The
Challenge of Digital Epistemologies
Colin Lankshear
Draft Paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of The American Educational Research
Association New Orleans, 3 April 20021
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Introduction
This symposium will broadly address the theme of
Qualitative Research Methodology and Social Practice in Online Spaces
in terms of what we call the 'challenge of digitization of everyday
life'. The symposium has two overall purposes. The first, with which
I will begin in this paper, is to briefly report some results of
research conducted at points where physical space, cyber/virtual
space and social practices intersect, in order to identify some
typical examples of change pertinent to qualitative research of social phenomena.
The second main purpose is to address what we see
as some key issues concerning research methodology, validity, ethics
and epistemology, that arise in contexts of educationally relevant
social practices mediated by new digital information and
communications technologies (ICTs). We are especially interested in
three facets here:
- Research into practices that are mediated
by new ICTs
- Research into such practices that is
itself
mediated by new ICTs
- Research that is to a greater or lesser extent
designed to be presented or reported via digital ICTs, especially
the WWW
What Manuel Castells (1996) calls the information
technology revolution is associated with profound changes in our
conceptions and experiences of time, space, relatedness, and what it
is to know things. This opening paper of the symposium will focus on
some notable changes pertaining to subjects, objects and processes of
knowledge that impact more or less directly and significantly on
research processes. To begin with, then, let me mention a few
examples of changes reported in contemporary literature associated
with escalating 'digitization of the everyday'. I will focus here on
what I see as four important dimensions of change:
Changes in 'the world (objects,
phenomena) to be known' associated with the impact of digitization
Changes in conceptions of knowledge and processes
of 'coming to know'
Changes in the constitution of 'knowers' which
reflect the impact of intensified digitization.
Changes in the relative significance of, and
balance among, different modes of knowing associated with
digitization.
These changes will broadly frame our larger
discussion in this symposium of implications for research
methodology, the validity of research conducted at interfaces of
social practice, cyberspace and physical space, and the value of such
research for advances in educational theory and practice.
Changes in 'the world (objects, phenomena) to
be known' associated with the impact of digitization
In Being
Digital, Nicholas Negroponte gives the
example of checking in at a place where he was asked if he had a
laptop computer with him. He was asked how much it was worth (in case
it got lost or stolen). Negroponte valued it at 1-2 million dollars.
The check in person disputed the possibility of the machine having
such a high value, and asked what kind it was. On being told she
assigned it a $2000 value. Negroponte says that this reflects the
distinction between 'atoms' and 'bits' as different kinds of
stuff.
Not unreasonably, the person in the position of
responsibility for property was thinking in terms of atoms. The
laptop was the atom stuff and its value as atom stuff was $2000.
Negroponte, being 'digital,' related the value of the machine
entirely in terms of its 'bits'--it's 'content' in terms of ideas and
patents potentials 'contained' (even the language gets tricky) as
binary code some'where' on the hard disk. Depending on what was 'on'
the disk at the time the value could have been anything--for
instance, a research proposal in the process of development could be
worth whatever the budget of the project would be.
Being oriented toward 'bits', Negroponte
approached the world to be known and engaged in a different way from
the person who asked him the value of the computer in dollar terms.
It seems a safe hunch that the insurance policies of the organization
in question insured atoms rather than bits. Insurance valuers
probably understand what it means to assess atoms more and better
than they understand how to assess bits.
Such examples raise all manner of epistemological
questions and issues, many of which can be usefully thought about in
terms of 'mindsets' (Barlow in Tunbridge 1994). In the physical world
of atoms, it is customary to think in terms of finiteness and, as a
consequence, in terms of concepts like scarcity, control, monopoly,
zero-sum games and so on. When information is contained as atoms
(e.g., in a book), for one person to have borrowed the library copy
means another person cannot access it. This 'reality' and 'logic'
impacts on our thought and behavior in all sorts of ways: from the
importance of knowing to put books on reserve, to knowing the fastest
way to the library after class to get the book before someone else
does. When information is contained as bits, all sorts of
alternatives arise. These include not having to know the fastest way
to the library, how to navigate the Deweyan catalogue system and so
on. By the same token, there are other considerations to take into
account and things to be known and thought about.
Or, to draw on another example from Negroponte,
what are the implications for how we approach and know the world when
the stuff of something as common as a photograph changes
fundamentally from analogue to digital form? Are color and image the
same thing under these different regimes? If not, how do we
experience the difference and respond to it in terms of thought,
practice, etc.? Consider, for example, Negroponte's (1995: 14-15)
account of a digital black and white photograph:
Imagine an electronic camera laying a
fine grid over an image and then recording the level of gray it sees
in each cell. If we set the value of black to be 0 and the value of
white to be 255, then any gray is somewhere between the two.
Conveniently, a string of 8 bits (called a byte) has 256 permutations
of 1s and 0s, starting with 00000000 and ending with 11111111. With
such fine gradations and with a fine grid, you can perfectly
reconstruct the picture for the human eye.
Here again, the epistemological implications of
this are massive. What is now involved in photographic knowledge, in
judging the quality of images, in knowing how 'true' an image is, and
so on? What are the implications for evaluative criteria, for
participation in fine arts? What constitutes color? What is our
concept of color once we have to think in terms of bits, resolution,
software tradeoffs, etc.?
