Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

May I suggest testosteroni as your luncheon selection? It's great with a little grated cheese on top.

"Topics get smaller. Compare Wikipedia to Britannica." - this is the interesting one to me, because in it somewhere is the point of "passion" ... does smaller = more intense? does smaller = self correcting due to the density of participation by passionate others? So size is not the scale anymore, but something more emotive, when it comes to quality/useability.

and stuff like that.

New face for me would be Régine Debatty of we make money not art. Perhaps you could look this person up and report back on his or her gender. I'm confused these days because I ran into Julia Sweeney of "That's Pat" fame and ... well, is Régine a boy name or a girl name and I hope I may be forgiven for asking.

Have a good time in Copenhagen and don't get into the Hans Christian Andersen schtick if you can help it. Let Doc do the Danny Kaye bit by himself.

Perhaps the answer to your structure of knowledge question lies in the structure of the neural cortex itself. Although it is a bound world, it is pretty infinite. I mention it here and there's a link to some stunning pix from IBM of stained neurons, axons etc.

I'm sorry about the David Tebbutt link - I picked my RSS feed in error.

I'm looking very much forward to seeing you at Reboot.

When the initial conditions for exchanging information (which is the basis of knowledge) change, then the power structures may also change.

In media studies there's a 20 years old tradition of seeing the media becoming more democratized (at first just in the interpretation of a given "message") - and at the same time more centralized.
The move is in both directions, which is actually what makes it so interesting.

This is the same here. We see the top-down structure of traditional media challenged by the bottom-up structure of blogging etc.

We see the knowledge monopoly held by the Universities and other traditional top-down organizational structures challenged by interested individuals and communities - who are able to almost ad hoc build the practical structures for knowledge creation and sharing, and who are increasingly able to build a "real time" structure - a new medium - within the internet (I'm talking about Web2.0/The Semantic Web or perhaps just about RSS/Trackback etc) - which ensures the ongoing sharing of information.

The same is true in Open Source, where the business model - top-down - being challenged by communities of practice, which form in an almost organic way, and create value together - without having the traditional incorporated power structure to struggle with, and without the need to make a profit. This is perhaps the most profound effect. That people actually have the means (they can make some money on the side and make a living) to build a business logic within society, while at the same time the technology monopolies are build around us - MS, Oracle, SAP, Nokia, Cisco etc.

Centralization AND Democratization.

No wonder that Rupert Murdoch sees blogging as a challenge to traditional news media.

And no wonder that OS software like Drupal has great succes with organizations wanting to challenge the traditional institutions.

Best
Gunnar

Regine is a girl! I'm very glad she's going to be there.

I still feel that the conference is unfairly balanced, and the organiser hadn't really got a convincing argument. Oh well. See you there!

Régine is indeed a woman, and we're very happy to have her at reboot. We're not proud of the balance between men and women (even less being Danes), but honestly we didn't have it in mind before we actually saw the total list of speakers.

Best,
Nikolaj, co-producer reboot7

David, what you are missing in all of this is that it is entirely Western- (ie. Euro-) centric. It does not at all consider the "shape" of K in Eastern, African, etc. cultures, since K is a cultural artefact.

The other thing that you are yet missing is the difference between the gender construction of K, that is, what is worth knowing, what constitutes K according to a woman's way of knowing, vs. a man's way of knowing.

One more thing: The issue of objectivity vs. subjectivity is becoming increasingly crucial in the academy, since there is an increasing push-back among (esp. American) institutions in favour of objectivity (which itself necessitates tight control over what's valued as K) and away from alternative modes of investigation (simple example: the continued systemic attacks in some parts of the academy against modes of qualitative investigation).

There's much more on this, of course (and I'd be happy to have a longer conversation with you on this.)

"No more forced rationality: The Web is big enough to let us disagree without feeling we have to get everyone else to agree."

I'm going to be a bit of an annoying bastard (then again, I usually am), but what does this have to do with the web?

Anybody who felt like he or she had to get everybody else to agree with them and then acted on that feeling, was behaving a bit like somebody with diminished social skills and no sense of diplomacy. Pre-web or post-web.

Besides, getting somebody to agree with you isn't rational. Trying to understand other people and getting other people to understand you is.

Understanding is the basis of knowledge and the application of knowledge. Debate is simply the act of shuffling the pieces around on the board.

And quite a few debates go haywire because one person is trying to explain his or her point while the other person is vehemently 'defending his side' and sees the points being made as 'rhetorical tactics by the opposition.'

That is, rather than seeing them as attempts to at least try and get everybody to understand the both sides before they blindly go about disagreeing with everything.

And there are some aspects of 'K' that can be said to be rooted in nature---mathematics being one example. The parallels and applications of mathematics to the fields of physics and biology make a fairly strong case for that.

Does this mean that we'd probably be better off trying to find a mathematical basis for the way we shape and organise our knowledge?

Yeah, probably.

Not to mention the fact that saying 'less like nature and more like us' implies that we are not of nature, not formed by the physicality of our being and the chemicals of our brain.

Which, if that is what you mean (and I'm pretty sure it's not), is patently wrong.

(Sorry about the somewhat snarky tone. Hayfever always gets me into a lousy mood. And I'm probably letting my frustrations with academia get the better off me to the detriment of innocent bystanders all around.)

We can no longer believe that K and the structures of K are rooted in nature. They are tools, not mirrors.

Are you trying to say that the map is not the territory? -- as wikipedia explains, "individuals may mistake a metaphorical representation of a concept for the concept itself."

I think this may be analagous to you saying that knowledge is not a mirror but a tool. No?

If so, then I'd suggest using the example of a 1:1 map -- A map that has a 1:1 scale is just as large as the territory and doesn't provide much added value to the navigator. A complete "mirror" of the territory is useless.

It's when some details are dropped from the map by dropping the scale down to 1:250 when the map really becomes a useful tool for navigation.

So the map is not the territory and knowledge is a not a mirror, but it's a model, an approximation and a tool. (BTW, I got the 1:1 map reference from Ken Wilber but someone else probably said it before him).

Oy, too many great comments! Herewith semi-random replies.

Mark, yes, I will make explicit that my domain of discourse is the West.

Baldur, I over-compressed my comment. I meant that when you're in a physical room talking and disagreeing with someone, it's easy to feel the conversation has to continue to a conclusion, i.e., someone has to "win." Because of the temporality of the Web, it's much easier to just let the conversation drift off. (Neither of these behaviors is inevitable, of course.)

As for the nature vs. us bit, I originally was going to put it in terms of the physical vs. meaning, but I decided to go for something snappier (and more misleading). So, of course we're part of nature (whatever "nature" means), but K is switching from following the rules of organizing physical stuff to the rules for clustering meaning. Something like that.

Ken, I meant that K is a tool for achieving an end. Objective K is good for solving certain sorts of problems -- I am wildly pro-science, for example -- but it is not _the_ picture of how the world "really" is. Likewise for emotional K, etc. And obviously this gets very complex very quickly since within each type of K there are rules for success, and the rule within objective K is that it be as much of a mirror as possible.

Jeneane, I agree 100% and will try to remember to make your excellent point explicit: Topics get smaller because, freed of paper, they can now reflect our actual interests -- passions -- better. This stands in contrast to the large-scale permanent divisions -- disciplines -- that have organized our thought and institutions for so long.

Knowledge without nature
is like food without taste.

Genesis teaches us about a tree of knowledge, after all.

otherwise, what Dave Rogers said.

So, how did the keynote go?