Peter Burke knows his stuff, as
should any Professor Emeritus of Cultural History at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge. But how does he, and everyone else, know it? That question is the
center of his latest book, a sequel to his 2000 Social History of Knowledge: from Gutenberg to Diderot. Resuming
his scholarship at the year 1750, Burke continues to study the social trends of
knowledge up to the present in A Social
History of Knowledge II: from the Encyclopedie to Wikipedia.
A Social History of Knowledge: from the Encyclopedie to Wikipedia
A multimedia project by Lauren Silverstein, student in LIS 201: The Information Society
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Historically Speaking
Burke includes an exhaustive amount
of evidence to support his many claims of how knowledge is used or not--in
fact, some cited this approach as being overwhelming and detracting from the
book’s clarity. I found his style of presentation to be easy enough to follow
and his grouping of historic examples admirably far-ranging, but the book has been called
‘nebulous’ for its lack of a central theme (Davies). Burke splits his subject
matter into three sections: the acquisition and use of knowledge, loss of
knowledge, and geographies, sociologies and histories of knowledge
developments. Each section is split into nine subsections total that describe a
more specific trend; for instance, ‘Experts and Expertise’ within the section
on knowledge loss. This format does not encourage interconnection, and makes
the book feel simultaneously regimented and free-floating (since no one
subsection ties into another).
In the absence of a unifying theme,
I used my own analysis to structure this project. People have handled knowledge
in much the same ways throughout history, regardless of the technologies they
used.
Remember when Google was on paper?
To illustrate this claim, I
selected examples from Burke’s book. The problem of organizing and tracking
knowledge, so that it can be put to use, is no new product of the Web’s
‘information overload,’ but is in fact a challenge people have met for
centuries with efficient cataloguing and storage systems. The use of
‘metadata,’ a buzzword of the moment in the revelation of the NSA spying
scandal, goes back to scientists labeling their specimens and librarians
devising indexes, among other things. Burke quotes Hermann von Helmholtz saying
that a society’s level of advancement depended on how many ways they had to
make knowledge ‘immediately accessible.’
The Informational Leap of Faith
The loss of knowledge, due to
intentional destruction or overlooking, often occurs when information
technologies shift and not everything can ‘make the leap,’ for example, from
books to the Internet or from an oral/spoken culture to a primarily printed
one. In addition, knowledge can be lost by mere obscurity: just as a book and
its contents can be lost to the world by simply never being opened, so too can
the content of a web page be lost if it is never accessed (Burke). The sheer
vastness of the Internet--millions of pages uploaded daily--means that a substantial
fraction of its material is abandoned in the clutter.
Snowballs in Cyberspace
As discussed in Jan A.G.M. van Dijk’s
Social Structure, the Internet is not
the level playing field it is often praised to be; some individuals wield
disproportionate power, while the majority of people use digital tools ineffectively
or for trivial purposes. The most powerful users tend to gain more influence by
virtue of being more influential to begin with, a snowball process known to
sociologists as the ‘Matthew Effect.’ In history, the Matthew Effect is writ
large in the form of colonialism, especially of the non-Western world by the
West. Burke cites numerous examples of the dominance of Western over
non-Western knowledge, and the resulting loss to the world. European and North
American science, art, literature and social practices have spread because
their regions of origins have done so, too.
In a different meaning altogether, one
mentioned briefly by van Dijk, the Matthew Effect applies not only to the
Internet’s users but to its content. Google’s Page Rank algorithm, the basis of
its success, works on the notion that the most popular search results are the
ones that are clicked on most frequently (van Dijk). Accordingly, these
most-clicked links are displayed higher up in the results list, prompting further
viewing, and increasing these sites’ popularity. The ‘top ten’ results of any
Google query are beneficiaries of the Matthew Effect. In a broader context,
Google itself owes its status as a Web giant to its previous acclaim as much as
to its technical superiority.
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