When my mother had a heart attack, I became intimately acquainted with the intensive care unit of the hospital and the perception of people as regulated combinations of information, so I did some thinking about what that means as a reflection of the contemporary information industry and knowledge work and the effects of modernity. If you are easily discouraged by academic commentary, you might be more interested in prior comments about Avatar.
Modernity is the time and the mentality of industry and rational science. Characteristics and consequences of Modernity include manufacturing, scientific study and development, colonial imperialism and exploitation, modern and surrealist art, and Disneyland.
The characteristics and consequences are reflexive. Modernity is itself a consequence of the Renaissance, the printing press, and rationality, an Aristotelian idea of knowable, predictable, and reliable cause and effect. Somewhat paradoxically, Aristotle has been both an obstacle to rational progress as a theologically approved intellectual standard conceptualization of the universe with the earth at the center, (the Galileo problem, and probably not what Aristotle himself originally envisioned), and as the inspiration for an intellectually curious and systematic investigation of nature (probably more along the lines of Aristotle's objectives).
Essentially, the effect of modernity is “valorization” of Western European ideas of knowledge accumulation and application established through adoption of Greek and Roman intellectual culture, partly as an effect of Christianity and partly as an effect of technology as an intellectual enterprise (distinguished from the more personal or mundane as art, craft, and individual functions, a mentality that inspires attitudes of cultural superiority inherited rhetorically from such notable predecessors as Homer, Alexander, Herodotus, and Julius Ceasar, as well as the intellectual heritage of Plato and Socrates). The exact intellectual or social process of technological development and advance is not completely understood. For Auguste Le Comte, John Stuart Mill, and others involved in the initiation of European science, it was an accumulation of knowledge necessary to answer the challenging questions posed by nature. For Thomas Kuhn, it is a series of revisions in paradigms, changes in fundamental ways of thinking about essential concepts brought about by recognition of irreconcilable exceptions, with intervening periods of methodically integrating information into existing concepts. For others, such as Donna Haraway, it is a competition between paradigms as well, or it depends on the contributions of exceptionally capable individuals, on the coincidence or condensation of essential information, or simply on the exclusive ability to ask the right questions. As Kuhn proposes, probably all of these are reflexive and none completely correct, including his.
John Misa describes instances of intellectual technology that are generally acknowledged to represent an acceleration or triumph of progress, production, and the way information has been applied and utilized, such as the advent of the printing press and the steam engine. The printing press contributed, not just to the proliferation of literature, but to religious conflicts, establishment of modern nations, capitalist economics, and the systematic investigation of nature, all depending on efficient and standardized exchange of information. The steam engine brought about both modification in the ways human labor applies to production and in the mobility of individuals through the availability of improved propulsion that ultimately affected a variety of transportation modes on the sea, on the land, and even in the air, when the project of self-contained engines that steam represented progressed to the point of internal combustion.
Electricity affected a wider variety of technical applications than any energy source in history since raw sunlight and fire, including everything from interpersonal communication to giant transportation vehicles. The transistor and the internet concentrated the application of electrical energy in an equally diffusive repurposing for comprehensive communication. In this way, intellectual technology has achieved the potential to involve every human being in direct ways, although the direct effects remain vastly under-developed and elusive.
Essentially, the effect of modernity is “valorization” of Western European ideas of knowledge accumulation and application established through adoption of Greek and Roman intellectual culture, partly as an effect of Christianity and partly as an effect of technology as an intellectual enterprise (distinguished from the more personal or mundane as art, craft, and individual functions, a mentality that inspires attitudes of cultural superiority inherited rhetorically from such notable predecessors as Homer, Alexander, Herodotus, and Julius Ceasar, as well as the intellectual heritage of Plato and Socrates). The exact intellectual or social process of technological development and advance is not completely understood. For Auguste Le Comte, John Stuart Mill, and others involved in the initiation of European science, it was an accumulation of knowledge necessary to answer the challenging questions posed by nature. For Thomas Kuhn, it is a series of revisions in paradigms, changes in fundamental ways of thinking about essential concepts brought about by recognition of irreconcilable exceptions, with intervening periods of methodically integrating information into existing concepts. For others, such as Donna Haraway, it is a competition between paradigms as well, or it depends on the contributions of exceptionally capable individuals, on the coincidence or condensation of essential information, or simply on the exclusive ability to ask the right questions. As Kuhn proposes, probably all of these are reflexive and none completely correct, including his.
John Misa describes instances of intellectual technology that are generally acknowledged to represent an acceleration or triumph of progress, production, and the way information has been applied and utilized, such as the advent of the printing press and the steam engine. The printing press contributed, not just to the proliferation of literature, but to religious conflicts, establishment of modern nations, capitalist economics, and the systematic investigation of nature, all depending on efficient and standardized exchange of information. The steam engine brought about both modification in the ways human labor applies to production and in the mobility of individuals through the availability of improved propulsion that ultimately affected a variety of transportation modes on the sea, on the land, and even in the air, when the project of self-contained engines that steam represented progressed to the point of internal combustion.
Electricity affected a wider variety of technical applications than any energy source in history since raw sunlight and fire, including everything from interpersonal communication to giant transportation vehicles. The transistor and the internet concentrated the application of electrical energy in an equally diffusive repurposing for comprehensive communication. In this way, intellectual technology has achieved the potential to involve every human being in direct ways, although the direct effects remain vastly under-developed and elusive.
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