Drudge Ontology: Internet Epistemology: How the Internet is changing the way we live and think.

by Michael Francisco If it's not on the internet, does it really exist? Probably not. If you can't find the answer to a question using Google, then perhaps it's not worth knowing. Three in the morning, you want to buy an out of print book? No problem. The internet has everything, or so it seems.…

The medium of the internet is fundamentally changing the way we view the world. Stealing a page from the playbook of Neal Postman, I contend that the internet is changing our epistemology in ways that are only starting to become clear.

Remember that movie The Matrix? Well, the internet is fast approaching the kind of information capacity that Tank used in the movie. Recall the scene in which Trinity needed to learn to fly the helicopter. She called up Tank and politely asked that he find flying instructions for the helicopter. Tank, consulting a beefed up version of Google, and found the obscure information in a few seconds. Far from science fiction, this kind of information searching ability is well on its way. In a minute or less, a well skilled 'net college student can find just about anything. The following are only brief sketches of some prominent changes we have downloaded from the net.

Drudge Ontology There is a tendency to believe that if something isn't on the internet, it doesn't really exist. For example, on September 11th I vividly remember where I was when I heard that two planes had flown into the World Trade Center. Working on a paper in my room, my roommate interrupted to tell me the news, after which I immediately checked the Drudge Report. There was no word of the incident on Drudge, so I doubted that anything had actually happened. Only five minutes later when I bothered to walk down to the lobby TV did I truly believe what had happened. It was long after the fact that I realized the significance of my instinct to consult the internet to verify that something had happened.

The Drudge ontology extends beyond news. If an organization doesn't have a website, it probably doesn't exist either. As more and more organizations establish themselves on the internet, our tendency to consult the virtual world to verify existence will only grow. In dark days before everyone had internet access, we would have never thought there could be one place to consult for the existence of basically anything.

Bible.com Expectation Ask almost anyone who has used bible.com to look up a verse and you'll likely find that they found the website by guessing. The availably of almost any type of information, and most of it for free, has led us into expecting certain things from the internet. We all expect that the Bible text is online, fully searchable, in multiple translations - and for free. If there's something worth knowing, it ought to be on the internet. Information is no longer a privilege, it's expected.

Amazon.Commerce You can buy anything on the internet, and for cheap. We have come to expect that anything and everything is available to us with just a few clicks of the mouse. Forget browsing the stacks at Barnes and Noble, we expect to find, and purchase, just the book we want in two minutes or less - at 3:54 in the morning. The fact is, almost anything imaginable is for sale somewhere on the internet, and we have changed our living habits accordingly. Buying books will never be the same. One might even begin to wonder where in the bricks and mortar bookstore are the convenient reviews for each and every book. Answer: they are on the internet.

Google Work Ethic Many 'Net Gen-ers have formed an interesting habit of consulting "the internet" for answers to just about any and every question. Wonder how to interpret the "Before Sunrise" chapter of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra? Check 'the internet.' The way in which we think and speak of 'the internet' as a single entity for consulting indications a significant shift in epistemology. Unlike 'the library' of lore, the internet, in all its gigabytes of glory, can be searched for key words or phrases, at all hours of the night.

Interestingly, the answers to found on 'the internet' could be found on dead tree, but not nearly as quickly and only after investing time reading. We have become lazy. Information has been cheapened. Indeed, the internet has put much information on the clearance rack - permanently. This may be good, but it also may be bad in the ways that we tend to seek simple answers now instead of spending time searing old style and reflecting about issues. We have grown impatient when we want an answer, and we are usually able to find the answer without doing any additional reading in the area. Perhaps we should be scared by the power of Google, instead of awed.

Case in point, some of the younger members of The 'Net Generation have grown up without realizing that books have an index, not a search box. Just imagine how nice books would be if they had a search function! Interestingly, one could speculate, eventually many books and especially older books will be on the internet for us to search until our hearts content. The problem is, how do you cite those blasted internet sources?

