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).
| Shared Features with Orality |
Lacking Features of Orality |
| communal ownership of knowledge, communal creativity, “storyteller/poet” (vs “author”) |
human contact, face time, use of proximate senses: touch and smell, intuition |
| lack of knowledge hierarchy, elevation of the quotidian and the marginalized, long tail |
temporal mastery (see Harold Innis) |
| localized information (vs standardized and de-humanized information) |
emphasis on training memory, recitation, long attention spans, attentional focus |
| parody, satire, irony, humour; colloquial, regional, and non-standard use of language |
information is unrecorded in external forms and frequently unconsciously categorized or encoded (e.g. information may be inseparable from a scent, or an emotion) - see cognitive science field for more info on this. |
| tangential, non-linear |
fluid memories, body/procedural memories |
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.
