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theory on demand
A scientific activity, neither academic nor entrepreneurial, but decentralized and of a ‘DIY kind’ is nowhere on the agenda, despite the fact that it is indispensable for fostering basic competences and the ability to evaluate the technological innovation that concerns all of us. More specifically, the whole notion of ‘scientific culture’ would need to be appraised afresh to cater for the all round need to have an elementary command of what is needed to confront the technological tsunami that engulfs us. The rise of Information technology to the status of main mover of technological innovation makes new scenarios possible: IT is not merely a technique to automatize the management of information, it also has logic of its own, meaning that it constantly strives to alter its own underpinnings. IT is all at once material, theoretical and experimental. IT adds to the formalization of language (and hence contributes to the formalization of knowledge), and puts that to work with the physical components of electronics, developing from there languages which in their turn influence theories of knowledge. IT functions as a loop of sorts, following a very particular cyclical process. In classic sciences one observes stable phenomena: the science of physics, for instance, constructs natural data and creates relevant theories. However, with IT, and its derivate computer science, the phenomena that theory helps identify are wholly artificial; they continuously change, both in nature as well as conceptually, in the same time and measure as theoretical and experimental advances make them more refined: the software that was developed on a computer ten years ago will be structurally different from one that has been developed the last month. What we held for true yesterday, we know today won’t hold true for tomorrow, when we will have more powerful machines that can do novel things. The world we live in is ‘alive’ as it were and hence in a constant state of becoming. 7.2 Miracles of Technology: From Subjective Opinions to Objective Truth It is amidst such a gigantic database that the ‘good giant’ Google appears in the landscape with a message for us: we are part of a yet unheard of ‘global electronic democracy’; the results of PageRank[TM] are correct since they emerge from a direct democracy, as expressed by the links validated by Google’s algorithms, which re institute us, in a certain sense, in our rights to ‘open it up’. Epistemologically speaking, however, popularity can never be acknowledged as a test for ‘objective quality’. If that were the case, then the concept of objectivity itself would be based on an unstated assumption, that is to say, a mass of subjective ideas (the ‘opinions’ expressed by way of links) would somehow, as if by magic, be transformed into their exact opposite (in this case, a ‘revealed’ objective truth) by the sheer virtue of its number passing the majority threshold. This is exactly how ranking becomes a token of quality, since it is the explicit outcome of a technology based on the manipulation of information. However, how can quantity ever become quality? One assumes, without admitting so much explicitly, that the technical mediation of the algorithm is in itself a guarantee of ‘objectivity’, and one associates this objectivity with the qualitative characteristic of ‘good’, then of ‘best’, and finally, that of ‘true’. And all this has to be rendered fast, nay, immediate, and transparent, thanks to the annihilation of the time factor and the ergonomic sophistication of the interface.