Neil Gershenfeld (1999: Ch. 2), provides a seris
of parallel examples for sound that test conventional
physical-analogue mindsets to (and beyond) their very limits. These
involve the work of Gershenfeld and colleagues at MIT's Media Lab to
produce a digital Stradivarius cello: a computerized assemblage of
hardware and software that pivots around a 'bow' equipped with
intricate sensors. In part the aim is to produce an 'instrument' that
can produce the quality of sound a player gets from the original
Stradivarius instruments--and thereby make it easier for more people
to access musical instruments that play with the sound quality of a
Stradivarius. The principles involved include digitizing massive
amounts of information about how an instrument turns a player's
gestures into sounds and converting these into a computerized model.
The implication is that
once a computer can solve in real time
the equations describing the motion of a violin [or a cello] the
model can replace the violin. Given a fast computer and good sensors,
all the accumulated descriptions of the physics of musical
instruments become playable instruments themselves (Gershenfeld 1999:
40).
The approach involves taking a great instrument
(like a Stradivarius) and a great player, putting the sensors on the
instrument, recording the player's actions together with the sound,
and then applying state of the art data analysis techniques to get
the model. This kind of activity can have some unusual results,
including one best recounted by Gershenfeld himself.
Soon after we were first able to model
violin bowing with this kind of analysis I was surprised to come into
my lab and see [a student] playing his arm. He has put the bow
position sensor into the sleeve of his shirt so that he could play a
violin without needing to hold a violin (ibid.: 42).
In addition, in collaboration with some of the
world's leading musicians, the MIT team is aiming to produce
instruments that make it possible to do things these musicians can
conceive of doing but which cannot be done in practice because of
physical limits in the 'real' world. For example, a cello can play
only one or two notes at a time. Moreover, there are constraints to
moving rapidly between notes played at opposite ends of a string, and
there are limits to the range of sounds that can be made by bowing a
string (ibid.: 33). Some of the musicians working with the Media Lab
team wanted to explore what possibilities lie beyond the limits
within which a cello, say, functions as the instrument we know.
Experimentation aims at using digitized software and customized
hardware to transcend existing constraints and enable musicians to
conceive musical projects beyond these limits.
Such changes are ontological. They change the
stuff of the world: cellos, sounds, and possibilities for musical
composition. This poses questions of what becomes of musical
knowledge, compositional knowledge, and unsettles conventional
concepts and categories in music, in acoustics, in matters of musical
technique and theory, and so on.
Changes in conceptions of knowledge and
processes of 'coming to know' contingent upon deeper incursions of
digitization into everyday practices
Two kinds of issues stand out here. One is
associated with Lyotard's work on the changing status of knowledge
with respect to the reasons for pursuing knowledge and the
relationship between knowledge and 'truth'. The other is associated
with issues of how we verify data that exists "at distance".
To date the most influential and widely recognized
view of how knowledge itself changes under conditions of intensified
digitizatiation has been Jean-Francois Lyotard's (1984) account of
knowledge in the postmodern condition. Lyotard's investigation
explores the working hypothesis that the status of knowledge changes as
societies become 'postindustrial' and cultures 'postmodern': that is,
as belief in the grand narratives of modernity diminishes, and as the
effects of new technologies (especially, since the 1940s) intensify
and become entrenched.
The two key functions of knowledge--namely,
research and the transmission of acquired learning in schools and
higher education institutions--change under these twin impacts, which
are now powerfully intertwined. Specifically,
knowledge is and will be produced in
order to be sold, and it is and will be consumed in order to be
valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange
(1984: 4).
Knowledge 'ceases to become an end in itself'; it
loses its use value and becomes, to all intents and purposes, an
exchange value alone. With increasing digitization, the changed
status of knowledge is characterized by such features as the
following:
- Availability of knowledge as an international
commodity becomes the basis for national and commercial advantage
within the emerging global economy
- Computerized uses of knowledge become the
basis for enhanced state security and international
monitoring
- Anything in the constituted body of knowledge
that is not translatable into quantities of information will be
abandoned
- Knowledge is exteriorized with respect to the
knower, and the status of the learner and the teacher is
transformed into a commodity relationship of 'supplier' and
'user'.
Lyotard sees some important implications and
corollaries associated with this changed status of knowledge. In
particular, as institutionalized activities of state and corporation,
scientific knowledge (research) and education (transmission of
acquired learning) are/become legitimated, in de facto terms, through
the principle of performativity: of optimizing
the overall performance of social institutions according to the
criterion of efficiency or, as Lyotard puts it, "the endless
optimization of the cost/benefit (input/output) ratio" (Lyotard 1993,
25). They are legitimated by their contribution to maximizing the
system's performance, a logic which becomes self legitimating--that
is, enhanced measurable and demonstrable performance as its own
end.
Lyotard suggests that within this kind of regime
the primary concern of professionally-oriented students, the state,
and education institutions will be with whether the learning or
information is of any use--typically in the sense of 'Is it
saleable?' or 'Is it efficient?'--not with whether it is true.
