It is impossible that anything should be produced if there were nothing existing before. – Aristotle
the debate i’ve been obsessed with through my entire academic and professional career is how information is made … sort of like a scientist smashing an atom into smaller and smaller subatomic particles … just when we think we know we’ve reached the basis, we learn otherwise.
the debate erin and i had from the get-go was plato versus aristotle. the chair versus the idea of the chair. i always ended up in aristotle’s camp. i still do. and that’s why i always thought it was a load of crap when journalism and journalists purported to be purveyors of objective reality. “whose reality?” was always my question.
the science crowd hates it but i also got interested in the whole philosophy of science debate. when you read the history, the personal, you learn how social all of it is. i’ve long suspected that the disciplines will all eventually collapse.
now we see the debate playing out in the exciting world of google and facebook. what consitutes information? how do we filter it? how do we value it? recently a friend said information is not created. it just is. i said hell no. information is totally created. i’ve made a living for the past 10 years constructing and deconstructing information. i know as well as anyone that it is not “just there. ” we pick what we want.
now that more and more info is created and unleashed every second, filtering is tougher and more important. every day i am amazed by the amount of dreck i encounter online. i am irritated in its ability to cross into my field of awareness. on the flipside i discover amazing things too … people … opportunities … even pets … life changing things, experiences, spirits. so with the bland and bad comes the radical personal good. what’s interesting right now is how the human info consumption model is changing … instead of hunter gatherers we are like whales … swimming along with our mouths open … letting the plankton float in.
