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Underground > Laboratory >

Wireless knowledge

15:00 / 10.06.05

So the other day I was in a pub quiz. Not much different from your normal, everyday pub quiz except that someone had figured out that there was wireless access available in the pub and was using their laptop and google to seem smarter than they were. Of course this individual was found out pretty quickly and taken out of the quiz, but this incident got me thinking about knowledge, the way we value it and how we go about acquiring it.

Technology has advanced to the point where someone with the appropriate equipment can access information on nearly everything from almost anywhere. The reach of wireless networks looks set to increase, as does the pickup of 3G mobile networks. Effectively, this turns everyone into a potential specialist on a wide range of topics. As little as 20 years ago, the amount of work you would have had to do to gain access to a similar amount of information was comparatively enormous. You would have had to go to a library or bookshop, trawl through reference books that you would either borrow or buy. The required outlay of effort and other resources meant that knowledge held by people was highly valued.

So the question is: Will the progressive advance of information distribution technology reduce the value we as humans attach to knowledge? Whereas in the past certain individuals would devote their lives to the acquisition of specialist information, will we see a reduction in this sort of behaviour? And is there a danger that eventually information will become static, as everything is linked to everything else and there is no reason to inquire anymore?

15:22 / 10.06.05

How do those things work? If you have a laptop with wireless access, you can just instantly connect to the internet when you're in a certain spot? Without paying for it or anything? Sorry, I'm not good with computer things.

15:46 / 10.06.05

Well, firstly I would profoundly disagree that the information available via the internet is anywhere near the level of even a local library in terms of quality, depth and authority.

This may well be down to the different way in which websites and most books present information to the reader. Websites are designed to be browsed, dipped in and out of as the reader searches for a specific nugget of information. Books are designed to be read whole and offer a greater depth of information on a wider subject. In addition to this, anyone can author a website and place whatever information they like upon it, no matter how inaccurate and spurious with few obvious indications of who the author actually is...

All Acting Regiment

16:03 / 10.06.05

Jack- basically, you just use your existing setup, same costs and all, only you don't need a wire going to the wall. You have an arial instead, and there's another arial in the wall socket.

Grey- The idea of knowledge becoming devalued as technology makes it more readily available is interesting, and I think we can already see this in some respects.

An example is when people just nip online and dig up their family ancestry: often, it's just something they do for a bit of a laugh, whereas like you say, in the past it would have meant months, at least, of research, and probably only done if you thought there was a very important reason to do so. Same goes for tracking down old school friends.

On the other hand:

Reading something on a webpage is not the same as doing a university course on it.

Finding something out is not the same as learning it. Though there are online courses, they rest on the fact that you have to write essays and do the groundwork.

Are we really any more knowledgeable than we were x number of years ago?

I embrace the idea of free knowledge, but I think we should be careful about over-estimating how much really useful knowledge we can get our hands on. For example: which companies have me on their mailing list? What did my past employer do with my bank details? The layperson still can't just come across this knowledge.

The retreival system is fragile.

Not many people realise this, but computers break easily, wireless systems and servers go on the blink all the time, and digital media degrades after 5-10 years. They also depend on a power generator. There are books a thousand years old and still in one peice, still capable of giving us information, whereas a Betamax tape from a bare two decades ago is practically useless, it's contents unretreivable.

16:15 / 10.06.05

Um... can we split the 'how to' aspect of wireless into a seperate thread please?

16:19 / 10.06.05

Um... can we split the 'how to' aspect of wireless into a seperate thread please?
I apologize.

semioticrobotic

16:49 / 10.06.05

This reminds me of some things Andy Clark wrote in his book Natural Born Cyborgs.

I am going to do my best to paraphrase from memory. Bear with me.

Clark says information technologies like the Internet can be conceived as extensions of human memory. How soon can we claim to "know" something that we retrieve instantly from an external tool?

For instance, he says, take the wristwatch. When someone says to you, "Do you know the time?", you typically say: "Yes," and then glance at your watch to give it to them. You didn't "know" the time "in your head," so to speak, but you claimed you KNEW it! The information was readily at hand and easily retreivable.

When someone says: "Do you know how to spell 'bureaucracy,'" and you don't know how to spell it, you say "No." Then you go look it up. What's the difference between this scenario and the watch scnerario?