Notions and practices of competence according to criteria like
true/false, just/unjust get displaced by competence according to the
criterion of high performativity. In such a milieu the 'fates' of
individual learners will depend on factors which vary according to
access to new technologies. According to Lyotard, under conditions of
less than perfect information the learner-student-graduate-expert who
has knowledge (can use the terminals effectively in terms of
computing language competence and interrogation) and can access
information has an advantage. However, the more closely conditions
approximate to conditions of perfect information (where data is in
principle accessible to any expert), the greater the advantage that
accrues to the ability to arrange data 'in a new way'. This involves
using imagination to connect together 'series of data that were
previously held to be independent' (Lyotard 1984: 52).
Current philosophical work being developed under
the aegis of 'telepistemology' (Goldberg 2000) provides an
interesting perspective on challenges facing the possibility of
knowledge--coming to know things--within the burgeoning field of
Internet telerobotics. The issues raised can be seen as a sub-set of
a more general concerns about how far the Internet is a 'sufficiently
reliable instrument' to serve as a source of knowledge (ibid.).
'Telerobotics' refers to remote systems where a
computer-controlled mechanism operating at one end is controlled by a
human at the other end (ibid.). Telerobotics has become accessible to
Internet users who can access and manipulate remote environments via
modem access to web sites where web cameras provide remote live
images and controls allow participants to act on what they see.
Epistemological issues arise here around whether
and when one can believe what one sees within a context (the
Internet) where forgery is legion. Can one believe what one sees? And
if one cannot necessarily believe what one sees, how much skepticism
is it judicious to practise, and what problems might this pose for a
model of knowledge as justified true belief as a standard for
engaging with the Internet?
Goldberg contrasts the situation of telerobotics
as found in TV news reports of NASA space probes with Net-based
telerobotics. He uses the concept of 'authority systems' to
distinguish the question of how far one can believe what one sees of
Mars via TV news from how far one can unquestioningly accept the
authenticity of telerobotics on the Web. The former, he argues, occur
within contexts of operating 'disciplinary' and 'control' systems,
which purportedly warrant confidence in the 'veridicality' (ibid.) of what one sees. While such authority systems
are fallible--scientists have been known to cheat, and news networks
to serve propaganda interests--the idea is that they nonetheless give
us better warrant than does a medium (the Internet) which prides
itself on maximum absence of such authority and control and where, to boot,
significant numbers of participants spend their energies practising
forgery and other forms of deceit.
Goldberg presents two vignettes addressing
opposite sides of the same phenomenon.
1. The first vignette runs as follows.
Suppose, for example, that I visit an
Internet site called the Telegarden that claims to allow users to
interact with a real garden in Austria by means of a robotic arm. The
page explains that by clicking on a "Water" button users can water
the garden. Let 'P' be the proposition "I water the distant garden".
Suppose that when I click the button, I believe 'P'. Furthermore I
have good reason for believing 'P': a series of images on my computer
screen shows me the garden before and after I press the button,
revealing an expected pattern of moisture in the soil. And suppose
that 'P' is true. Thus, according to the definition [of knowledge as
justified true belief] all three conditions are fulfilled and we can
say that I know
that I watered the distant garden.
2. Goldberg's second vignette adapts long-standing
philosophical arguments advanced against justified true belief by
Edmund Gettier (1963) to the case of Internet telerobotics. The
assumption seems to be that the Internet in general, and Internet
telerobotics specifically, comprises an information source where
Gettier's counterexamples get sufficient purchase to create real
problems for justified true belief. In contrast to the first
vignette
let 'P' be the proposition that I do
not water a
distant garden. Suppose now that when I click the button I believe
'P' and that I have good reasons: an expert engineer told me about
Internet forgeries, how the whole garden is an elaborate forgery
based on prestored images of a long-dead garden. Now suppose that
there is in fact a working Telegarden in Austria but that the water
reservoir happens to be empty on the day I click on the water button.
So 'P' is true. But should we say that I know 'P'? No. But I believe 'P'.
I have good reasons, and 'P' is true.
Problems attend both vignettes. Given the extent
to which Internet forgery and fraud occurs, it's a safe bet that on
many occasions the person in the first vignette will be deceived. On
the other hand, just what degree of skepticism can we live with
before the pursuit of knowledge (as justified true belief) actually
becomes incoherent or, at the very least, unduly time consuming and
impractical?
Philosophers will argue, of course, that
philosophical skepticism has predated the Internet and telerobotics
by millennia, and that so far as the philosophy of knowledge is
concerned nothing substantial has changed with the advent of the
Internet. The only changes have been contingent: namely, heightened
dependence on other people's honesty when we use our senses to access
empirical information--people can forge empirical data in a way we
have to presume nature cannot--and, at the same time, massive
evidence of Internet deceit and the emergence of entire subcultures
devoted to perpetrating it in various forms.
So far as the practice of pursuing knowledge
is concerned, however, such contingencies are important. And sooner
or later philosophical models of knowledge (or of anything else) have
to touch ground if they are to guide human behavior. This being so,
we do in fact
have some 'digital epistemologies' work to do here. Unfortunately, it
is not especially clear what it is and how much there is of it to do.
To see this point we can recall Lyotard's ideas about the changed
status of knowledge and link it to the present issues.
