info-mation v in-formation RE: [xmca] Sunstein "Infotopia" on BookTV Sunday night

From: Tony Whitson (twhitson@udel.edu)
Date: Sat Oct 14 2006 - 12:19:13 PDT


Mike, you ask:
> Sunstein argues for Dewey's notion of social intelligence, I gather?
> At least as a potential and perhaps afforded by our current infotopia?

Trying to make connections across discourses, I might have been misleading
in the post you are responding to, where I wrote:

Cass Sunstein is on BookTV this weekend talking about a new book on how
wikis and open source software, etc are being used in processes of social
knowledge and decision-making. See
http://curricublog.wordpress.com/2006/10/13/infotopia-booktv/

My clarification follows below, but it is also posted --with all the links--
at http://curricublog.wordpress.com/2006/10/14/sunstein-information/ .

Actually, “social knowledge” is not a term that Sunstein himself uses.
Sunstein is discussing processes in which “information” is socially
aggregated in ways that produce results that can be better–but sometimes can
be worse–than the results obtained by the expertise of individuals.
Theoretically, Sunstein is not in the ballpark of either cognitive
psychology or semiotics. He’s coming, rather, from a framework of political
& economic theory, as reflected in a blurb on the back jacket of his book,
in which Robert MacCoun (Berkeley Public Policy & Law Prof.) writes that

Cass Sunstein’s new book is a lively illustration of emerging mechanisms for
collective rationality never anticipated in the classic writings of Madison,
Marx, or Milton (Friedman).

Sunstein’s blog post On Aggregating Information: Hayek, Blogging, and Beyond
(July 2005) displays this theoretical orientation. His other posts on that
blog extend this discussion, including a post on Hayek v. Habermas.

In a response to his first post (linked above), Wikipedia founder Jimmy
Wales comments:

I just wanted to say that Hayek’s work on price theory is central to my own
thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. Possibly one can
understand Wikipedia without understanding Hayek, since perhaps my own
theories of how Wikipedia works are false. :-)

But one can’t understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding
Hayek.

Sunstein quotes this comment on pp. 156-7 of his book.

In one of his own posts, Wales issues a call to “Free the Curriculum!”

Earlier in this post, I wrote that

Sunstein is discussing processes in which “information” is socially
aggregated …

My reason for putting “information” in quotation marks is that I’ve become
increasingly concerned about and interested in the idea of “information”
that is now taken for granted, which obscures (at best) an older,
pre-positivistic idea of information that is more in tune with Dewey’s
thinking (to bring this back to Mike Cole’s question, with which this post
begins). The positivist degradation of understanding about meaning is
discussed in a paper to appear early in 2007 in the special issue of
Semiotica edited by Donald Cunningham on semiotics and education. In my
paper “Education à la Silhouette: The need for semiotically-informed
curriculum consciousness,” I discuss the difference between how C.S. Peirce
(and Dewey, following Peirce) understood meaningful signification as a
matter of signs potentiating meaning in the interpretive responses to those
signs. In this understanding, the sign is something that potentiates, not
something that contains and conveys meaning.

The earlier view of “information” had to do with entering into the formation
(e.g., of someone’s understanding, awareness, character, etc. This is
reflected in European languages that use cognates of “formation” or
“Bildung” in their common words for education.

Now I’m seeing examples in a wide range of domains all over the place. To
use an example that involves Dewey, consider the 2002 book

The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think, by Robert Aunger

in comparison with Dewey’s 1910 classic

How We Think

In the future I will be writing more about the crucial difference between
these two senses of “information.” They are such different ideas that I need
to adopt different ways of signifying them. For now, I’m thinking of
differentially using “in-formation” juxtaposed with “info-mation.” It seems
to me that this could work. What do you think?

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Mike Cole
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2006 7:48 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Sunstein "Infotopia" on BookTV Sunday night

Sunstein argues for Dewey's notion of social intelligence, I gather? At
least as a potential and perhaps afforded by our current infotopia?

Oddly, as some of you may have noticed from another posting today by a
student of mine (who I intended to have post
to our seminar, not xmca, but the juxtaposition is interesting!) I am
running a seminar are Orwell's 1984 and its resonances
with contemporary events and modes of mediation.

Hmmmm, perhaps for everyone infotopia there is at least one infodystopia?
And besides, lets keep in mind that utopia means
nowhere, or, if you prefer a contraring view, Erehwon.
mike

On 10/13/06, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> wrote:
>
> This isn't directly related to any current thread, but there was so much
> interest in my earlier post on wikis that I thought I should share this.
>
> Cass Sunstein is on BookTV this weekend talking about a new book on how
> wikis and open source software, etc are being used in processes of social
> knowledge and decision-making. See
>
> http://curricublog.wordpress.com/2006/10/13/infotopia-booktv/

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