I'd say: ease and speed of retreival. As wireless networks become ubiquitous and the Net becomes integrated into and under the skin ("skin-bag," in Clark's terms), how long will it be until we can constantly say "Yea, I know that"?

nedrichards is confused

21:09 / 10.06.05

I like that metaphor quite a lot. It's like asking someone if they know how to breathe, of course they do but actually doing it when you're thinking about every muscle you have to move, every rise and fall. That's a bit different. I take the upthread point about your local library having lots of information that isn't necessarily easily accessible on the internet but if you think that people (like google with their print project for example) aren't interested in digitising all of that and adding it into your ordinary searchflow then you're sadly mistaken.

Yes there is a difference between knowledge and a quick answer and we'll always need to have experts, if only to add to the verified knowledge pile. As for the means of access I happen to think that the phone form factor has got mroe going for it than the laptop one, certainly in this country (UK) but I think that's already been suggested to be the topic for another thread.

alejandrodelloco

23:10 / 10.06.05

I would have to say that what you find on the web will soon be of equal quality to what you can find in a library, especially as more and more textual work becomes digitized. See also: Google's efforts up that alley.

My local library just started offering a service that allows me to access a bunch of really quality databases with just my card number from home. You can "check out" DRM'd audiobooks from netlibrary, and all sorts of shit. Even the libraries themselves are seeing the inherent advantage of digitized information where it is otherwise difficult to deal with, like periodicals.

12:35 / 11.06.05

I think there are more factors at work in; I’m searching for the right word here, retarding the use of works of depth via the Internet. I see them as being split broadly into commercial and technical hurdles. Tech hurdles include such problems as storage issues brought up earlier (the key example here is the digital doomsday project, a bid to do a modern equivalent of the doomsday book produced around 1086. Where as the original remains as accessible today as it was when it was first completed the 1986 version was stored on laserdiscs which have since become obsolete).

Additional tech hurdles also include additional problems such as the current poor level of display technology. I don't know anyone who would rather read a novel or a textbook off a computer/PDA/phone than off of paper.

I’d also argue that there is a significant difference between how individual web pages are read and how individual pages of a book are read, that there is a larger level of resistance to clicking through than there is to turning a page, but this is probably a topic for another time…

On the flipside of the technical problems are the commercial considerations. Everyone is keen to make a buck, seemingly more so on the Internet than elsewhere. Whereas a local library provides you with the opportunity to read a novel/textbook/journal for free the same is not yet true of works of depth via the Internet, nor even for the archives of some online journals and newspapers. It is by no means guaranteed that such resources will be available for free in the future. Even if the problems of the digital divide are solved there are also problems of the cost of quality information of depth.

None of these hurdles are insurmountable but, crucially, there is no guarantee that the eventual solutions will maintain all of the benefits of, say, the local library of dead wood publications.

19:50 / 20.06.05

Well, does a local library have all the advantages of memorizing the corpus of your tribe's historical myths?

I'd say no, it doesn't, but it's a different way to approach bodies of knowledge, and over the past 500-1500 years, the dead tree variety of knowing seems to have become the standard.

What's interesting about wireless is that it makes the net seem as if it is and should be universal, like clean water -- a public utility, a fruit of civilization that just exists without thinking about it.

22:10 / 20.06.05

I take your point about tribal history being recorded in a different way, ie through an oral tradition repeated generation to generation, but surely the point about oral tradition is that A) there absolutely no guarentee of fidelity, the story might change completely and B) there is only the living record; if the tribe are wiped out or are prevented from telling their own stories then they die out unrecorded. Dead trees and stone tablets carry the stories of civilizations longsince dust but there is nothing for extinct non-literate cultures.

At the moment I am minded to agree that wireless should be free but, in the UK at least, the number of free open wifi access points is relatively small, with numerous pay services attempting to make their money through installing their services in public places such as train terminals... still there are projects like this one...

Like I say... I WANT access to information to be free, but we are a long way from being there yet...

semioticrobotic

17:08 / 08.07.05

What's interesting about wireless is that it makes the net seem as if it is and should be universal, like clean water -- a public utility, a fruit of civilization that just exists without thinking about it.

I like this idea. My dad is an electrician by trade, and we've talked about this issue many times. I told him that when I start shopping around for an apartment, Internet ports in rooms are as important to me as electrical outlets and phone jacks.

I think it's only a matter of time before the Internet is considered a utility.

08:08 / 09.07.05

Phone jacks were more of an issue in the internal modem days - in the times of wireless broadband you can broadcast a wifi signal to your whole house, with tactical boosts if necessary, without having to worry so much where the wires are...