Here's an idea, Google is knowledge.
So a couple of years ago, some friends of mine and I
were trying to remember the name of the guy-- you
know, the guy in the show with the spaceships.
Anyway, none of us could remember the name of the guy
so one of us Googled it.
It was Nathan Fillion, by the way, which all of us
should have known.
And then out of nowhere, one of my friend says, yeah, well,
we are past the age of memory.
Say what?
Sure, Google might be what Wikipedia co-founder Larry
Sanger calls a mental prosthesis,
but past the age of memory-- really?
This idea is all over the internet, though.
The internet is changing how we think.
The internet, our brains-- what's the deal?
Technology, everything's different.
I'm scared.
Larry Sanger has also written that you can find information
on the internet very easily.
Knowledge is another matter entirely.
Herein lies the quandary.
With all of this information available all the time,
are we not somehow getting more knowledgeable?
Is Google not itself knowledge?
I say, well, yeah.
But before we get too much further,
let's talk about what knowledge actually is, other than power.
There are about as many theories of knowledge
as there are things to know.
Personally, I like John Locke's theory.
In his essay concerning human understanding,
he writes that the mind hath no other immediate object
but his own ideas.
Knowledge, he writes, is the perception
of the connection of and agreement or disagreement
and repugnancy of any of our ideas.
In short, you got stuff in your brain zone and the way
that stuff relates to all the other stuff,
well, that there is knowledge.
Ideas themselves are not knowledge.
Knowing the facts is not the same as knowing.
You know, like you could be in possession of the facts
that Nathan Fillion is 42 years old,
was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,
and voiced Frisbee Guy on "King of the Hill."
But those facts are meaningless if you
don't know who Nathan Fillion is and don't have a use for that,
which I imagine you do.
Facts and ideas become knowledge when
they relate to and are put to use
with and against other facts and ideas.
If an idea is a LEGO piece, then knowledge is the 5,922-piece
LEGO Taj Mahal.
What the internet does is makes available to us
all the LEGO pieces we would ever need.
And that is a dual edged sword also made of LEGO, probably.
Actually, made of all the LEGO.
You'll also notice that I started
saying LEGO and not LEGOs.
In a step towards the perfectly transhumanist brain,
we have these little boxes at the end of our arms
that can answer any question at any time.
Beep-boop-beep.
Nathan Fillion is 6 foot 2.
But There are some folks who argue that this
is awful for our brains.
They make two major points.
One, that there are enough neat and surface level facts
and tidbits, many of them about Mr. Fillion,
that we will never dig deep enough into any one thing
to build knowledge.
And two, that there is so much out there that even if we
wanted to build knowledge, that it is so overwhelming we
don't or can't.
Many of these concerns are summed up very nicely
by a question asked by Mr. George Dyson,
what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?
I am totally unconvinced, though,
that Google-built knowledge is any more
taxing or distraction-laden than any
of the old-fashioned methods.
If someone lived in a very well-stocked library
and could avail themselves of any information they wanted,
would people be all like, uh, excuse me,
you're never going to learn anything in that library.
There's too many books, just too many.
No, of course they wouldn't.
And don't tell me that libraries don't have
books full of pictures of cats.
I know they do, I've been to libraries.
But yes, I understand the point--
it is very easy to get distracted on the internet.
But does that mean that we are now
bad at constructing knowledge?
That seems like a bit of a stretch.
The way we behave is different, sure,
but it's only different because facts themselves and knowledge
itself is also different.
There used to be a kind of romance surrounding
knowing because you had to work really hard to get
the answer maybe from the source that
was edited and distributed and locked in a filing
cabinet behind a secret door at the library at the end
of the you get what I'm saying.
Now wanting to know and knowing to happen
at roughly the same time, sort of like
how your brain works, actually.
And there is no shortage of places offering up things
to know and their set of the facts.
In his book, "Too Big to Know," David Weinberger
writes about what he calls networked facts.
He writes that we don't see facts marching single file
within the confines of an argument contained
within a blue book, a scientific article, or a printed tome.
We see them picked up, splattered against a wall,
contradicted, torn apart, amplified, and mocked.
We are witnessing a version of Newton's second law.
On the net, every fact has an equal and opposite reaction.
