Knowledge Infrastructure: Mechanism and Transformation in the Information Revolution

Опубликовано 28 июля 2016, 0:28

The information revolution has been unfolding for a few thousand years. The changes of the past half-century fit in; differences in degree become differences in kind. Transformation happens, but what�s the mechanism? This talk suggests that knowledge (or more precisely, epistemic) infrastructure can frame the causal mechanisms of transformation in the information revolution. I describe the baseline idea of epistemic infrastructure and its evolution through three social mechanisms: the academy (or organized education, broadly); systematic collecting (especially as seen in the LAM -- libraries, archives, museums); and crowd-sourced knowledge (Wikipedia and related things). The gist of the argument is that changing epistemic infrastructure changes access to knowledge, and changing access to knowledge changes human agency. Sounds good on the surface, but as everyone who's read Animal Farm knows, while all animals are created equal, some animals are more equal than others. The question of whose interests are most served by this revolution remains sticky. Same, too, for the relationship between the past and the future. This talk won't attempt to tell the future, but it will attempt to make sense out of Faulkner's observation: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."