The world of performativity is a world in which
'truth' seems to be far less of a concern than in the past. The
object is to get things done, efficiently. We may have here a
distinctively postmodern 'take' on Marx's famous 11th Thesis on
Feuerbach: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point is to change it' (Marx 1845-47). The driving
motive behind the most powerful knowledge production these days is to
create 'truths'
rather than to discern them. At most, the latter seem to be in the
service of the former. For example, research is widely commissioned
by governments to vindicate policies and programs rather than to evaluate them openly.
Consultants can make good livings doing 'research' that finds what
their clients want to hear; or, at least, that does not find what
clients do not want to hear. Massively funded research is undertaken
to determine just how far it is possible to push frontiers in digital
electronics and biotechnology (which, of course, involves discovering
certain kinds of truths), not whether they should be pushed to where they
can go (which involves other kinds).
To paraphrase Lyotard, access to perfect
information being equal, imagination carries the day:
imagination--and, to the same extent, 'truth' and knowledge--in the
service of what James Gee calls 'enactive projects' (Gee, Hull and
Lankshear 1996). Enactive projects are about bringing visions into
reality, about making worlds in the image of visions. This has some
very interesting and important ramifications for epistemology in a
digital world of emerging 'cybercultures.' Two similar examples can
illustrate the point here.
On April Fool's Day 1999 an Australian group
foisted a benign scam using the Internet. They solicited shares in a
bogus enterprise. The group was startled at the success of their
scam, which they had concocted for pedagogical purposes: to show how
easy it is to get conned. They returned every cent they received, but
confessed to being surprised about just how many people were willing
to part with so much of their money so readily. The other example
concerns cases like the stock invested in e-enterprises like
Amazon.com, despite open reports of heavy financial losses over
successive years, and the stunning share-raising feats achieved by
Internet outfits like Netscape and Yahoo.
In the face of such examples it makes perfect
sense to ask what the comparative significance might be to the
punters of 'truth' (in the form of something not being a scam, or the
likelihood of their making a good profit on their shares), on the one
side, and the sense of being a part of building something and making
some history, on the other. Perhaps just being part of the emerging
e-commerce scene--even if one is sometimes taken for a sucker--is
more of a consideration than the 'truth status' of an enterprise. By
comparison, troubling oneself about the 'veridicality' of some
Internet telerobotic may be entirely trivial or beside the point for
many (see also Sherry Turkle's account of her encounter with 'Julia',
below).
This becomes relevant when we ask how far, and for
whom, it is important to develop 'awareness' on the part of Internet
users so far as matters of 'veridicality' are concerned. Perhaps the
passionate drive to keep the Internet as free of authority and
control as possible is the corollary of some conventional
epistemological constructs having down the toilet--at least, for the
meantime--along with some cherished grand narratives of
modernity.
Changes in the constitution of 'knowers' which
reflect the impact of digitization
Of the many observed related changes in the
constitution of knowing and believing subjects--the 'bearers' of
propositional, procedural, and performance knowledge--contingent on
intensified digitization of daily life, two must suffice here.
The first has been well-recognized in a range of
guises for some time now, within the contexts of 'new capitalist'
workplaces and discourses, as well as in areas of inquiry like
cognitive science, social cognition, and other neo-Vygotskian
cognates (for an overview, see Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996: Ch. 2).
However, it has still to be recognized and taken up in any
significant degree within formal education. This involves ideas like
'distributed cognition,' 'collaborative practice,' 'networked
intelligence,' and communities of practice.'
Theories of distributed cognition, for example,
have grown in conjunction with the emergence of 'fast capitalism' and
networked technologies (Castells 1996; Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996).
Within work teams, for example, a collective may share between them
the knowledge pertaining to particular processes, or for solving
problems that arise. Such teams may operate within a particular area
of an enterprise, or be dispersed across several areas. A further
instance, identified and discussed by Lyotard (1984), is found in the
role and significance of multidisciplinary teams in 'imagining new
moves or new games' in the quest for extra performativity within,
say, research. Increasingly, the model of multidisciplinary teams
supersedes that of the expert individual as the efficient means to
making new moves (Lyotard 1984). In addition, as described in Paul
Gilster's (1997) account of 'knowledge assembly,' in the
information-abundant world of the Internet and other searchable data
sources it is often impossible for individuals to manage their own
information needs, maintain an eye to the credibility of information
items and so on. Practices of information gathering and organizing
are often highly customized and dispersed, with 'the individual'
depending on roles being played by various services and technologies.
Hence, a particular 'assemblage' of knowledge that is brought
together--however momentarily--in the product of an individual may
more properly be understood as a collective assemblage involving
many minds and machines. For instance, the knowing subject will
increasingly make use of search engines, many of which employ bots:
small, 'independent' artificial intelligence robots (Johnson 1997;
Turkle 1995; Brown and Duguid 2000). These are composed of bits and
bytes rather than screws and metal (<http://botspot.com/search/s-chat.htm>). They can move about in cyberspace and interact with
other programs performing a range of tasks, including finding
information that answers questions framed in natural language.
AskJeeves is a well known example of a bot-based program
(<http://www.askjeeves.com>). In addition, of course, we use all manner of search
engines that employ Boolean logic to address our keywords, as well as
customized newsfeeds and information feeds and editors that are often
mediated by other human beings, as well as ones that operate as
unmediated software programs.
