The Tao of Blog 2: Just add water

Unlike knowledge the bill of wisdom cannot be itemised. Wisdom is knowledge plus the bits in between - the connections.

The way we currently go about the media analysis process is akin to the manufacture of instant coffee. We filter all the connections, context and meaning out of the media until we have our granules of data, then add water and the end product is a passable imitation of the real thing. But wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to lose the wisdom to get at the knowledge?

Scientists were for a long time prone to the same basic error- attempting to understand the universe by breaking it down into its component parts and then reassembling it theoretically through the medium of mechanical models. In "the zone of middle dimensions" this approach provides a fair approximation of our sensory experience. But I'm not sure that Information is scaled the same way.

We used to think that space and time were fixed phenomena and that everything within them was either a material object or 'empty space'. Now we know that the universe has an organic structure in which the concept of 'empty space' is largely meaningless.

You might think that knowledge is best understood as a collection of discreet information objects located at a given time and place in media space, but any attempt to objectively measure these units will, for the time being at least, necessarily discard all the invisible bonds between them.

The two parts of Queens College in Cambridge on either side of the river Cam are linked by the Mathematical Bridge. Punting beneath its span "unscrupulous" (i.e. student) tour guides in straw boaters will confidently repeat the "baseless myth" that surrounds its earliest construction - that Issac Newton designed it and had it erected it without the use of nails. His reductionist heirs later had the bridge disassembled in order to better understand this marvel, but when they tried to put it back together found to their dismay that they couldn't get the structure to hold firm and had to bang in some nails. Baseless it may be, but like a lot of myths it packs a relevant little allegory - in this instance one about the inherent dangers of all intellectual disassembly.

Computers hand an awful lot of power to the un-wise. That's why they are being used predominantly to pull mathematical bridges apart before anyone has a reliable model of how they were built in the first place.