Finally, the discussion on HUMANIST focused on whether or not humanities folk's experiences with computing might have changed previous notions (such as those implied by T.S. Eliot) about knowledge, information, etc. I offered the following - I'm tempted to think that computing has changed people's perceptions - in the direction of what O'Leary and Brasher in their 1996 essay have identified as a form of Gnosticism: == One issue raised in computer-mediated communication that we find particularly troubling is the extent to which the new media reduce all discourse to information. This can result in a contemporary analogue of Gnosticism, the mystical quest for the knowledge that saves. Physicist Heinz Pagels puts the problem succinctly: <quote>Some intellectual prophets have declared the end of the age of knowledge and the beginning of the age of information. Information tends to drive out knowledge. Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge has semantic value. What we want is knowledge, but what we often get is information. It is a sign of the times that many people cannot tell the difference between information and knowledge, not to mention wisdom, which even knowledge tends to drive out. (1988, 49) </quote> If our traditions cannot keep knowledge and wisdom alive, these distinctions will disappear as all is reduced to information. The cyborg's spiritual quest would become an endless search for the information that saves-a quest doomed to failure, an endless and eternally restless manipulation of signs and numbers that, like the search for the philosopher's stone, can never produce the gold or the semantic value that we seek. When the ambitious dream described by Richard Lanham in The Electronic Word is realized, and the whole record of human culture is digitized and available on computer databases connected to each other by a global web, our spiritual crisis will remain and even intensify, for we will be forced to confront the fact that no electronic alchemy can turn information into knowledge, or into the wisdom that will teach us how to live. == Pagels, Heinz. 1988. The Dreams of Reason. New York: Simon and Schuster. Cited in O'Leary and Brasher, The Unknown God of the Internet: Religious Communication from the Ancient Agora to the Virtual Forum, in Ess (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives on Computer-Mediated Communication (Albany, NY: SUNY Press), 262. As a last note - Bill McKibben's _The Age of Missing Information_ (1993) argues much the same point, primarily vis-à-vis TV, drawing on the work of phenomenologist / philosopher (and closet theologian) Albert Borgmann, McLuhan, and others, along with his own experience of watching several thousand hours of TV collected from a day's broadcasting of the nation's first cable system of 90+ channels in Fairfax, VA. Well worth the read, IMHO. cheers, - c. Charles Ess Distinguished Research Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Drury University 900 N. Benton Ave. Voice: 417-873-7230 Springfield, MO 65802 USA FAX: 417-873-7435 Home page: http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html Co-chair, CATaC'06: http://www.catacconference.org Co-chair, ECAP'06: http://www.eu-cap.org Professor II, Globalization and Applied Ethics Programmes Norwegian University of Science and Technology NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway http://www.anvendtetikk.ntnu.no/pres/bridgingcultures.php Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23