Is Our Knowledge More Endangered Than Our Planet ?

By Patrick Willemarck

This book reveals the history of information processes and the mass-media aberration. By industrializing information, maas media transformed each of us into neoliberals, from left to right, from democrat to republicans, from socialists to capitalists. And now, we're left in a world of imbalance, violence, injustice where both prosperity and freedom go bankrupt. The author shows other avenues and invites us to be more socially busy and develop a social economy with social businesses. The new media and technology will help transforming this world provided we can guarantee our access to knowledge. Science and information are no longer abel to fight against darkness. We need to change this. It requires vision and political courage.

Concrete examples in this book show how confidence, mutual respect and exchange are the most promising avenues. New media could help provided our knowledge can be protected by a kind of worldwide public intelligence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312260726

Book preview

Is Our Knowledge More Endangered Than Our Planet ?

Is our knowledge

more endangered than our planet ?

How mass media became a delusion that is making us lose our minds.

Patrick Willemarck

Suroh Editions

Copyright © 2014 by Patrick Willemarck

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2014, Nos savoirs à l’épreuve, by Editions Espace de Libertés,

Brussels

ISBN : 978-1-312-26072-6

Suroh

Avenue des Cytises, 5

Brussels, Belgium ,

Dedication

To Nathan, my son, we got the wrong myth.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my family and my friends without whose help this book would never have been completed.

Thank you for your patience and guidance, your use of the editor’s red pen…

My special thanks to Jacqueline Van Osten who did work like hell in order to get this book translated in English.

Foreword

The idea of this book goes back to the discussions which did follow one of my conferences in Brussels. The audience made of important European decision makers gathered at the famous Cercle Gaulois asked me to write about what I told them which at this stage were pure contingent thoughts about the way information circulates and gets integrated in order to form knowledge, culture and democracies.

I wrote it in my mother tongue, French. I did receive so many mark of interest and even emotions that the same group did encourage me to write it in English.

Being edited in English is a nightmare for a man like me. You need an agent. You need patience. I decided to do it my way. Here it is.  Blame them not me.  Thank You.

Introduction

... Socrates is right as opposed to Jesus and Nietzsche. Progress and true greatness are in human dialogue and not in the Gospel, a monologue dictated from the top of a solitary mountain. What balances the absurd is the community of men fighting against it.  And if we choose to serve this community, we choose dialogue to the absurd - against all politics of lies or silence. This is how we are free with others.

Albert Camus, Letter to Louis Guilloux Letter, January 5, 1946

For over one hundred years our communication, our culture, our education, our consumption and production has been qualified as 'mass' ; the mass - the increasing sum of individuals who are facing an uncertain and dark future, moving from crisis to crisis, seeking immediate gratification and developing a kind of allergy against patience, commitment and perhaps even effort.

The mass like challenges by delegation: passive sportsmen and spectators of reality shows where they are asked to eliminate candidates by voting via SMS message The tears, the testimonies that follow, the interviews with the losers give it all a very real life sentimental side. That is the paradox of the world we live in: faced with mass media programs, we acquire a sort of super power over something that looks even emptier.

The mass media have put us in a showbiz society. 

Even news programs with political debates have become entertaining, because without entertainment, there is no audience. In this society, the cult image outweighs the quality of the content. The long-term goes from bubble to bubble quickly passing on to something else, just because one media has to be better than the other media.

All of this constitutes the breeding ground for an old myth, the self-sufficient me, that plays an important part in our social imaginary, a group of ideal images that shape our behaviours, whether consciously or not.  Performance and envy are the stars – achieving success gives rise to envy much more than approval.  When the urge to do better than the other becomes a status, it is not surprising that living together is more difficult to organize. In ancient Greece, strategies, such as ostracism, were put in place to combat envy. I think there are other ways.

Thankfully, mass media paved the way for increasingly democratic consumption. Ikea once launched a campaign in Sweden, where the rich protested in the streets because Ikea made available everything beautiful, previously reserved for the rich bourgeois and aristocrats. It was an allusion, but with any joke there is an element of truth, and this democratization let envy be the driving force. The world has become a huge supermarket where the symbolic value of an object is more and more important. The status symbol object underlines a personality who will only accept to be defined through the eyes of others.

I wonder if there is a path where each member of the mass would help his immediate entourage to not end up in the mass, to not be enslaved, by rediscovering the virtues of sharing and synergies that exist only in the respect of otherness.

Exchange is the heart of trade and information. There was a time when it was said that some people were easy to do business with. They were good company and a pleasure to exchange with. And then everything became mass.  Mass media, mass production, mass consumption have ensured that little by little, the quality of trade has eroded, the sense of trade has changed as well as the flow of information. Today, the crisis is omnipresent. It attacks the world on all fronts, ecological crisis, economic crisis, financial crisis, unemployment crisis, crisis of capitalism, crisis of democracy, crisis of confidence, a crisis of faith ... nothing seems to work.  Has the die been cast ?  I doubt it: since the beginning of the Arab Spring in Tunisia in 2010, a shock wave appears to travel the world from Tunis to Wall Street. The classic analysis merely sees riots that have been suppressed. And what if there was more? And what if it was the awakening of a mass of people who no longer want to suffer but who want to exchange and progress instead of fighting to win at the expense of another ? People who aspire to live and not to conquer ? People who, in fact, wonder if Albert Camus was maybe right in stating that perhaps progress was a mistake and that the public good is made up of individual happiness.