Perseus Potential Got Perseus? If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then you probably don't study Greek or Latin, because if you did - you would know about Perseus. An amazingly powerful and free resource, Perseus centralizes most Greek and Latin texts and allows the user to simply click on the word to learn the form and definition. I conjecture such centralized information on the internet will only increase as government funding continues to get involved. Perhaps over time similar centralized websites could gain a good enough reputation to be cited with the credibility of good ol' fashion hardbacks.

The lack of permanence does present a problem though. The current convention of citing the full URL in a footnote simply doesn't work. Links go bad. Unlike really dead paper sources, stuff on the internet just disappears.

In conclusion, all these issues could be judged as either advantages or disadvantages in the long run. Rather than winning the race to become the first fool to naysay the internet, I intend to spark further reflection on the subject. Don't get me wrong, I use the internet more than most, but that doesn't mean that I think all the long-term consequences of this radically different media will be positive. With the transition from oral culture to written culture, we lost the ability to memorize. I only hope we don't lose more important abilities as we transition to the digital culture.

We have grown impatient when we want an answer, and we are usually able to find the answer without doing any additional reading in the area.

One of my own predictions is that the internet will actually have a detrimental effect on learning. In the future, we will probably see a time when a computer/internet interface is wired directly into the brain. When this happens, people will be able to instantly have the answer to even the most complex equation or the most obscure bit of knowledge. Languages will be translated instantaneously for example. There will be no need to know how to spell or use grammar correctly when there is a program running in the background to check all your output.

What will happen is many people will no longer see a need to spend large amounts of time learning and mastering a subject- why would they when any question they can think of can be so readily answered? There are long term ramifications of such a phenomenom.

If nobody sees a need to really study a subject you'll have ever fewer people who understand that subject completely enoug toadd to it- in other words, add to the body of knowledge that exists or come up with new ideas and theories.

Thank you much and happy New Year.

"Epistemology" as I understand it is a philosophical concern with the nature of "Knowledge". Changes in time and space have altered our knowledge.

When you view Rush on his dittocam he has split his 22 inch monitor screen and with Matt Drudge on the right hand portion of the split screen and again it automatically refreshes.

In a way I find the article somewhat hyped and in fact I might check FR before Drudge. FR is very aphoristic and is known for detailed analysis of many topics and has more of a blog feel.

Just wait until we have hot spots everywhere.

Postmodernism has been termed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" and has at its core are the effects of "space-time compression".

There seem to me to me to be two worlds- an analog world of nature and human artifacts and a world of digital creation/ recreation.

I enjoyed the Matrix discussions and look forward to pings in the future.

How to fly a Helicopter, by Dave Barry

Although flying a helicopter may seem very difficult, the truth is that if you can drive a car, you can, with just a few minutes of instruction, take the controls of one of these amazing machines.

Of course, you would immediately crash and die. This is why you need to remember :

RULE ONE OF HELICOPTER PILOTING :
Always have somebody sitting right next to you who actually knows how to fly the helicopter and can snatch the controls away from you because the truth is that helicopters are nothing at all like cars.
Cars work because of basic scientific principles that everybody understands, such as internal combustion, and parallel parking. Whereas scientists still have no idea what holds helicopters up.
"Whatever it is, it could stop at any moment," is their current feeling. This leads us to :

RULE TWO OF HELICOPTER PILOTING :
Maybe you should forget the intire thing.

This is what I was thinking recently as I stood outside a small airport in South Florida where I was about to take my first helicopter lesson. This was not my idea. This was the idea of Pam Gallina-Raissiguer, a pilot who flies radio reporters over Miami during rush hour so they can alert drivers to traffic problems.
I began having severe doubts when I saw Pam's helicopter. This was a small helicopter. It looked like it should have a little slot where you insert quarters to make it go up and down. I knew that if we got airborne in a helicopter this size in South Florida, some of our larger tropical flying insects could very well attempt to mate with us.

