A look at history and popular culture
Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority
Abstract. Much of our knowledge of the world comes not from direct sensory experience, but from reliance on epistemic authorities: individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe. For example, what most of us believe about natural selection, climate change, or the Holocaust comes from our reliance on epistemic authorities (scientists, historians). Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible, and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of actual experts. This essay considers some possible changes to existing free speech doctrine to remedy the epistemological crisis brought about by the internet.
Historical pragmatism and the internet
This article argues that the literature describing the internet revolution in the 1990s was characterized by the rhetoric of the technological sublime. This rhetoric suffered from three fatal flaws: (1) it was not sufficiently grounded in the historical development of technology; (2) it viewed the internet in isolation, failing to consider the wider technological context; and (3) it failed to examine the internet in view of the social, economic, religious and political circumstances of its users. Several examples from history are cited, demonstrating that changes in various systems for the production, dissemination and preservation of cultural information both border and deborder the world. The article suggests that if internet researchers take a pragmatic, historically grounded approach, they will discover that the introduction of internet technology can be seen to have similar consequences. While the technology overcomes many boundaries (of space and time, politics and economics), other social borders may be created at the same time. It is easier to see old boundaries coming down than to see new ones being erected. Rather than being swept by utopian or dystopian enthusiasms, the article insists that the really interesting discoveries are to be made in locating the subtle social shifts taking place, relatively unnoticed, as a consequence of technological change.
A folksonomy of lexicons - Chris's Corner
On the design and intent of different lexicons
The Grid: A Lecture on Cybotron and Techno-Vernacular Expressionism by DeForrest Brown, Jr.
The Myth of Allied Technological Inferiority
World War II, The Free Press, and the Problematic Use of History in Contemporary Media
Maite Taboada
Maite Taboada. Professor. Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University. Research: discourse analysis, computational linguistics
The Great Reckoning - The Ideas Letter
The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about…
The Great Reckoning - The Ideas Letter
The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about…
The Depths of Wikipedians—Asterisk
A conversation about yogurt wars, German hymns, tropical cyclones, and the people who make Wikipedia function.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang
‘Quite simply the best historical dictionary of English slang there is, ever has been […] or is ever likely to be’ — Journal of English Language and Linguistics
Epistemic Infrastructure: Building Shared Truth in an Era of Disaggregation
The Construct of Collective Perception
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models rep…
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
How Markdown took over the world - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
