Reinventing Knowledge in Times of Change

by Katherine Bertolucci

Welcome to The Reading Club.  There's more information about the Club in the official Welcome post from July 8 and also in the About page.  Take a look at the Titles List page to see what we're planning to read in the next few months. Please add some titles of your own.

You are also encouraged, starting now, to post your own thoughts about titles you are reading.  Just contact our blog owner, Alex Grigg at agrigg@lexmark.com.  He'll help set you up to post. 

I am honored to offer the second Reading Club post and the first post about reading.  Organizing The Reading Club was a lot of fun and I want to thank all of our members: Patricia Cia, Laura Claggett, Wendy Foster, Alex Grigg, Dee Magnoni, and Karen Reczek.  We're delighted to be part of LMD's contribution to SLA's 100th Centennial. 

This post originally appeared in my own IsisInBlog on May 28 as part of a series on Reinventing Knowledge.  I'll be posting other entries in the series from IsisInBlog for the next few weeks and then start publishing further posts on The Reading Club and IsisInBlog simultaneously.

Reinventing Knowledge in Times of Change

Currently reading Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton.  I am interested in claims of knowledge reinvention during times of upheaval.  In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger promotes our time of the World Wide Web as reinventing knowledge.  Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen and photosynthesis, also promoted his time of the American and French Revolutions as reinventing knowledge. 

Eras of massive change, such as Priestley’s and our own, encourage us to believe that our time on earth is the most important in all of history, so important that even knowledge is transformed.  In their book, McNeeley and Wolverton look at actual changes in knowledge, primarily through the institutions that promoted them.

First up is the library at Alexandria.  The change here is from the spoken word to the written word.  That’s a huge change in knowledge.  Writing and books existed before the library’s founding in 300 BCE, but only as an adjunct to the spoken word.  Because authors dictated their words to scribes, writing was a service, not a scholarly activity.  The speaker, not the writer, was honored.  That changed when the Alexandrian library began collecting scrolls and providing scholars with convivial living arrangements. 

During the transition from speech to text, there was much argument about the value of written ideas as opposed to spoken ideas.  Socrates preferred the spoken word which he felt was more truthful.  You could gauge the veracity of ideas by the reputation of the speaker.  In contrast, the written word was separate from the author and there was no way, at least in Ancient Greece, of judging the reputation of the writer. 

According to McNeeley and Wolverton, the oral versus written argument continued through the 18^th Century.  It continues today with two forms of research – reading about ideas and talking about ideas with colleagues.  If you want the latest information, do you reach for a database or a telephone?  Do you feel more comfortable with a distant author or someone whose reputation you already know?

Social interaction on the Web may be another continuation of the argument.  Are social sites the digital equivalence of oral rhetoric?  Web connectivity encourages the free exchange of ideas, like a spoken discussion with a much bigger conversational group.  The medium is written, but speed encourages spontaneous interaction.  Many sites have reputation systems to help users gauge the veracity of other users.  One might suggest the quality of discourse on today’s social sites is far below that of the ancient Greeks, but remember they didn’t write everything down.      

Comments

[Dan Cherubin]

it's good to see this moving forward, but I think you can't just jump onto "hot keyword" new titles without maybe seeing what esle was written before. I strongly suggest Walter Ong's Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Even though it's from 1982, it covers a lot of what we in the Library and Info world have been trying to convey as a message and it explains it in a much more cogent argument than many other sources.

[Katherine Bertolucci]

Dan – Thanks for your recommendation of Ong’s Orality & Literacy. You’ll be glad to know there’s a 2002 2nd edition. It’s a fascinating read and an entire book about this topic rather than McNeely and Wolverton’s single chapter. The next chapter is about the reinvention of knowledge in monasteries. Since they are already published on IsisInBlog, I can guarantee the third and fourth posts will cite a reference from 1982. We'd love to hear more from you about Orality & Literacy and other titles you recommend.

[Susan Hanrahan]

This is just a comment on the post. I haven't read the book, or the other book that was mentioned, "Orality & Literacy."
In reference to this quote:
"If you want the latest information, do you reach for a database or a telephone? Do you feel more comfortable with a distant author or someone whose reputation you already know?"
I think for me that this depends on the type of information I want. For medical information, for example, I have to go with someone whose reputation I already know -- a trusted doctor, hopefully.
For other types of information, a "distant author" would work, but even then I need to know the qualifications of the author.

[Katherine Bertolucci]

Thanks for your observation, Susan. You’re right that we all chose different avenues for receiving information based on what we are researching.

My thinking in the post came from my experiences as a library management consultant. I have organized many new libraries for different types of organizations. In each client group, there are those whose style of research involves continual use of library services and others whose style is to talk on the phone all day long. Is one better than the other? The most effective approach is probably a combination of the two, but you will still find people who resist one because of a strong preference for the other.

It may be that different jobs require different research strategies. Those who want to be on the phone may gravitate toward jobs that let them do that and the same for those who prefer the style of research offered by the library.