the internet, many of its www texts, if not the majority (?), are not really textual. Internet information demonstrates the communal and localized aspects of an oral society (but at the same time, it definitely lacks certain key features of oral society).

The internet is not the first modern medium to be neither distinctly literate or oral (it does have afterall, many unique features that are neither textual nor oral) but it’s the first one that is so participatory. As such, tensions between the values and expectations of the literate and the oral have exploded as both paradigms struggle to impose very different power/knowledge structures onto internet information. The internet won’t acquiesce to state power and the paradigm of literate knowledge in the way that film, radio and tv have.

But the thing is, the internet is really neither oral or literate, and not even a mix of both. Which is perhaps why these struggles, which have profound impacts on our laws, our culture, and our knowledge, always feel to me like they’re trying to catch up to something else. (Although if I had to pick a medium the internet is most like, I’d choose comic books, and I’m not at all surprized at the resurgence of the comic book in mainstream culture, especially in youth.)

*n.b. By “literate” I don’t mean just being able to read, and “oral” isn’t just conversations. I mean all the structures and values that literacy or orality functioned within. Suggested readings: Harold Innis’ The Bias of Communication and Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record.

Some older people will marvel at how “Gen Y” people prefer to learn about current events from Stephen Colbert and why a video like The Great Schlep can speak more immediately to them than say, the BBC news or local political debates. I suppose they didn’t grow up in an age where you are told to distrust everything everyone tells you, but to buy all their products and services anyways. We’ve come a long way from the No Logo days. Being anti-evil-corporation didn’t seem to get us anywhere except more appropriated. (From the Capitalism & Hegemony handbook, “If you can’t beat em, brand em.”) It seems the only way to be heard in a consumerist society is to be a customer, and then you’re always right!*

Is it so surprising then, that Canadian youth don’t take traditional sources of authority or traditional institutions “seriously”? And if everything is such a joke, and everything is for sale, why not turn to information sources that are completely farcical to begin with? And while other mediums can produce materials that reflect this ethos (check out The Totally Untrue History Of…), what better place to mock The Author and The Truth or even The Facts than the internet?

(from Bob Staake)

The continentalists wrote about the death of the author, but perhaps not quite like this. Globalized generations are running out of spaces to believe in; God has been dead for ages, and the nation state is faltering. What has previous generations left for mainstream culture? We’ll take what we can get. I can always count on my next online distraction and retail therapy. In lolcats and branding we consume. There’s no post after postmodern and there’s nothing to take seriously anymore. You’ll never be trustworthy but you can at least be funny.

* And people wonder why Gen Y is so uppity in the workplace… This is the generation that was told to buy their career through rising tuition fees. Of course they’re so entitled; the education system has made them customers instead of scholars.