The Internet and human Knowledge

[Fingers]

ok, what was on the site of the rio cinema in dalston in the mid-1890s?

An auctioneer's shop?

 

[Pickman's model]

When I were a kid (late 70s early 80s) I had a thirst for knowledge but getting it was a bit of an arse which involved the library or NME or Smash Hits. Same with the news.

Now we can get this info in seconds.

Not sure where I going with this but how much more had the net made us more intelligent overall?

the internet is in many ways marvellous. but there is a great deal of information which a) has not been digitised; b) will never be digitised, and c) which is in foreign languages. going hand in hand with the vast increase of internet-based learning is a great decrease in people's use of physical books, at least in academic libraries, where even taught postgraduates - at least in the sciences - will often ignore physical materials even when those books have chapters squarely focused on the question at hand.

 

[Pickman's model]

An auctioneer's shop?

you can't readily find out online: i don't know, but i do know the information would be either be in a) the post office london directory; or certainly in the local directory: the latter of which you'd find in the hackney archives, the former in the bishopsgate institute and london metropolitan archives.

goad insurance map of 1893:

 

[discokermit]

Not sure anyone can convincingly argue that this massively increased availability of information is a bad thing...

a little knowledge is a bad thing.
the amount we don't know is infinite.
the amount we do know is finite.
finite, compared to infinite, is very little indeed.

 

[Pickman's model]

a little knowledge is a bad thing.
the amount we don't know is infinite.
the amount we do know is finite.
finite, compared to infinite, is very little indeed.

yeh i had what i call my socratic moment back in the 1990s, where at one end of a street i was confident in my knowledge while by the other end i had suddenly realised the paucity of my knowledge, i knew that i knew nothing. for someone in the final year of their degree this was something of an unwelcome epiphany.

 

[camouflage]

How long's a piece of string?

Twice as long as it is from the middle to either end.

 

[camouflage]

It's making us very front-brain, I think. Information and data is replacing knowledge.

We don't have to work things out so much.

Alchemy is one of my interests and there is a tendency in Alchemy not to tell too much, not to tell people what to do, not to start people too near the end.

The rationale is to make them do the work, to find out for themselves through experience and mistake.

"Never memorize something that you can look up." - A. Einstein.

 

[camouflage]

There's definitely a change happening with memory and knowledge, but it's not as straight forward as you make it seem here.

In the past, knowing something, having knowledge, meant being able to recall the fact (and understand it etc, of course). Now, knowledge is not knowledge about the thing but knowledge of how to find out about the the thing.

If you know where to find out about something, you can defer actually knowing it until you need it. The memory 'space' required to recall where to find out about something is much lower than that required to hold the information at that location in your head.

By reducing the amount of memory needed to be able to know about a thing, we can fill that gap with knowledge about where to find out about other things. We've essentially outsourced our knowledge about things that can be found online, and replaced them with meta-knowledge about how to find it, and massively increased the amount of things we can know about at the same time.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, except for the fact that information online is transient. If there is one authoritative source for a piece of knowledge and that knowledge disappears, then in this new model, you no longer 'know' about it. And worse, you might not even know that you don't know it, because you don't go regularly checking that all the places you think you can find things are still there. It's only when you do the search when you need it that you find it's gone and then you're fucked. And this isn't just you, it's everyone who outsourced their knowledge of that information to that single source - they've all now 'forgotten' it.

Roll on holographic memory devices that can store gigabytes of data but don't require high-end technology to retrieve from. Read about research into something like that in New Scientist a few years ago... lemme see if I can google it.