Such examples pose problems for the notion that
knowing, thinking, believing, being justified, and so on are located
within the individual person (the 'cogitating' subject). This,
however, is an underlying assumption of the justified true belief
model, which construes propositional knowledge of 'P' as an attribute
of an individual, A. Ultimately, schools too operate on this
assumption at the level of their 'deep structure.' For all of the
group work and collaborative activity that has entered classrooms in
recent times, knowledge is seen in the final analysis as a private
possession, and is examined and accredited accordingly.
The second example is a small-scale variation on
the previous notion that to date exists mainly at an 'extreme geek'
experimental level. It seems likely, however, to become much more
common in the future. It involves people themselves, and not merely
machines, being electronically wired together as networks by means of
'wearable computers.' Gershenfeld's younger colleagues in the MIT
Media Lab provide graphic illustrations of what is at stake here.
One, named Steve, wears a visor that covers his eyes and contains
small display screens. 'He looks out through a pair of cameras, which
are connected to his displays through a fanny pack full of
electronics strapped around his waist' (Gershenfeld 1999: 45). Steve
can vary his vision. When riding a bicycle in traffic he can mount a
camera to the rear to view traffic approaching from behind, and when
walking in a crowd he can point a camera to the footpath to see where
he is walking.
Among the many extended applications made possible
by virtue of the computer he wears is one that allows other people to
see the data that goes to his display screens--via a web page from
which others can access his recent images. By these means his wife
can look out through Steve's eyes when he is shopping in the
supermarket and help him select fruit, which is something he is not
good at (ibid.).
This raises intriguing questions about what it
means to know that a given piece of fruit is (or is not) of good
quality, and to know how to select good fruit at a supermarket stand.
In this case, multiple forms of knowledge are involved within the
performance of selecting good fruit. Some of it, and only some of it,
has to do with fruit. Much of it has to do with managing a wearable
computer. As wearing computers becomes a more common practice, it
seems almost inevitable that more and more knowing will become
collaborative, networked, and distributed processes and performances.
While we may be unable at present to foretell the implications of
this for curriculum with much specificity, it is clear that they will
be enormous, and that now is the time to start thinking seriously
about possible scenarios.
Changes in the relative significance of, and
balance among, different kinds and modes of knowing
Conventional epistemology has privileged
propositional
knowledge, and supported the overwhelming domination within
classrooms of text-based knowing that. In principle, the
book-centered 'modernist space of enclosure' that is the school (and,
more specifically, the classroom) could support a more equitable
balance between propositional knowledge and other modes and forms of
knowledge--notably, procedural knowledge, or knowing
how--than it
typically does. Even so, the abstraction and decontextualization of
classrooms from mature forms of authentic non-scholastic social
practices has seriously limited the range of possibilities until
recently.
Now, however, the proliferation of new social
practices predicated on nothing more than networked computers and
access to expertise (which follows almost inevitably from having
access to online communities of practice) makes it possible to admit
distinctively new forms of curriculum pursuits into classrooms that
can emulate 'mature' versions of social practices in ways that the
cooking and woodwork rooms rarely could. Understanding the importance
of this, the extent to which it should be pursued in the name of
'education,' and what it may involve in practice, will call for
rethinking epistemology in terms of the evolving digital age.
This section will briefly address just four of the
many facets that are likely to become increasingly relevant and
important here.
First, there will be a need within an ongoing
digital epistemologies research program to investigate knowledge in
relation to building, inhabiting, and negotiating virtual worlds.
This will involve aspects of personal and interpersonal knowledge, as
when deciding how best to represent oneself using avatars and
whatever other means become available. To 'outsiders' this may seem a
trivial matter, but to 'insiders' it is anything but. For some
participants, at least for a while, it may be enough simply to choose
from avatars made available by virtual worlds (e.g., as is possible
in ActiveWorlds or Outerworlds). Others will want to create their own
(as in the Avatar Factory or Cybertown Palace), deciding whether and
how their avatar will reflect who and what they see themselves as
being. According to Michael Heim (1999: no page)
When people enter these [virtual]
worlds, they choose their avatar, determining how they will appear to
themselves and to others in the world. Even in worlds where avatar
parts can be assembled piecemeal into customized identities, the
initial design of the parts still strongly affects the look and feel
of the avatar. Avatar design not only affects the perception of the
self but it also affects possible ways of navigating through the
world and the kind of dwellings that are appropriate for the
avatar.
Clearly, all manner of issues will arise here for
identity knowledge, as well as for knowing where and when one
is as one moves
between virtual and 'real' worlds: as 'one' moves between 'being'
atoms and bits. Categories like 'real' and 'location' mean
differently across the different spaces. Virtual reality splinters
our working concepts of 'real life.' The significance of the
conceptual shakiness of 'real life' versus 'not real life' is
exemplified by the fallout that surrounded the Tamagotchi fad of
digital handheld pets that 'died' if not cared for properly.
In a future that looks certain to involve a lot
more interaction between humans and more or less human-like
'bit-beings,' new forms of inter'personal' knowledge will become
increasingly important. Early indications of terrain to be traversed
here were documented by Sherry Turkle (1995: 16).
Many bots roam MUDs [multi-user
domains]. They log onto the games as though they were characters.
