unmediated: Anti-credentialism and Technostalgia

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February 11, 2006

Michel Bauwens:

I have long argued that the new P2P technologies and social processes reflect a deep shift in ways of feeling and being and in the constellation of values (in ontology, epistemology, axiology). Technostalgia then, could be called a state of opinion which wants to hold on to an earlier form of technology, corresponding to an earlier state of feeling/being/knowing.

There is an interesting debate about this in the Ghost in the Wire blog. I recommend to read both the main entry, and the ensuing debate with Michael Bujega, who wants to stabilize the internet as a knowledge exchange mechanism and is interpreted by the author of the blog as being in thrall of technostalgia. Michael is a reporter and is concerned that students have not ‘earned’ the new technologies and that they may abuse it, and that concerns with facts are disappearing, leading to the mere exchange of opinions. I’m really summarizing the feeling tone of the debate here, as the points are well argued by both parties. Nevertheless, though such efforts may bear some fruit, it seems to me they are ultimately doomed (in the sense that their effect will be marginal), as an attempt to enforce an earlier logic, where information was rather more scarce and thus could be managed qualitatively and otherwise, to an information explosion leading to a situation where there are eventually more authors than readers.

For a new development to be integrative, it has to include the qualities of earlier forms, but in the process, some things will get lost, to be replaced by new mechanisms.

To summarize current trends, we are moving from

1) macrocontent to microcontent and microlearning,

2) from individual learning theories to connectionism,

3) from hierarchichal categorization via decentralized multi-dimensional facetting to distributed tagging and folksonomies;

4) from institution-based credentialist peer review, to anti-credentialism and communal validation in truth-building;

5) from wholistic absolutism via objectivism to intersubjective aperspectivism and distributged collective intelligence in epistemological method.

These trends are not regressive, because the earlier standards of objectivity and fact-checking are still implied and supplied through communal validation. But supply becomes a function of self-selection, while the filtering is a posteriori. It is rather the method of fact gathering which changes from being decentralised through media, to being distributed through peers.
We cannot merely be content then, to safeguard the older quality-mechanisms, but need to invent totally new ones.

Originally posted by Michel from P2P Foundation, remediated by yatta on Feb 11, 2006 at 10:02 PM