For example, when is some institution going to publish a refereed scholarly journal online with a comment box facility and with articles containing embedded hyperlinks to other cited articles as a matter of course (given that most journals are now published online as well as in hard copy)?

Hyperlinked papers is, quite literally, the original purpose of the worldwide web.

Maybe I should be less free and more direct. Here are the words Plato gives to Socrates:

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

I wish people could read Plato without suspicion. If the first place you ever read something by Plato is as a quote in a book by Derrida then you’ve missed out on something.

I hate the way students read texts knowing that they are ‘wrong’ and searching only for evidence of how they are wrong. If we can suspend disbelief when we read novels, why can’t we suspend suspicion when we read philosophy?

Maybe it is an ‘arid’ model or reading. But it’s an interesting one.

Did you skip that paragraph and jump straight to here?

That’s exactly what I did. In fact I skimmed the whole thing and will return for a more thoughtful read later as it looks pretty interesting, and I didn’t want to read the whole of that ‘is Google making us stupid’ article in Atlantic when I ran across it.

But your sentence was spooky as it was just where my eye took me (after skipping the para - and the quote before).

Nice to have our own resident clairvoyant.

Anyway Don, what am I going to do now? And when will I return to this thread?

(PS: sorry for the typos above)

Years ago if you had a theory you had to hope that someone else knew something about it the subject. You had to have access to books and papers and individuals. Often those were somewhere else, on the other side of the world probably. The people might have been dead. So a diligent and intelligent and socially capable person would have been able to make just a few connections and draw out some faint conjectures. The working of the mind was limited to what you could get hold of. Today the access to the information and the people is not an issue at all. You can have almost all the relevant information and talk to almost all the relevant poeople within moments. What happens next is the important thing. The miond can really go to work on “real” and truly extensive materials. The brain has to create a hugely greater number of synapses to deal with it all. The mind can create a vastly greater, more creative and more substantial work than ever before. That is why we are becoming more intelligent, not less.

Almost anyone can access the brilliance of the greatest thinkers and authorities, living and dead. Access is no longer limited by our membership of societies and universities, or whatever. The internet is creating a more egalitarian society than ever. Who needs Barry?

A book has no intelligence. Unlike Barry Jones, it can’t answer questions or defend its arguments. A blog on the other hand …

I assume you’re being ironic here, Don. Either that or the post is working with a very arid model of reading.

Some other form of alien lifeform perhaps, but geeks? No.

(I do lack social skills however, so maybe I’m not a real manager - cue drummer joke)*

* obscure pop culture reference which can be explained on request.

JC — my guess is the dot com boom.

Yea, it’s my guess to, Jacques.

Why is the writer picking the 80’s and then stopping in 1997?

Now geeks are inheriting the earth.

JC - Are you sure? Which occupational groups are benefiting most from increases in productivity?:

there was no relative increase in the starting salaries of engineering and science BAs in the 1980s relative to humanities BAs, and in fact the reverse was true. Further, there were no above-average wage increases for the occupational groups most directly involved with the development and use of computers, namely, “engineers” and “math/computer”. During 1979–97 fully half of the growth in the college wage premium can be attributed to the increased relative wage of the group called “managers,” and only 17 percent to the computer-related occupational groups.

My kids use Google now and have instant access to things like what caterpillars eat when they found one in the garden and wanted to keep it for a few days. I think that is great. I still wonder whether reference books will go the way of the dinosaur? What will we do with our book cases. Currently we have DVDs,videos, CDs and books, all of which are potentially heading for extinction.

We will likely have more wall space for digital devices and art.

Don’t forget that abilities such as strength and endurance were once prized possessions when living off the land. Now geeks are inheriting the earth.

TO which I would add, don’t forget that this is the single biggest step forward for equality, ever. I still don’t understand why feminists don’t preach capitalism as the one true faith, poor dolts.

Don, Barry Jones always was obsolete. The Jesuits (or ancient poets) remembered incredible volumes of information because it was incredibly valuable to them to do so - but the encylopaedia made memory castles obsolete before Barry Jones was born.

Finall, software is still a long way off making decisions. So the person who can assimilate/process the most data is still at an advantage vis-s-vis his concurrent.

If cab drivers move to satellite navigation, will their brains shrink?

But it’s also possible that the person doing the driving now will find some other useful job to do and cabbing will be done by someone whose brain doesn’t function like the present cabbie’s in terms of having a photographic memory abilities. Thats okay.

As for google…

The information you were looking for was once contained in a tree version of an encyclopedia. So google in terms of the examples you mentioned is simply a faster version of Britannica if you want to know the capital of Burkino Faso (and who really needs to unless you’re trying to initiate an arms sale or attempting a mining deal). Why waste time leafing through thick books for such info.

How about the speed of new knowledge hitting or the amount of interesting information you can now have at your fingertips compared to the rep-web age?

With the shift from wetware to software, what will we lose as human beings?

But what will we gain too? How about the ability to live longer life spans and soak up more information along the way?

Don’t forget that abilities such as strength and endurance were once prized possessions when living off the land. Now geeks are inheriting the earth.

I wouldn’t be too pessimistic if I were you. World GDP is accelerating which is good thing.

Socrates (at least, Socrates as a character in Plato’s dialogues) had a pretty low opinion of literature (it’s heavily censored and only really fit for children in the Republic) so he probably would have thought that the greek plays we still have are attempts at understanding through unknowing imitation, and therefore to be condemned. Mathematics is a bit different as it’s the beginning of the path away from sensory illusion into the realm of transcendant reality, so it’s very important. Numbers on their own, though, trapped on a page are dead. Calculation, astronomy and something about harmony that I’ve never really understood are to be studied as a preparation for the study of philosophy, through which presumptions are questioned and (bang!) true knowledge is attained. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it.

A pretty neat summary of some the intermediately tedious passages of The Republic.