Players create these programs for many reasons: bots help with
navigation, pass messages, and create a background atmosphere of
animation in the MUD. When you enter a virtual cafe, you are usually
not alone. A waiter bot approaches who asks if you want a drink and
delivers it with a smile.
Turkle goes on to explain how she has
sometimes--as have others--mistaken a real person for a bot because
their actions and comments within the MUD seemed 'bot-like' or 'too
machine like' (ibid.) And, conversely, 'sometimes bots are mistaken
for people. I have made this mistake too, fooled by a bot that
flattered me by remembering my name or our last interaction' (ibid.).
Turkle describes one very accomplished bot, known
as Julia, who was programmed to chat with players in MUDs, to engage
in teasing repartee, and so on (Turkle 1995: 93). She relates a study
by Leonard Foner who describes how one person, Lara, reacted to
Julia--both when Lara thought when Julia was a person and when she
knew Julia was a bot:
[Lara] originally thought Julia's
limitations [conversation-wise] might be due to Down's (sic)
syndrome. Lara's reaction when she finally learns that Julia is a bot
reflects the complexity of current responses to artificial
intelligence. Lara is willing to accept and interact with machines
that function usually in an intelligent manner. She is willing to
spend time in their company and show them cordiality and respect. …
Yet, upon hearing that Julia was a bot, Lara says she felt "fright,
giddiness, excitement, curiosity, and pride". There was also the
thrill of superiority:
'I know this sounds strange, but I
felt I could offer more to the conversation than she could. I tested
her knowledge on many subjects. It was like I was proving to myself
that I was superior to a machine….'
Interestingly, Lara still refers to the Julia
program as 'she.'
A second area for development with respect to
changes in the relative significance of, and balance among, different
kinds and modes of knowing is inchoate in the efforts of people like
Michael Heim (1999) to wrestle in varying ways with conceptions and
issues of 'multi modal truth.' How do we make sense of 'truths' that
are expressed not in propositions but through multiple media
simultaneously and interactively?
Since the invention of the printing press the
printed word has been the main carrier of (what is presented) as
truth. Mass schooling has evolved under what could be called a
'regime of print', and print more generally has 'facilitated the
literate foundation of culture (Heim 1999 no page). Of course,
various kinds of images or graphics have been used in printed texts
to help carry truth (e.g., tables, charts, graphs, photographs,
illustrations). However, Internet technology merges pictures and
print (not to mention sound and developers are currently working on
smell) much more intricately and easily than ever possible before. As
Heim (1999 no page) puts it,
[t]he word now shares Web space with
the image, and text appears inextricably tied to pictures. The
pictures are dynamic, animated, and continually updated. The
unprecedented speed and ease of digital production mounts
photographs, movies, and video on the Web. Cyberspace becomes
visualized data, and meaning arrives in spatial as well as in verbal
expressions.
Of course, virtual worlds with their images and
forms, the music found in a world or part of a world, the text one
writes to communicate with others, the gestures and movements one's
avatar can be programmed to make are thoroughly multi-modal in a
seamless and 'natural' way. For example, if we teleport to
Alphaworld, the music, the lush greenery and strong, sunlit colours
suggest to us that this world is probably a happy place. Unlike
Metatropolis with its eerie music, strange lurking figures and
barren, nighttime landscape which suggests that one had better take
care. Likewise, in Alphaworld there are no hidden tunnels and holes
to get trapped in as there are in Metatroplis and requiring an exit
from the world to escape. These worlds add up to wholes by means of
sound, images, text, movement and change requiring the inhabitant or
tourist (yes, there are tourists in ActiveWorlds!) to be constantly
reading these constitutive elements in order to make sense of the
world they are in.
A third consideration inviting us to reassess the
relative significance and balance among multiple modes of knowing and
forms of knowledge is the idea of an emerging 'attention economy'
(Goldhaber 1997). If people in postindustrial societies will
increasingly live their lives in the spaces of the Internet, their
lives will fall more and more under economic laws organic to this new
space. Michael Goldhaber (1997, 1998a, 1998b), among others, has
argued that the basis of the coming new economy will be attention.
Attention is inherently scarce and it moves through the Net.
The idea of an attention economy is premised on
the fact that the human capacity to produce material things outstrips
the net capacity to consume the things that are produced---given the
existing irrational contingencies of distribution. For the powerful
minority of people whose 'material needs at the level of creature
comfort are fairly well satisfied,' the need for attention becomes
increasingly important, and increasingly the focus of their
productive activity.
[T]he energies set free by the
successes of … the money-industrial economy go more and more in the
direction of obtaining attention. And that leads to growing
competition for what is increasingly scarce, which is of course
attention. It sets up an unending scramble, a scramble that also
increases the demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we
can (Goldhaber 1997: no page).
Within an attention economy, individuals seek
stages - performing spaces - from which they can perform for the
widest/largest possible audiences. Goldhaber observes that the
various spaces of the Internet lend themselves perfectly to this
model.
The importance of gaining attention has been
extended to enterprises operating in the growing Network Economy.
NCR's 'Knowledge Lab' (<http://www.knowledgelab.com>) is an early player in the domain of identifying the
kind of knowledge needed to gain the attention of consumers--who face
a glut of information relevant to their requirements--and to pay to
consumers the kind of reciprocal attention that will generate brand
loyalty. According to the Knowledge Lab:
Attention will be an increasingly
scarce commodity. Firms will have think of themselves as operating
both in an Attention Market as well as their core market.
