I am reading Neil Postman’s Technopoly, which is filled with interesting questions that us technocrats (and you technopolists and technophiles) should be asking. Personally, I find Postman’s views a little extreme and dystopian but he did provide an interesting quote:

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt… To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

- Phaedrus by Plato (towards the end)

I never thought that a PhD in Computer Science would involve reading Plato! One of the other questions that Postman raises is the need for information.

What is the problem in the Middle East, or South Africa, or Northern Ireland? [this was written in 1993 - but there are plenty of current examples] Is it lack of information that keeps these conflicts at fever pitch? Is it lack of information about how to grow food that keeps millions at starvation levels? Is it lack of information that brings soaring crime rates and physical decay to our cities? Is it lack of information that leads to high divorce rates and keeps the beds of mental institutions filled to overflowing?

The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information… To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store, and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds that ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity.

- Technopoly, Neil Postman, Page 60

Now I might take issue that insufficient information is the cause of certain societal problems: the spread of AIDS in Africa is certainly hampered by the prominence of tribal beliefs and the lack of education; the crime rates might again be attributed to a lack of education. However, Postman’s view (as far as I can grasp) is that education is a controller of information and, in fact, both of these examples might be attributed to an over-abundance of information. In the case of AIDS, there is too much conflicting information and too little accurate information. In the case of crime (and assuming education would lower this), Postman would probably argue that current education systems work on tests, grades and exams, and therefore exclude certain people by reducing them to numbers (i.e. information).

As I said, this book is a thought-provoking read, if a little extreme at times. But what does this mean to the Semantic Web (and indeed, our modern lives of blogs, email and the www)? The Semantic Web is founded on the belief that more information is ‘good’, that information wants to be ‘free’ and that aggregating this information together is ‘useful’. Have we stopped to consider why we believe that freeing information is a good thing, or has this view become so intergrated into our lives, our society, that no one questions it any longer? Truely, we are a technopoly.