Sunday, June 11, 2006
Random writing about stuff
I've been considering the impact of the Internet on the universities and how that compares to the impact of the printing press on the knowledge establishments of that time period. The Wikipedia entry I linked above has some interesting information in it.
We all know that books were hand written by scribes and that in Europe, it was closely tied to the Catholic Church. We know that very few books were produced, they were very expensive, and that they were closely guarded by a privileged few.
Interestingly enough, when the printing press began to catch on, the papal court considered requiring a license from the Catholic Church in order to run a printing press. If they had any foresight, they would have made this a top priority because the printing press would result in an unpredictable, uncontrollable chaos which would be the Renaissance, the Reformation, the establishment of a scientific community and the organizational technique which would eventually dominate the entire world: the scientific method. The Wikipedia entry says that before the printing press, scientists has been mostly isolated and didn't work in a large community with lots of communication.
It seems pretty clear that the printing press in Europe enabled large groups of people to organize outside of the traditional hierarchy of Western society: the Catholic Church. And at that time, the church was arguably growing increasingly corrupt and ineffective. Perhaps that was because the best and brightest now had other choices.
We are in the early stages of the Internet revolution (I'm talking from a human communications perspective and not from a data communications perspective which is also quite amazing). I've been involved in it since 1992 and I've watched it transform amazingly rapidly and on profoundly structural levels. In 1992, Usenet newsgroups created discussion forums of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them very well educated and knowledgable about every sort of detail. At that time, it seemed like the future of the Internet was more of the same, with a greater number of forums discussing ever more narrowly defined subjects. But then the world wide web appeared and suddenly it became clear that anyone could become a publisher. In 1992, some Usenet news groups had operated like chat rooms, but then chat rooms appeared on their own. Online games broke out of the local area networks of high tech businesses and onto the Internet. Instant messaging appeared. Blogs appeared. Podcasting. Myspace. And I believe the constant innovation will continue, perhaps even accelerate. In my opinion, we are in the early stages of our own Renaissance.
The early activities of the Internet were mostly in academia and very specific companies such as BBN. So in this case, the printing press was invented by the church and used by the church. Soon, most high tech businesses joined in (this was before they were in vogue and before being called "tech" companies), which was when I stumbled into the Internet in 1992. Since we were not far removed from academia, those high tech business people blended in reasonably well. But very soon after, I could see that AOL and bulletin board systems were truly crashing into the Internet culture. It created a lot of chaos. You'd have bulletin board people posting advertisements for a babysitter on the Internet, you'd have totally uneducated idiots arguing about physics with groups of physics professors, you'd have the worst sort of abusive behavior that a word had to be invented/stolen to describe it: spam. The church had been invaded by the masses thanks to the printing press.
But during the past 15 years or so in which the Internet has enabled communications among people who otherwise would have been isolated from each other, it seems to me that academia has been rotting away, becoming increasingly corrupt and ineffective. I think a lot of that appearance of decline is because the Internet has "raised the bar".* Huge amounts of knowledge are transferred much more rapidly, effectively, and efficiently today over the Internet than in pre-Internet days. We aren't aware of it because we're immersed in it and the change has happened slowly over time, relative to the speed of our lives. For instance, imagine going to the store and buying a newspaper in order to find a stock quote (which can only be obtained for the previous day). Or imagine having to wait hours for, and then watch, an entire news show on TV just to find out who won a particular baseball game. But obviously it goes far beyond baseball scores and stock quotes.
It seems to me that the role of the university as the repository and education center of knowledge is now gone. If you think about it, all of the knowledge students learn in college could easily be distributed over the web as wiki-books, blogs of notes and FAQs, podcasts of lectures, and so forth. You might argue that you need professors to grade papers, but it's really grad students who grade most of the papers and they aren't very good at it. Besides, we're talking about knowledge and not certification (i.e. a degree). But this would only be for portions of an education which are useful such as physics, calculus and differential equations, probability and statistics, engineering courses, science courses, and other objective valuable classes. The benefits of English composition could be done easily via blogging. Medicine obviously needs its own educational system. I'd argue that engineering probably does as well, although most of it could be offloaded to individual work.
But really. Take a step back for a minute and compare the way knowledge is gained via standard education vs how it's gained over the web. Most people have taken at least one small area of knowledge and done extensive web learning on it. Think about how fast and effective and inexpensive that was compared to taking a college course on the subject. College is now mostly a medallion, a token, a certification. It's an expensive and largely useless exercise in getting a diploma.
Imagine if you could de-couple the requirements of all jobs (except medical doctors and veterinarians) from the diplomas they currently require. Think about how much useless activity is demanded from people. There's a reason why home-schooled kids are so knowledgable.
* Despite what news publishers and academics say, putting the punctuation inside the quotes is not a given. Arguably, with the increasing precision required from language due to changes in technology and communications, the punctuation should go inside the quotation marks iff** it's part of what is being quoted.