Attention will be hard to earn, but if it is
viewed as a reciprocal flow, firms can use information about
consumers and customers to stand out in a sea of content to increase
profitability: pay attention to them and they pay attention to you.
Relationships are likely to encompass attention transactions. As
customers realize the value of their attention and their information
needed to get it, we show that they may require payment of some kind
for both.
The Knowledge Lab is looking into how we can
quantify, measure and track flows of attention in the Network Economy
(<http://www.knowledgelab.com>).
What kind of knowledge will be advantageous for
operating in the attention economy? Goldhaber argues that in a
full-fledged attention economy the goal is simply to get enough
attention or to get as much as possible. This becomes the primary
motivation for and criterion of successful performance in cyberspace.
Generating information will principally be concerned either with
gaining attention directly, or with paying what Goldhaber calls
'illusory attention' to others in order to maintain the degree of
interest in the exchange on their part necessary for gaining and
keeping their attention.
Beyond this, Goldhaber (ibid.) argues that gaining
attention is indexical to originality. It is difficult to get new
attention 'by repeating exactly what you or someone else has done
before.' Consequently, the attention economy is based on 'endless
originality, or at least attempts at originality.'
Some challenges facing conventional
epistemology
While all sorts of variations and complexities
exist around the kernel of 'scientific knowledge' (e.g.,
falsificationism vs verificationism, niceties of validation,
representation, interpretation and so on), it seems fair to say that
to a great extent the trappings of a long established model of
knowledge commonly known as "justified true belief" still dominate
research methodology at the level of practice. This is especially
true within higher degree research programs.
Knowledge as justified true belief is concerned
with propositional knowledge and is typically rendered as a simple
set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions.
According to this epistemology, for A (a person,
knower) to know that P (a proposition)
- A must believe that P
- P must be true
- A must be justified in believing that P
The ideas raised above pose some serious
challenges for this epistemology and for sedimented qualitative
research practices that remain to a large extent based upon it. I
will identify very briefly five challenges.
1. The standard epistemology constructs knowledge
as something that is carried linguistically and expressed in
sentences/propositions and theories. The multimedia realm of digital
CITs makes possible--indeed, makes normal--the radical convergence
of text, image, and sound in ways that break down the primacy of
propositional linguistic forms of 'truth bearing.' While many images
and sounds that are transmitted and received digitally so still stand
in for propositional information (cf. Kress' notion of images
carrying complex information mentioned above), many do not. They can
behave in epistemologically very different ways from talk and
text--for example, evoking, attacking us sensually, shifting and
evolving constantly, and so on. Meaning and truth arrive in spatial
as well as textual expressions (Heim 1999), and the rhetorical and
normative modes challenge the scientific-propositional on a major
scale.
Michael Heim (1999) offers an interesting
perspective on this in his account of what he calls 'the new mode of
truth' that will be realized in the 21st century. He claims that as a
new digital media displaces older forms of typed and printed word,
questions about how truth is 'made present' through processes that
are closer to rituals and iconographies than propositions and text
re-emerge in similar forms to those discussed by theologians since
medieval times. Heim argues that incarnate truth as the sacred Word
is transmitted through a complex of rituals and images integrated
with text-words. In the case of the Catholic church, for
instance:
communal art is deemed essential to
the transmission of the Word as conceived primarily through spoken
and written scriptures. The word on the page is passed along in a
vessel of images, fragrances, songs, and kinesthetic pressed flesh.
Elements like water, salt, and wine contribute to the communication.
Truth is transmitted not only through spoken and written words but
also through a participatory community that re-enacts its truths
through ritual (Heim1999: no page).
The issue of how truth is made present in and
through the rituals of the community of believers-practitioners has
been an abiding concern of theologians for centuries. Is the presence
of incarnate truth granted to the community through ritualized
enactment of the sacred word real, or should it be seen as
symbolic or, perhaps, as a kind of virtual presence? (ibid.). Heim
suggests that this and similar questions take on new significance
with the full-flowering of digital media. If truth 'becomes finite
and accessible to humans primarily through the word,' he asks, 'what
implications do the new media hold for the living word as it shifts
into spatial imagery?' (ibid.).
Heim casts his larger discussion of these issues
in the context of Avatar worlds being constructed by online users of
virtual reality (VR) software to express their visions of virtual
reality as a form of truth. These visions are realized and
transmitted through what Heim calls the 'new mode of truth.'
2. In the traditional view knowing is an act we
carry out on something that already exists, and truth pertains to
what already is. In various ways, however, the kind of knowing
involved in social practices within the diverse spaces of new ICTs is
very different from this. More than propositional knowledge of what
already exists, much of the knowing that is involved in the new
spaces might better be understood in terms of a performance
epistemology - knowing as an ability to perform - in the kind of
sense captured by Wittgenstein as: 'I now know how to go on.' This is
knowledge of how to make 'moves' in 'language games.' It is the kind
of knowledge involved in becoming able to speak a literal language,
but also the
kind of move-making knowledge that is involved in Wittgenstein's
notion of language as in 'language games' (Wittgenstein 1953).
