By Michael P. Lynch
With far-reaching implications, this pressing treatise offers to revolutionize our figuring out of what it skill to be human within the electronic age.
We used to assert "seeing is believing"; now googling is believing. With 24/7 entry to almost the entire world’s info at our fingertips, we not trek to the library or the encyclopedia shelf looking for solutions. We simply open our browsers, sort in a couple of key terms and watch for the knowledge to come back to us. certainly, the net has revolutionized the way in which we research and recognize, in addition to how we engage with one another. And but this explosion of technological innovation has additionally produced a curious paradox: whilst we all know extra, we appear to comprehend less.
While a wealth of literature has been dedicated to lifestyles with the net, the deep philosophical implications of this seismic shift haven't been safely explored earlier. Demonstrating that wisdom in response to cause performs a necessary function in society and that there's even more to “knowing” than simply buying info, top thinker Michael Patrick Lynch indicates how our electronic lifestyle makes us overvalue many ways of processing info over others, and hence hazards distorting what it skill to be human.
With far-reaching implications, Lynch’s argument charts a course from Plato’s cave to Shannon’s mathematical thought of knowledge to Google Glass, illustrating that expertise itself isn’t the matter, neither is it the answer. in its place, will probably be the way we adapt our minds to those new instruments that would eventually come to a decision even if the "Internet of Things"―all these devices on our wrists, in our wallet and on our laps―will be a web achieve for humanity. alongside the best way, Lynch makes use of a philosopher’s lens to ascertain essentially the most pressing concerns dealing with electronic existence this present day, together with how social media is revolutionizing the best way we expect approximately privateness; why a better reliance on Wikipedia and Google doesn’t unavoidably make wisdom "more democratic"; and the perils of utilizing "big info" on my own to foretell cultural trends.
Promising to modernize our knowing of what it skill to be human within the electronic age, The net of Us builds on past works via Nicholas Carr, James Gleick and Jaron Lanier to provide us an important consultant on the way to navigate the philosophical quagmire that's the details Age.
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Additional info for The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data
Example text
2 Google-Knowing Easy Answers One day in the summer of 2014, I wrote down four questions to which I didn’t know (or had forgotten) the answers. The challenge: to answer the questions without relying—at all—on the Internet. The four questions were: 1. What is the capital of Bulgaria? 2. Is a four-stroke outboard engine more efficient than a two-stroke? 3. S. representative? 4. What is the best-reviewed restaurant in Austin, Texas, this week? Number 1, unsurprisingly, was the easiest. I suspected it was Sofia, and a map of Europe and a large reference dictionary I had in the house confirmed it.
Knowledge became more widely and cheaply available, which in turn led to mass education, new economies and even social revolution. But in truth, the comparison with the printing press underplays the significance of the changes being brought about by the Internet today. The better comparison is with the written word. Writing is a technology, a tool. Yet its invention wasn’t just a change in how information and knowledge was distributed. It was a new way of knowing itself. Writing allows us to communicate across time—both with ourselves and with others.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015051171 | ISBN 9780871406613 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of. | Information technology. | Internet. Y. com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT For Rene In the past, the things that men could do were very limited… . But with every increase in knowledge, there has been an increase in what men could achieve. In our scientific world, and presumably still more in the more scientific world of the not distant future, bad men can do more harm, and good men can do more good, than had seemed possible to our ancestors even in their wildest dreams.