Epistemographer

Topic at hand is less digital tools than digital epistemologies

“Digital” – candidate for trendiest word (1.5 million books use it in their title), but very ill-understood.

Revisionist history of epistemology:

• Descartes’ turn from the “messy stuff” of the processes of understanding the world to the mechanistic explanations of it
• Late 19th-century: people started to think that the mechanical world-view could explain everything, “fusing the world that Descartes sundered through an expansionist ploy on the part of the mechanistic side.”
• Computers grew out of the project of fusing “meaning” and “mechanism”

• Implication that computers are somehow “special”, bridging this chasm

“There aren’t any computers; we’ve been misled”

• It’s not that there are no physical devices, but rather that the notion of computers as occupying a special and unique place in the epistemic landscape is fundamentally wrong

• Being “digital” doesn’t make a computer special

5 examples of the impact of “Computers aren’t special”

• It was a claim of the “fusion” agenda that computers could be fully explained by a mechanistic account
• Wrong: meaning is inextricably bound up with computer functionality and use
• We should hold our systems accountable for their dimensions of “meaning”
• Ontologies are contingent on local culture and perspectives
• Every piece of metadata is a political act

• We as humanists shouldn’t be party to the re-institution of the dualism between physical and mental that’s bound up by how many use “digital”

Computers represent a historical moment in which we have sufficient power and sense of complexity to allow back into our analysis all the stuff that Descartes swept away.

* Cute phrase: “Computing reunites the world of matter with the world of things that matter.”

Idea: “Digital” fundamentally points at the abstraction of information from the physical medium on which it’s encoded. It’s not that it has no physical presence, but rather that this very presence is one step removed from its corporeal form. (Kind of a neutrality of physical presence, like speaking through a filter that makes all voices sound the same.)

Technorati Tags: 2005 Digital Tools Summit

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