This continuous, multi-sided linked contradiction
of every fact, he writes, changes the nature and role
of facts for our culture.
It also necessarily changes how knowledge is made.
If the metaphor for becoming an expert
is doing a deep dive, well then now the body of water
is much, much larger.
Each layer of facts to be connected
in order to develop a real sense of knowing has expanded.
Where we used to deep dive in wells, now
we deep dive in the Pacific Ocean over the Marianas Trench.
The Mariana Trench.
So many different ideas, lots of them
contradictory, exist in heretofore unseen proximity,
both to each other and to us-- which as a side note is also,
I think, a reason for the uptick in fan fiction ships,
but that's another thing entirely.
Ideas are linked to and from one another, contextualized
in countless ways by their mere existence on the internet.
They are a heterogenous assemblage,
a thing that accomplishes more than its parts ever could.
The act of remembering, then, is now just
as much physical and technological
as it is biological and mental.
And that is OK.
And it makes sense that knowledge
complexifies alongside the things which need to be known.
Plus, if we agree with John Locke's definition
of knowledge, take a bunch of ideas
and synthesize a relationship, well then Google
itself is knowledge.
Google knows, Amazon knows, Wikipedia knows,
Netflix knows-- especially when it
recommended that I watch "Twin Peaks" for the third time.
Netflix just gets me.
Which I guess makes sense.
If, like Hank Green says, Google wants and is therefore alive,
I suppose it makes sense that it also knows.
What do you guys think?
Is Google knowledge?
Let us know in the comments and you know what to do.
I would like to revise my previous statements.
The internet is clearly a series of tubes.
The tubes, however, are filled with cats.
Let's see what you guys had to say
about "The Internet is Cats."
First of all, thank you to Joe Hansen
and all of the other biologists who
let us know that toxoplasmosis is not a virus, but a parasite.
I have added an annotation to that episode
so that everybody knows how dreadfully incorrect I was.
And to everybody who says that cat people are on the internet
because done people go outside, I
think I know more people who are tied to their homes
by their dogs than by their cats.
I don't buy it.
I'm pretty sure no one has ever been like,
I can't, I've got to go home, the cat
needs-- the cat doesn't need you.
To SuperNova and everybody who wants
to go to the website with the wiggly thing
where it going crazy, it's staggeringbeauty.com.
Craft2299, does the sun ever run out of shine,
does the ocean ever run out of wet,
does Matt Smith ever run out of chin?
I don't think so.
No, man.
The way that it works is that you use your kitchen,
your kitchen has a microwave in it,
you use your microwave to cook popcorn, people eat popcorn,
and therefore it's a part of them
so the internet is popcorn.
It's OK, that one's really complicated.
Pedro Paramu del Valle theorizes the connection
between cats and Eternal September,
which is really interesting, so that when the internet first
became home to new users they would
post pictures of their pets and then the rest is. history.
So it is possible.
To Kopipop and everyone else who says that the internet is not
cats, but is rather porn, Dented Bells and Adam Weaver 43
have really great responses to all over those comments.
We'll pause here for a second so you can read them.
I totally agree.
Jason Wilkins suggests that cats might
be part of a kind of catspiracy and that
seems to be furthered and even more by iKonaskona's point
that the internet is brought to us on cat five and six cables.
Threatening music plays.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SilverJay 47, did it work?
Let's know in the comments.
To 621Infamous, in the words of Lana Cane, yup, citizens.
Do not think about the dog park.
Also we're going to make this episode.
MrDags0000 makes a really fair point
that this argument would be a lot more compelling if we could
show that cats were popular on the entirety of the world
wide web and not just the Western web.
I don't know.
My impulse is to say, yes, but maybe
some of our international viewers
can let us know if cats are as popular around the world
and they are in the Western web.
Good point.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these hooded figures--
don't think about dog park.
This week's tweet of the week comes
from Bookmore, who sends us a link to an article describing
how Germany has made Bitcoin an official currency.
And finally, a bit of news.
We are going to take a play out of "The Daily Show's" book
and take a two-week break.
So we'll see you in two weeks.
I'll still be on the IRC and on the internet, so say hi,
but no full episodes for another two weeks every.
Have a good summer or two weeks of August if you're
in the southern hemisphere.