Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I've posted the write-up Ars Electronica required of its presenters. It's called (overly-dramatically) The New Is. It's a slightly different take on what's becoming my same-old topic: The effect of the change in principles of organization currently underway. This piece focuses on the dismantling and re-mantling of knowledge. Here's a snippet from near the beginning:

From Aristotle's way of thinking came a history of thought and politics that made certain assumptions: Because knowledge and being are fused, just as there is only one reality, there is only one structure of knowledge. The best people to put this structure together are experts. Because of the economics of parchment and paper, experts filter what we need to know. They become gatekeepers, priests of knowledge.

The digital age undoes all of these assumptions, changing the nature of knowledge and even of meaning itself. We are entering the age where to understand something is to see how it isn't what it is.