Position Paper from Fall Quarter
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
11/28/2010
Internet: Knowledge and Community
Position Paper
The Internet: The New Oral Culture
The acquisition and value of knowledge has always been one of the most important aspects of human society through the ages and technology has certainly advanced to meet this need. In oral culture knowledge was ever-changing; "Remembering requires forgetting" (Beck, Technologies of Language). As the centuries went on, new methods of communication were developed and knowledge became increasingly solidified, mainly through writing and literacy (Beck). Now at the dawning of the Information Age, the Internet has come full circle with oral culture.
The history of information exchange is a long one, but a few important technologies must be highlighted. The invention of the printing press is, obviously, extremely significant. With the ability to create many copies of text, knowledge was more easily brought to the literate masses and this new form of communication had doubtless impact on the many societies it affected (Beck, Technologies of Language). Next came telegraphy, radio (Beck), and, currently, the Internet. With each advance knowledge became more fluid; new information replaced old at an increasingly faster rate. When taking the Internet to be an improvement (Graham, 25) of an older technology, one can see that knowledge today is still similar to oral tradition due to the fact that the information the Internet contains is ever-changing.
In A Magna Carta for the Information Age, Dyson et al. states on page 12 that we have "...an eight-lane data superhighway rushing into every home." I wrote a response to this in which I noted that thanks to the invention of the Internet, "The eight-lane highway flowing into the home is now flowing back out" (Price, 1). As mentioned above, the Internet has created the opportunity for knowledge to change in a similar way to oral culture. Our new oral culture makes use of this "eight-lane highway" to change information and knowledge faster than previous ages. No more can this be seen than with Wikipedia.
In a sense, Wikipedia is based on two of the most important aspects of oral tradition: Sharing of information and constant changing of that information. "Remembering requires forgetting" as Stephen Beck noted is very true in this case because Wikipedia is built around collective knowledge and continual updating of the information stored within it (Shirky, 139). Many perfect examples of how Wikipedia functions are described by Clay Shirky in his Here Comes Everybody. The example he uses here is asphalt. In short, he describes how a simple one-sentence entry on asphalt as a road covering can be transformed into a full-fledged article about everything that has to do with the material, including the history of the word "asphalt" itself (Shirky, 118 - 119). Shirky also notes that "...once Pluto was demoted to the status of a 'dwarf planet', the Pluto entry [on Wikipedia] was updated to reflect that almost immediately" (119). Not only is knowledge changing extremely rapidly, but old information is being updated and "forgotten" as it were; keeping with the dynamics of oral tradition.
Another example of knowledge-fluidity can be found by looking behind the scenes of the Google home page. In this case, updating takes place constantly and that which is omitted from search results can be just as important as what is shown (Schuler, Google Technology). Google uses mathematics known as the "Page Rank Algorithm" to determine, based on number of links, which pages are displayed in its search results. In short, the more connected a certain page is to other pages, the greater the chance of it being found by any given user (Schuler). This, too, is a kind of forgetting in the sense that certain knowledge on the Internet must be memorable in order to be found and the number of links to any given page is a measurement of that memorability. Google also constantly (24 hours a day) updates where it searches (Schuler) and this can also be conceived as another form of forgetting in order to remember.
One cannot deny that society today is exceedingly different than societies built upon oral tradition. The cultural and technological changes that took place between the age of story-telling and the Information Age are vast and could fill volumes. Moreover the speed and distance at which information can be transmitted, received, and processed is far greater than anything our ancestors could have imagined. Yet as humanity enters this new age of information exchange, we can see that some aspects of oral culture have survived. Wikipedia demonstrates that many people are still willing to examine, criticize, update, and re-evaluate current knowledge. Google makes the utmost effort to update and display only the most current information and employs a kind of "this is memorable" attitude with its Page Rank Algorithm. The technology of the Internet is ever-changing and fluid. In this same way, the information that is exchanged over the Internet is ever-changing and fluid as well. When we consider that oral tradition relied on this fluidity (due to the technology of the time), we can see how current trends of knowledge on the Internet are similar. In this way, the Internet has come full circle with oral culture.
