I was recently reading about Gesner’s ‘Historia Animalium’, and his method of classification of the natural world. Essentially, he thought that in order to gain an understanding of the natural world, we need to understand both the physical attributes, as well as the cultural and symbolic attributes of the objects in question (e.g. to understand a fox, we must also know fables concerning the fox, what it means to be foxy, etc.).
Over time, the natural sciences have slowly drifted away from the study of culture and mythology. However, it struck me that with the growing popularity of Wikipedia (among other online knowledge databases), we have – in a way – begun to organize our knowledge in a way similar to Gesner. Because storage space is cheap, and data can be easily sorted and linked, we have none of the historical problems of cataloguing and linking together massive amounts of data. The end result is that when you look up ‘fox’, for example, you no longer get information specific to the resource (i.e. biological information in a biology textbook; mythological information in a mythology book), but rather all (or most) of the information pertaining to that subject. In a way, we have come full circle in the way we organize our data.
One of the things I’m finding myself saying a lot lately is that we (or, to be clear, average people) have experienced a rapid climb in broader access to different qualities of information in the past 15 years, with no corresponding increase in the ability to select and process. Or at least, the institutions aren’t properly equipped to measure if we are.
We’re flying blind, for the most part.
On the flip-side, this has caused us to re-evaluate how we judge the quality of information. In some fields, like news reporting, the Internet has helped revolutionize the industry. It has provided alternatives to the standard Newspaper/TV Network models, helping highlight the strengths and weaknesses in our media coverage. It has also taught us a lesson in how much news is just copied from other sources, as opposed to obtained from a primary source.
We might be flying blind, but at least we’re flying now.