At one level this may be understood in terms of
procedures like making and following links when creating and reading
Web documents. At another level it is reflected in Lyotard's idea
that the kind of knowledge most needed by knowledge workers in
computerized societies is the procedural knowledge of languages like
telematics and informatics--recalling here that the new ICTs and the
leading edge sciences are grounded in language-based developments--as
well as of how to interrogate. Of particular importance to 'higher
order work' and other forms of performance under current and
foreseeable conditions--including performances that gain
attention--is knowledge of how to make new moves in a game and how to
change the very rules of the game. This directly confronts
traditional epistemology that, as concretized in normal science,
presupposes stability in the rules of the game as the norm and
paradigm shifts as the exception. While the sorts of shifts involved
in changing game rules cannot all be on the scale of paradigm shifts,
they nonetheless subvert stability as the norm.
3. Standard epistemology is individualistic.
Knowing, thinking/cognition, believing, being justified, and so on
are seen as located within the individual person (knowing subject).
This view is seriously disrupted in postmodernity. Theories of
distributed cognition, for example, have grown in conjunction with
the emergence of 'fast capitalism' (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996) and
networked technologies. This is a complex association, the details of
which are beyond us here (see also Castells 1996, 1997, 1998). It is
worth noting, however, that where knowledge is (seen as) the major
factor in adding value and creating wealth, and where knowledge
workers are increasingly mobile, it is better for the corporation to
ensure that knowledge is distributed rather than concentrated. This
protects the corporation against unwanted loss when individuals
leave. It is also, of course, symmetrical with the contemporary logic
of widely dispersed and flexible production that can make rapid
adjustments to changes in markets and trends.
A further aspect of this issue is evident in
Lyotard's recognition of the role and significance of
multidisciplinary teams in 'imaging new moves or new games' in the
quest for extra performance. The model of multidisciplinary teams
supersedes that of the expert individual (Lyotard's professor) as the
efficient means to making new moves.
In addition, we have seen that in the
information-superabundant world of the Internet and other searchable
data sources it is often impossible for individuals to manage their
own information needs, maintain an eye to the credibility of
information items and so on. Practices of information gathering and
organizing are often highly customized and dispersed, with 'the
individual' depending on roles being played by various services and
technologies. Hence, a particular 'assemblage' of knowledge that is
brought together--however momentarily--in the product of an
individual may more properly be understood as a collective assemblage involving
many minds (and machines).
4. To a large extent we may be talking about some
kind of post-knowledge epistemology operating in the postmodern
condition. In the first place, none of the three logical conditions
of justified true belief is necessary for information. All that is
required for information is that data be sent from sender to
receivers, or that data be received by receivers who are not even
necessarily targeted by senders. Information is used and acted on.
Belief may
follow from using information, although it may not, and belief
certainly need not precede the use of information or acting on
it.
There is more here. The 'new status' knowledge of
Lyotard's postmodern condition--knowledge that is produced to be sold
or valorized in a new production--does not necessarily require that
the conditions of justified true belief be met. This follows from the
shift in the status of knowledge from being a use value to becoming
an exchange value. For example, in the new game of 'hired gun'
research where deadlines are often 'the day before yesterday' and the
'answer' to the problem may already be presupposed in the larger
policies and performativity needs of the funders, the efficacy of the
knowledge produced may begin and end with cashing the check (in the
case of the producer) and in being able to file a report on time (in
the case of the consumer). Belief, justification and truth need not
come within a mile of the entire operation.
Even accounts like the one Gilster provides of
assembling knowledge from news feeds stops short of truth, for all
his emphasis on critical thinking, seeking to avoid bias,
distinguishing hard and soft journalism, and so on. The objectives
are perspective and balance, and the knowledge assembly process as
described by Gilster is much more obviously a matter of a production
performance than some unveiling of what already exists. We assemble a
point of view, a perspective, an angle on an issue or story. This
takes the form of a further production, not a capturing or mirroring of some original
state of affairs.
5. So far as performances and productions within
the spaces of the Internet are concerned, it is questionable how far
'knowledge' and 'information' are the right metaphors for
characterizing much of what we find there. In many spaces where users
are seeking some kind of epistemic assent to what they produce, it
seems likely that constructs and metaphors from traditional rhetoric
or literary theory--e.g., composition--may serve better than
traditional approaches to knowledge and information.
Conclusion
To the extent that such perceived challenges to
conventional epistemology have force, they carry implications for
qualitative research. At the very least, they imply that besides
taking into account the standard sorts of considerations associated
with developments in poststructuralist, post-colonialist, postmodern
and post-positivist theorising, debates around themes like validity,
verification, representation and interpretation should also reckon
with quite specific dimensions of contemporary change such as those
identified here.
Note
This paper draws on material presented in other places, notably:
Lankshear, C., Peters, M. and Knobel, M. (2000) Information,
knowledge and learning. The Journal of the Philosophy of Education
Society of Great Britain 34, 1.
Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2001) What is digital
epistemologies?. In J. Souranta et al (eds.), The Integrated Media
Machine: Aspects of Internet Culture, Hypertechnologies and Informal
Learning. Helsinki and Rovaniemi: Edita and the University of
Lapland.
Acknowledgment
The work reported in this paper was supported financially by the
Faculty of Education and Creative Arts, Central Queensland
University, and by the Australian Research Council.
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