neticulum

For those of you who haven’t read the very first post in this blog, you’ll probably want to do so before you read this one, as it makes far more sense in context.

Contrary to one of my personal life mantras “please keep your destination in mind” (the motto of Norton Juster’s logical opus of a children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth), when I started my thesis research, I had a very firm idea of the topic I wanted to study (web 2.0 technology and the evolution of the media), but didn’t really know where I was going to go with it. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing; I was still working on developing my ideas and arguments as I learned more and more about the intricacies of web 2.0 as well as historical theories of the media.

My early research focused on developing a theoretical history of the media, which induced me to read philosophers such as Habermas and Kant. Kant is the epitome of enlightenment philosophy; the term might as well be named after him – it probably is. Writing in a period of great scientific and technological advances – the advent of modern medicine, for one – Kant had great faith in rationality and the ability of humans to reach an objective understanding of the world through the use of practical reason. He believed that the rational order of the world as known by science is not a result of the fortuitous accumulation of sensory perceptions, but rather a product of synthesis, a rule-based activity of deliberation. Sensibility supplies the mind with intuitions, and understanding allows individuals to judge these intuitions and place them into different a priori categories. As Kant believes these categories, like the laws of nature and other methods we use to organize knowledge, are objective, being able to place our subjective perceptions within the categories yields objective, universal knowledge. By this method, Kant predicted that the human race would eventually reach enlightenment. This, of course, is a very hierarchical view of knowledge; his a priori categories had to have been developed by a scientific and academic elite, who basically crafted the framework by which all perceptions were to be submitted. Individual, subjective observations which did not readily fit into an a priori category were given far less credence than those which made it into the canon

Habermas, about a century later, revisited Kant’s theories in light of his historical account of the growth of of communications media and its role in the development of communities over time. Habermas argued that the rise of newspapers, novels, and other publications raised public awareness and education, as well as introduced them to critical viewpoints they may not otherwise have been exposed to. This intellectual shift spurred individuals to develop public reason, akin to Kant’s practical reason, whereby individuals refined their ideas and realized new ones via discussions within public forums; the media provided both content and venue for public reasoning. And though it hinted at a more democratic canon (as long as you could get people to agree with you, your views were considered) than Kant’s a priori principles would allow, Habermas’ view of knowledge was still hierarchical and top-down in nature; objective knowledge was a product of deliberation amongst educated individuals. Indeed, Habermasian public reason held headquarters in new coffeehouses and pubs, maintaining a sense of elitism; who really had the luxury time to read and argue about art criticism in the 18th century?

In terms of liberal-democratic theory, the more informed a citizenry is, the more fruitful the democracy; as a democracy is rule of the people by the people, the most well-run democracy is the product of people having the knowledge and wisdom with which to use public reason to arrive at the best form of governance. The media is a means by which to distribute information to the masses as well as conduct debate over public issues. Thus, the more access citizens have to diverse media sources as well as mediated outlets by which they can express their own voices, the more healthy the democracy will be.

When I first began developing the actual argument of my thesis, I focused identifying the ways web 2.0 would affect the way the media operates within a democracy. Namely, I studied ways in which the internet has made more information accessible to individuals, from the proliferation of news sources thanks to e-magazines and the blogosphere to the advent of whistleblowing websites like Wikileaks to Wikipedia, the first attempt to document the knowledge of the entire human race instead of just its scientific and academic elite.

It was this last point that caused me to stop in my tracks. I realized that liberal-democratic theory is contingent upon the liberal conception of knowledge – the canon, if you will. The scholars I had been reading were all very optimistic about the internet’s capability of transmitting the intellectual fruits of the academic elite to all corners of the globe. Yet this model did not seem to fit the Web 2.0 technologies I was studying, which allowed any non-expert with a keyboard to promote their own beliefs on the web and, in doing so, threw into question the nature of knowledge and how it is derived.

Wikipedia is a perfect example of this departure. I had previously conceived of Wikipedia as a project that could one day yield a comprehensive survey of human knowledge, always edging towards completion. Yet the “truth” that Wikipedia has delivered is not objective knowledge at all.

If there is anything that globalized communications has taught us, it’s that the world – and the ways in which people see and categorize the world – are vastly more complex and diverse than we imagined. Postmodernism has by and large rejected the Kantian conception of objective knowledge; as our awareness of other cultures and ideals grows, so does the sentiment that knowledge is subjective and often relative to those cultures. Of course, some knowlege is more objective than other knowledge – the findings of the scientific and academic communities are often more broadly accepted than, say, political and social views. But this knowledge is still the result of deliberation within these communities and between these communities and the general public. Knowledge is not a decree; it is a conversation. Wikipedia is a constant work in progress; its entries are always being revised and added to as new events arise and as new members join to express their views. But this speaks to a critical aspect of the nature of knowledge. Wikipedia entries are always changing because the way we see the world is always changing because the world is always changing. If everything is in a constant state of flux, then how can there be objective knowledge?

Web 2.0 has illuminated this phenomenon in many ways. Wikipedia is a particularly interesting case study, because it provides a way for these conversations to be recorded and preserved in the form of Wikipedia edit histories and the forums that house debate over said edits. It has become a primary battleground for the semantic and cultural wars of our generation. It allows individuals from a variety of cultures to edit articles, and observing which types of opinions come from different types of backgrounds illuminates the cultural differences in opinions of public issues. Case in point: compare the Wikipedia article on Cuba written in English to the one written in Spanish – they have vastly different approaches. When we can clearly delineate the different aspects of a cultural conflict, we can better understand its nature and thus have a better idea of how to resolve the conflict – or at least reach a compromise.

Web 2.0 has ushered in the era of hyperconnectivity. For the first time in the history of civilization, mediated communications has fallen completely out of power structure’s control. The human network forged by the internet and other new media has certainly been utilized by governments, corporations, and other authorities, but their attempts to regulate it have been futile. Even the Chinese government has admitted that their “Great Firewall” is ultimately useless in the face of the vast loopholes the internet – and its army of hackers – have to offer. Until now, knowledge has mainly been transmitted via one-way media – that is, it has been broadcast from a centralized source to the general public via mediums such as radio and television. But today, web 2.0′s promotion of user-created content has forged two-way media for information transmission – instead of coming from a centralized source generally controlled by the elite, a hierarchical structure of knowledge, information comes from and travels to millions of different sources. Certain discourses which were once privileged under one-way media are not so privileged anymore. The intellectual hierarchy which was once vertical is now horizontal; different information nodes are interconnected via new media, and the entire structure is in constant flux. To use Deleuze and Guittari’s terminology, this is a rhysomatic thinking.

The ways in which this new conception of knowledge affect the way we conceive of democracy, and the media’s role in democracy, will be the topic of my next post. Your predictions and/or criticisms are welcome.