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After talking with Jonathan on his radio show The Browser I spent a lot of time thinking about epistemology. I first learned  that 50 cent word in college, in a music industry class. We were reading Neal Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I remember the opening, in which Postman says that much time had been spent worrying about about the dystopian future presented by an all-knowing government entity in Orwell’s 1984 when in fact we were much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World. The rest of the book goes on about how the kind of thinking that is valued by a culture whose primary media is television is different than the kind of thinking valued by a culture whose primary media is the written word (keep in mind that Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985–we aren’t talking about the internet, blogs or Twitter–the newspaper or magazine article might be the most shortest unit of writing used for transmitting knowledge).

Some of the basics of technology and the transmission of ideas/knowledge that Postman discusses are like so:

• Oral culture: values memory capabilities
• Written culture: technology displaces memory and promotes linear thinking
• Television culture: displaces linear thinking and promotes meta-discourse (which brings to mind Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer, forward to around 1:28)

It’s worthwhile to note that none of these technology/epistemology pairs completely obliterates the previous entry. Memory is still useful, just not as useful in a written culture, for example.

A culture in which data is the primary technology of knowledge transfer

What I’ve been mulling over, since being interviewed for the show, is a data-driven culture. I don’t foresee an immediate future in which everyone is numbers-literate or aware of the meaning behind various analytics metrics any more than I envision a future in which everyone is aware of how television is effective as a communication medium or a future in which everyone knows how to read, write and produce a well-reasoned essay.

But I do envision a future in which those who are data-literate begin to wield a distinct advantage over those who are not. How many lyric poets can be replaced by The Marble Threshing Floor: A Collection of Greek Folksongs? How will the advantage distribute itself? What sort of conversations will organizations and individuals have should a data-literate advantage become apparent? Will anyone miss the individual voice of the poet? The visual narrative of silent film? The letterpress version of Gill Sans?

Rate of change

I’ve been going down this rabbit hole of “change will increasingly be the norm” for awhile. Primarily as a result of reading and agreeing with a couple of HBR articles about change. I do think that we’re experiencing an exponential growth curve in turbulence of information/knowledge generation. We’re trying to assemble meaning around all of this.

I think maybe it’s like when you’re playing Katamari Damacy, growing a star. For awhile, children’s toys are pretty big but slowly you get the star bigger. Almost without noticing, those children’s toys are seeming smaller and smaller. The sense of scale changes and adjusts to the size of the objective (the star) and the size of the objects of your attention (the things you’re rolling up into your star). Before you know it, ocean liners are seemingly small objects. In the game, every now and then there’s a noticeable moment when the perspective really does change to allow a larger perspective to encompass larger objects.

Perhaps, with regard to the distribution of a data culture, we are in one of those noticeable moments when the perspective changes.