Interesting that you're not sure

mrG — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 10:34:21 -0500

Interesting that you're not sure if you agree with him after admittedly only "skimming" the paper. It's interesting because, at work last night I posted that URL and one coworker, a part-time associate professor and thus very much in the literate-generations, clicked through immediately to read it, but a much younger coworker said, "Just give me the executive summary".

I chimed in to say that by asking that question, by preferring amateur (ie, with no vested interest) peer review to a first-hand encounter with the actual words of the original author he had more or less proved Mark Federman's point. He responded with, "now that's a good exec summary".

the age of the second-hand gods

Why read Aristotle when you can just ask some people more familiar with the works? Indeed, how many current teachers of near any subject have read the original Copernicus, Newton, DaVinci, Einstein, Schoenberg, Freud, Pythagorus, Ptolemy ...

No sir, we of the post-literate ubiquitously networked and everywhere proximate western urban reality, we read only textbooks pre-sifted, pre-contexted, and almost, we discovered, universally wrong-headed, mean-spirited, propagandist and teaming with factual errors.

like trapezium and trapezoid, two hundred years of error and 'nationalist' seperatism ... caused by a printing mistake. Like the song goes, "but we won't be fooled again'

I asked if he was happier now that he had two data points, and proposed that perhaps he'd be happier still with three, since (to my linear in-literate trained mind) you need three points to make any sense of trend. I confess, I didn't expect his answer ...

I'll settle for 2."

Unity, as Bucky Fuller would say, is plural. At minimum, two.

when worlds collide

See what's happening here? Still disagree with Mark? :) It's not that the younger coworker is lazy, because he's not. He just wants his dose of Federman authority to be filtered through the sum timeline experience of as many 'informed opinions' as he can get. Rather than jump in to read what he had no background himself to evaluate, he tapped his network and spontaneously sought out a context in which to see the Federman paper. This spontaneous Gestalt strategy of trust assessment simply made sense to him, that an independent viewpoint was better than any original authority of print and two viewpoints was a minimum. He then asked, quite sincerely, how could it be otherwise?

I explained it thus: "My grandparents would have gone ballistic over that proposition. they'd say it only takes one, the one with The Book." ... which is a dangerous thing to say in these Modern Times when foreign policy and the deaths of tens of thousands are being predicated on assumptions of authority from 'Holy Scriptures', and maybe that we have a bible thumping President vs a Koran Thumping whoever the fuck it is we are supposedly fighting now, maybe that's not so much coincidence as just another sign of the shift from the linear-literate to the post-literate ubiquitously networked successor.

Also apropos to this shift from centralized book-authority culture to a future consensus-authority, and perhaps evidence that the New Boss is not all that different, quality wise, from the Old Boss, news out of a study published in Nature has come out ambivalent over WikiPedia vs the Encyclopaedia Britannica, both methodologies scoring roughly equally well for honest and fair representation of scientific topics.

critics have raised concerns about the site's increasing influence, questioning whether multiple, unpaid editors can match paid professionals for accuracy. Writing in the online magazine TCS last year, former Britannica editor Robert McHenry declared one Wikipedia entry -- on US founding father Alexander Hamilton -- as "what might be expected of a high-school student". Opening up the editing process to all, regardless of expertise, means that reliability can never be ensured, he concluded.

Yet Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries.
[ nature.com: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head ]

Robert who? Well, if you must know, just ask WikiPedia, but if you want just the salient point, consider that Robert loads his rhetoric calling the Wikipedia a Faith-based Encyclopedia ... as if our trust of his board and their choice of authors and editors was not just as much an act of consumer faith. The trouble Robert faces, however, as he watches his google juice slide away, is that while maybe his board is uniquely very skilled at selecting real actual quality contributors and editors, Corporate Globalized Centralized-Media Middle 'America' has seen to it that scant few of us will believe him on the weight of his academic credentials alone.

In the ubiquitously networked age, as the Cluetrain told us, you have to be more than decorated, you truly need to be demonstrably valuable. Credentials are only the window dressing.

revisiting the Chinese Room

Searle's Chinese Room was a gedenkenexperiment wherein you sit sealed in a box surrounded by every available manual on Chinese grammar and every technical and artistic subject indexable by Chinese token patterns, and people would write questions in Chinese, you would decode that mechanically against the handbook, look up the matching pattern in the tech boosk and cut out the Chinese tokens that match and slip out another paper as an 'answer'. Searle asked, "Does the operator inside Chinese Room 'understand' Chinese?" -- This was intended as a critique of the Turing Test and what passes for Artificial Intelligence, but apropos to our discussion here, what if instead of books, you sit in ubiquitous connection to every expert on every subject, including Chinese?

Consider your stint at CNN: Did you really read everything you needed to know, or did you instead get online and ask anyone who might know, or who might know someone who might know?

This was my biggest complaint with the sci-fi world portrayed in Star Trek: American sci-fi invariably asks some 'super computer' to look stuff up in 'archives'. Instead, the Captain would ask his Computer (or the android Data in TNG) and the Computer would say, "One moment, I'll ask ..." while it pinged the IM/SMS/Email of every expert in the galaxy and summarized the result into a consensus. Star Trek, it seems, was written by in-literates, not the illiterate post-literates.

Corrollary result: Could Data then be said to 'understand' what he reports? More to the point: Would it matter?

You see, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Paperless Office. This is only about who we consider as our authority and who's assessment of truth we will trust, how we each and collectively arrive at that judgement, and the power struggle of an old guard hell-bent with nothing to lose trying to keep control of the tracks in the face of an onrushing freight-train.

I confess, I just skimmed this

paul@grabthemic.org — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:42:57 -0500

I confess, I just skimmed this (too scattered to read it through), but Federman should go further and name his new paradigm (UCaPP is not a name). He takes us from the oralist tradition to the literalist to . . . what? the connectionist?

That said, I'm not sure I agree with him. I made my living for some years as a systems engineer with a little site you may have heard of (CNN.com), but I never studied technology formally. I could read the directions, though, as a result of a degree in English (and a lot of practice).

This sounds a lot like the Paperless Office, when we heard for years that paper would go away but instead paper use skyrocketed as we saw the laser printer and WYSIWYG interfaces. The Unwritten Future? In the face of so many blogs (one created per second), I have my doubts.

Why Johnny and Janey Can't Read (and why Mr/Ms Smith can't teach)

mrG — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 20:01:19 -0500

Media Literacy Studies time, and my source blogger Will Richardson says it so elegantly enough that I'll just quote him:

This is such a big shift, and this essay makes the case so clearly the significance of what we're seeing and feeling. I urge you to read the whole thing
[ Weblogg-ed: Ubiquitously Connected and Pervasively Proximate ]

only, left to me, I think I'd add a sense of urgency to his review, and maybe also add "... and why Johnny and Janey are bored out their tree and can't wait until they can bolt classes and get to the mall Blockbuster"; bit of a slog to wade it's 11 highly literate pages, but I agree, must-reading for those of us print-breds who must tred anywhere within 60 meters of a modern (or ancient) youth

though, for their money, I'll bet they'll be holding out for the Web/DVD version ...

From Mark Federman, current Chief Strategist of the McLuhan Program, click on this title to fetch a bitcopy of

"Why Johnny And Janey Can't Read, and Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can't Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time"

and set your controls for the heart of the sun.