Where to begin? 1750, of course!

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.

          

                                                                         

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.

Print Divide, Digital Divide

 In any information society, the Matthew Effect creates winners and losers. A ‘digital divide’ separates today’s information society into those with the tools and skills needed to participate in the ‘knowledge economy’ and an unfortunate minority who lack them (van Dijk). Burke points out, however, that such a gap has always existed, usually in the form of traditional class divisions between middle and upper classes and a large lower class of manual or agricultural laborers. Modern anxiety over this divide has a historical precedent in the many ‘learned societies’ that sprung up during and after the Enlightenment period. These were organizations devoted to propagating, usually through cheap pamphlets, news scientific or technical advancements that might inform and enliven the masses (Burke). The National Geographic Magazine and Society is a modern example, although at its founding in 1888 it would have been a perky upstart among older, less-fashionable societies: the movement began to lose momentum in the Industrial Revolution.

Taking up the slack were mechanics’ institutes, dedicated to educating the working class.  In her study Foot in the Door, Mouse in Hand: Low-income women, short-term job-training programs, and IT careers, Karen Chapple researches the success rates of nonprofits that train non-degree students in the basics of computer use. The educational programs she studies, and the people, are mirrored in Burke’s descriptions of mechanics’ schools, night schools and societies for ‘useful’ knowledge. Both modern IT training schools and past mechanics’ schools sought to teach practical skills to intellectually-marginalized people.  

The More Things Change...

This is the Social History of Knowledge’s real value: as with any history, we are better-equipped to see continuity in our surroundings, which tempers our over-enthused or doomsayer reactions with an appropriate amount of perspective. Perhaps Chapple might have augmented her study by reviewing the literature on mechanics’ institutes from the Industrial Revolution; maybe van Dijk’s conclusions about the elites in a networked society would have been different if he had looked at the problem through a postcolonial lens. Although Burke says little of Wikipedia or the rest of the Internet, his book makes clear that he doesn’t need to--it’s all been said before.