Dana Montello Journal #6
space subsumes or modifies to some extent all previous spaces—is couched in
cautious terms to complement the radical and ambitious prediction of the
future. I can't fault him doing as constructing any new era and saying that we
are in it invites a fair amount of skepticism. He did this in 1997, when
internet Utopianism was giving way to the mainstay of commercial interest, or
as I like to think: when the World Wide Web became the Internet. The idea that
soon our knowledge credentials and intellectual work will be paramount for our
identity in the same way that our names, addresses, and professions are now is
dubious. The prior three are necessary for economic activity while our
intellectual work provides very little economic compensation for the vast
majority of us. While the advent of things like Wikipedia could be the
beginnings of a knowledge space, it presents several problems that ensures that
the commodity space is still the dominate format.
First, without financial compensation, few can claim it as their dominant
activity, and thus their identity. While we use our names all day, we live at
our house all of the time, and our profession usually has us at least half of
our conscious time, most people participate in the knowledge space only by a
limited amount, usually by necessity. If we were to shift over to an economic
system of abundance (where scarce resources are a thing of the past and most
people can participate in leisure for a good 6 hours of every day), this could
change. The vast majority of humanity is slaving away in professions, at
addresses, barely known by names. The second issue is what Rozensweig draws
attention to: the citationless nature of the future knowledge space. In lieu of
what we know (impossible to put on a resumé), credentialing is our way of
incorporating our knowledge into our public identity. With copyright-less,
citation-less knowledge source, participation is can rarely give the verified
ego the respect that people in the field desire. The identity can only cling to
past forms of the knowledge space which has our names emblazoned on
dissertations and books. A college will not hire you based upon your
contributions to an online database. This is not to say that they are inferior
(I agree with Rozensweig that they are the future of codified knowledge), but
they deny the continual need for credit that is the heart of identity and
especially academic personality. Finally, this doesn't take into account
White's criticisms of consumer versus user. Participating in this knowledge
space is controlled by the format and those that provide the space—the same
people who controlled the previous methods of discourse. While Wikipedia users
toil away, they do so in a format that values a false "Neutral Point of
View" not because the user agrees, but because Wikipedia owns the
discourse. Most contributors work for free, never receiving financial
compensation while others use their labor for economic endeavors like creating
text books. The culture makes this expected, and though it values free
expression, it also diminishes the author's work to where free is the expected
valuation of it.
This is not to say that Lévy's argument is wrong; I do believe we're heading
into a knowledge space. Without an alternation of how we view intellectual
labor for the masses, however, we can't leave the old commodity space behind.
