The body of knowledge

A long time ago, man learned to write stuff down. Of course, he’d always doodled on cave walls, but that was just art. He didn’t get serious about his symbolic ability until about 8000 BCE when the Sumerians started scratching clay. They didn’t begin by recording great speeches or how-to manuals. The earliest writing was done on clay tokens, a sort of e pluribus unum that turned otherwise worthless shards into valuable coinage. From there, the scribbling of symbols developed into commercial documentation of who owed who and how much.

It paid to be literate in this new technology. If you knew what token to hand the dude who placed your date beer on the oasis table, you didn’t just have to spread them all out and trust the bartender to pick the right one—or ones. Certain unscrupulous people began to notice how the people who couldn’t read got taken. They decided to use the confusion surrounding signs for their own nefarious purposes. They started inscribing clay tablets like hell and thus, out of deception and debt, was born law and religion. If you got in with the right circle and were fluent in the newest arcanum, your span on the planet was going to be a whole lot easier.

This pattern of introducing new technologies so that a man or a group could put one over on his fellow man has proven very effective through the centuries. Some have argued that first the pen and later the printing press were advancements in communication technology that have lead to greater understanding among the populace. What a crock. Wars have only gotten bigger and a guy who couldn’t pronoun “nuclear” took over the world.

From sundial to atomic clock, technology has had only one purpose: to enslave the befuddled.

Just look at the latest promise to unify the global village. On the surface, the World Wide Web now instantly connects bloggers around the world. My Space and Facebook are touted as a revolution in social networking. But even though a person can now post word of his conversion to Scientology with the click of a button to three hundred friends, what kind of intimacy is that? What are we really communicating?

Any medium which was developed by the defense department and made popular by pornographers is not a medium to be trusted. I can’t shake the suspicion that we’re all just insects caught in semi-invisible threads, waiting for a giant spider named Bill to come and finish us off.

Okay, so paranoia is one of my personality traits and, yes, I did write “we” are caught. Right now I’m sitting in front of my computer writing this on Microsoft Word.

In spite of the fears which I know are not just grounded in illusion, I like Word. I know how to use about five of its ten thousand functions, but the cut and paste feature alone has seduced me. I used to write on yellow legal pads. By the time I was done, the page was so filled with blacked-out lines and arrows crossing each other, pointing bracketed phrases to different places on the page, that even I couldn’t read it. Those pages often ended up balled and bouncing off the wall.

How neat the page on this screen looks by comparison. It seems to tell me that have a neat and orderly mind, that the path I took to get to this point was a straight line instead of the curving, back and forth thing that it was. And just where is this point that I’ve gotten to?

Well, I guess it’s pretty much the same one I started out with—that the relationship between people and technology is ambiguous. Technology both reflects and changes the way people think about themselves and the world. But let me start over and make my point a little clearer.

Before the people learned to write, knowledge had a human face. Science and religion came out the mouth of a storyteller around the campfire and medicine was a crazy loner who danced outside the village. People had an unusual capacity to remember things because all were conscious that knowledge had a tendency to disappear when she or he who held it did. Time traveled in circles.

But when the technology of writing things down came along, knowledge and time changed. Symbols on a page could outlive the writer by centuries. Knowledge came to be regarded as outside the person, something contained in a body of texts. All one had to remember was how to open a book and interpret the signs.

Certain types of knowledge recorded in these texts began to outpace others in their ability to affect the very human matters of life and death. Those types of knowledge which progressed were called science and given priority over those that just kept going in circles like religion. Science progressed along a line that easily documented by the ever increasing size of explosions.

Which brings me again to where I sit in front of the computer. I’m sure that just behind the screen that holds my words are the words of others. Thousands of texts have be transcribed or freshly composed by people around the world. Right now, they lie in servers and quite a few are available to me through typing a few keys.

In one sense, that knowledge is still outside a human body. It is contained in something I nostalgically imagine to be a text, but I know that’s not true. Today’s texts aren’t like a book that exists in a specific place, can be held in hand and smelled—in a word, owned.

Today’s texts exist in space as virtual as consciousness itself, suspended in a gray matter of chips as small as cells. Recovering knowledge is a process of sending tiny electric signals through a body that is sprawled across the globe.

I have a decapitated head of the body of knowledge resting on my desk. It talks and sings and occassionally answers me when I ask it something. It displays those answers in images as ephemeral as the expression on a storyteller’s face.

It is not an illusion to see a human face on technology—and that’s the thing that truly frightens me.