Abstract
Life on planet Earth in 2025 is an unmitigated dumpster fire, or so it would seem. Intellectual freedom is under attack. All sorts of -isms are on the rise: Isolationism, Protectionism, Nationalism, Fundamentalism, Racism, Sexism, etc. What’s more, the Machines (!) are taking over. It’s dystopia central around here. (Stop the great world spinning, I want to get off!)
Anyway, that’s the glass-half-empty worldview. The musings to follow will articulate other ways to look at the aforementioned $%!#-show. (Pardon my French.) They will do so through the lens of Information Science (so-called) — as the author (i.e., me) is a graduate student in said discipline and said musings are intended to fulfill the requirements of the final project in his LS 500 class (titled, aptly enough, Information Science and Technology).
To wit: it is reasonable to observe that many aspects of society are experiencing intense destabilization, much of which is either caused or exacerbated by the increasingly digitized experience of being human. This digitization is changing how our minds work, and it’s probably changing the structures that scaffold our minds: the brain itself, our relationships with information, with nature, with others, and with ourselves. (Other stuff probably too.) That process is not entirely or inherently bad, nor is it all that new. What’s new is the sheer volume of evidence at our disposal that shows us how messy this evolutionary process can be. Volume, that is: there’s a lot of it and it’s really loud.
The aforementioned author of these musings is no Pollyanna. There’s no guarantee that whatever evolution we muster for ourselves will lead to transcendence. (This is where we say the quiet part out loud, but in parentheses: 99.9% of all species on planet Earth are no longer around.)1
And yet this is the dance we dance.
So, concludes the author, let’s dance!2
Contents
- Introduction
- Methodology
- Hypotheses (Untested)
- Reading is the new writing.
- Genius isn’t genius (anymore?).
- In other words, TS Eliot was right.
- A search engine isn’t an engine.
- What used to be called the “Graphical User Interface”27 is now called “AI.”
- AI Hallucination is a key to something.
- Almost no one is a scholar.
- But everybody
hurts39 [searches]. - Search ruts are a thing.
- Michael Stipe (et al) = Poet(s) + Prophet(s)
- (oblique) References (aka: metadata)