** "iff" stands for "if and only if".* ***
*** Warning: I created an infinite loop!
We all know that books were hand written by scribes and that in Europe, it was closely tied to the Catholic Church. We know that very few books were produced, they were very expensive, and that they were closely guarded by a privileged few.
Interestingly enough, when the printing press began to catch on, the papal court considered requiring a license from the Catholic Church in order to run a printing press. If they had any foresight, they would have made this a top priority because the printing press would result in an unpredictable, uncontrollable chaos which would be the Renaissance, the Reformation, the establishment of a scientific community and the organizational technique which would eventually dominate the entire world: the scientific method. The Wikipedia entry says that before the printing press, scientists has been mostly isolated and didn't work in a large community with lots of communication.
It seems pretty clear that the printing press in Europe enabled large groups of people to organize outside of the traditional hierarchy of Western society: the Catholic Church. And at that time, the church was arguably growing increasingly corrupt and ineffective. Perhaps that was because the best and brightest now had other choices.
We are in the early stages of the Internet revolution (I'm talking from a human communications perspective and not from a data communications perspective which is also quite amazing). I've been involved in it since 1992 and I've watched it transform amazingly rapidly and on profoundly structural levels. In 1992, Usenet newsgroups created discussion forums of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them very well educated and knowledgable about every sort of detail. At that time, it seemed like the future of the Internet was more of the same, with a greater number of forums discussing ever more narrowly defined subjects. But then the world wide web appeared and suddenly it became clear that anyone could become a publisher. In 1992, some Usenet news groups had operated like chat rooms, but then chat rooms appeared on their own. Online games broke out of the local area networks of high tech businesses and onto the Internet. Instant messaging appeared. Blogs appeared. Podcasting. Myspace. And I believe the constant innovation will continue, perhaps even accelerate. In my opinion, we are in the early stages of our own Renaissance.
The early activities of the Internet were mostly in academia and very specific companies such as BBN. So in this case, the printing press was invented by the church and used by the church. Soon, most high tech businesses joined in (this was before they were in vogue and before being called "tech" companies), which was when I stumbled into the Internet in 1992. Since we were not far removed from academia, those high tech business people blended in reasonably well. But very soon after, I could see that AOL and bulletin board systems were truly crashing into the Internet culture. It created a lot of chaos. You'd have bulletin board people posting advertisements for a babysitter on the Internet, you'd have totally uneducated idiots arguing about physics with groups of physics professors, you'd have the worst sort of abusive behavior that a word had to be invented/stolen to describe it: spam. The church had been invaded by the masses thanks to the printing press.
But during the past 15 years or so in which the Internet has enabled communications among people who otherwise would have been isolated from each other, it seems to me that academia has been rotting away, becoming increasingly corrupt and ineffective. I think a lot of that appearance of decline is because the Internet has "raised the bar".* Huge amounts of knowledge are transferred much more rapidly, effectively, and efficiently today over the Internet than in pre-Internet days. We aren't aware of it because we're immersed in it and the change has happened slowly over time, relative to the speed of our lives. For instance, imagine going to the store and buying a newspaper in order to find a stock quote (which can only be obtained for the previous day). Or imagine having to wait hours for, and then watch, an entire news show on TV just to find out who won a particular baseball game. But obviously it goes far beyond baseball scores and stock quotes.
It seems to me that the role of the university as the repository and education center of knowledge is now gone. If you think about it, all of the knowledge students learn in college could easily be distributed over the web as wiki-books, blogs of notes and FAQs, podcasts of lectures, and so forth. You might argue that you need professors to grade papers, but it's really grad students who grade most of the papers and they aren't very good at it. Besides, we're talking about knowledge and not certification (i.e. a degree). But this would only be for portions of an education which are useful such as physics, calculus and differential equations, probability and statistics, engineering courses, science courses, and other objective valuable classes. The benefits of English composition could be done easily via blogging. Medicine obviously needs its own educational system. I'd argue that engineering probably does as well, although most of it could be offloaded to individual work.
But really. Take a step back for a minute and compare the way knowledge is gained via standard education vs how it's gained over the web. Most people have taken at least one small area of knowledge and done extensive web learning on it. Think about how fast and effective and inexpensive that was compared to taking a college course on the subject. College is now mostly a medallion, a token, a certification. It's an expensive and largely useless exercise in getting a diploma.
Imagine if you could de-couple the requirements of all jobs (except medical doctors and veterinarians) from the diplomas they currently require. Think about how much useless activity is demanded from people. There's a reason why home-schooled kids are so knowledgable.
* Despite what news publishers and academics say, putting the punctuation inside the quotes is not a given. Arguably, with the increasing precision required from language due to changes in technology and communications, the punctuation should go inside the quotation marks iff** it's part of what is being quoted.
** "iff" stands for "if and only if".* ***
*** Warning: I created an infinite loop!
// posted by Bruce @ 5:36 AM 