Also, this helicopter had no doors. As a Frequent Flyer, I know for a fact that all your leading United States airlines, despite being bankrupt, maintain a strict safety policy of having doors on their aircraft.

"Don't we need a larger helicopter?" I asked Pam, "with doors?"
"Get in," said Pam.

Now we're in the helicopter and Pam is explaining the controls to me over the headset. But there's static and the engine is making a lot of noise.

"........your throttle [something]," she is saying. "This is your cyclic and [something] your collective".
"What?" I say.
"[something] give you the controls when we reach 130 metres," Pam says.
"WHAT?", I say.

But Pam is not listening. She is moving a control thing and WHOOAA we are off the ground, hovering, and now, WHOOOOOAAAA, we are shooting up in the air, and there are still no doors on this particular helicopter.

Now Pam is giving me the main control thing.

RULE THREE OF HELICOPTER PILOTING :
If anyone tries to give you the main control thing, refuse to take it!

Pam says : "You don't need hardly any pressure to ........"

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

"Now that was too much pressure," Pam says.

Now I am flying the helicopter. I AM FLYING THE HELICOPTER. I am flying it by not moving a single body part for fear of jiggling the control thing. I look like the Lincoln Memorial Statue of Abraham Lincoln, only more rigid.

"Make a right turn," Pam is saying.

I gingerly move the control thing one zillionth of an inch to the right and the helicopter LEANS OVER TOWARDS MY SIDE AND THERE IS STILL NO DOOR HERE. I instantly move the thing one zillionth of an inch back.

"I'm not turning right," I inform Pam.
"What?" she says.
"Only left turns," I tell her. When you've been flying helicopters as long as I have, you know your limits.

After a while it becomes clear to Pam that if she continues to allow the Lincoln Statue to pilot the helicopter, we are going to wind up flying in a straight line until we run out of fuel, possibly over Antartica, so she takes the control thing back. That is the good news. The bad news is she is now saying something about demonstrating an "emergency proceedure".

"It's for when your engine dies," says Pam
"It's called auto-rotation. Do you like amusement park rides?"

I say, "No, I DOOOOOOO............."

RULE FOUR OF HELICOPTER PILOTING :
Auto-rotation means "coming down out of the sky at about the same speed and aerodynamic stability as that of a forklift dropped from a bomber."
Now we're close to the ground (although my stomach is still at 130 meters) and Pam is completing my training by having me hover the helicopter.

RULE FIVE OF HELICOPTER PILOTING :
You can't hover the helicopter.

The idea is to hang over one spot on the ground. I am hovering over an area about the size of Australia. I am swooping around like a crazed bumblebee. If I were trying to rescue a person from the roof of a 100 storey burning building, the person would realise that it would be safer to simply jump. At times I think I am hovering upside down. Even Pam looks nervous.

So I am very happy when we finally get back on the ground. Pam tells me I did great and she'd be glad to take me up again. I tell her that sounds like a fun idea.

RULE SIX OF HELICOPTER PILOTING :
Sometimes you have to lie.

I'm not talking about the heart surgeon. I'm talking about the average person.

So, from your persepective, I gather that you believe that once language translation is instantaneous, totally accurate and ubiquitous, there will be more people learning language?

You are entitled to this opinion of course but I disagree. I believe when all people have access to instant language translation at all times no matter where they go there will be less people bothering to take the time to learn a second language.

I saw this happen in the military with the coming of GPS systems. Ever fewer soldiers and leaders could really read a map. There was no great incentive to learn when a device was always there to tell you where you were or which direction you needed to go.

And by the way, I'm talking about the future not the present and I'm talking about humans that you would not recongize as humans. Augmented humans. Humans who are all connected to each other all the time. When every thought or image that we see can be transmistted instantly to the whole world. When people rely more on man-made sensory organs than on their own biological ones. A time when there is no true distinction between the biological and the electronic.

I'm not saying something negative about the internet- I love the internet- I'm saying something negative about humans. There is a distinction there.

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