To think about this together, I invite you to review three chapters.

In the first chapter, we approach the mass media as a delusion in the history of mankind. The past shows that the social aspect of the media was always dominant before information became an industrial product. We will discuss the consequences of all this by analysing the perverse effects associated with the passage of one media to another: the lack of reference points, infobesity, algoplanet and subversive risks. We will also outline the future mass media, mainly social.

In the second chapter, I would like to discuss our loss of reason and confidence. Traditional media are retreating, new media does not yet inspire confidence and between the two, a disturbing phenomenon such as the meme [1] industry, generating audience by appealing to our baser instincts. We will discuss the problem of data and the catastrophic level of teaching of the digital world in which we will lose our freedom if nothing is done to prevent it. But on another hand, I would like to give a few notes of hope to reinstate our confidence. We will see that a certain type of network is being created and promises a restoration of confidence and a reform of modes of management of our common lifestyles. We will also discover a company that lives and thrives in the world without an organisation chart and without hierarchy. It was created long before the emergence of new media technologies.

In the third chapter, I would like to invite the reader to think about our society and its national treasures, our national treasures that we will lose entirely and in a very unequal manner if nothing changes. We will address the challenges of growth and the social imaginary to which we submit our behaviour.

We will consider a new imaginary without turning everything upside down. Maximizers which are so dear to our economists and other capitalists may still survive  and reproduce in a new framework slightly changed to respect what I call our national treasures that have, in this case, nothing in common with our Ministries of Finance.

Each chapter ends with a short summary evoking what is worthwhile thinking about. Each time I have tried to remember the general elements and more specific elements for three active maximizers in our societies: the citizen who wants a maximum of well-being, quite rightly, the politician who wants a maximum of votes in the elections, and the manager who wants maximum performance results within his organisation.

---

[1] The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme (from Ancient Greek μίμημα Greek pronunciation: [míːmɛːma] mīmēma, imitated thing, from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, to imitate, from mimos mime)[4] and it was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). Today on the Web, memes refer to viral content, widely transmitted.

Chapter 1 : Mass Media, a historical aberration

Information has always been social up until it became an industrial product. Yet, regarding the question of what would be considered the most futile today, mass media almost 200 years old or social media in existence for only 10 years, the answer tilts towards the futility of social media. But history does not allow to confirm this.

History of transmitting information

In Egypt, hieroglyphics were based on pictograms representing objects, concepts or sounds. As of 2600 AC, cuneiform and hieroglyphic writings become flexible enough to transmit hymns, religious texts, advice and elements of wisdom. Letters written on papyrus, exchanged between individuals, were not messages sent to a specific receiver. There were reports of conversations or exchanges established between the sender and the receiver. Communication was already social, oral communication preceded written messages.

A tiny portion of the population could write. To become literate took time. Scholars formed an elite and intended to remain so. This of course delayed the use of alphabetic letters where sounds could be combined to form words corresponding to things. This alphabet with consonants and vowels appears in the 8th century BC in Greece and serves to communicate and spread to the population the art of reading and writing. To proceed with the ostracism of a citizen, 6000 signatures on the ostraca were necessary, the document reserved for votes in favour of ostracism of the said citizen. Explanatory panels were also present along Greek roads. All this proves that the majority of the Greek population was literate.

We know that mathematicians exchanged their progress or findings from one end of the world to another. But writings in Greece remained a means of dubious communication. According to Plato, Socrates complained that writings absolved man from remembering things and thus, weakened the mind. Without traces of writings, there is no way we could know this.  Plato's writings were useful but I would like to point out that they are called dialogues and therefore the oral word takes precedence over the written word. The social takes precedence over the unilateral.  The oral word is a reflection of a mental experience of man, whereas the written word is merely a reflection of an oral word.

Over time, Rome will become the major force of the Mediterranean Basin after defeating Carthage and conquering Greece. The size of the empire could not get accustomed to the way the independent cities of ancient Greece were governed, led by the elite. Aristotle claimed the ideal size of a city should not exceed the number of individuals that one speaker may address. In Rome, the forum remains the central place of exchange of information. Letters will allow those who are far to remain informed. Members of the Roman elite keep each other informed by tons of letters, transcripts of speeches and copies of the Acta Diurna, the daily gazette published on the forum and created by Julius Caesar when he was elected consul. Diurna is the origin of the word Journal and refers to today’s daily newspapers.

The contents of the Acta Diurna travelled to the most remote regions and they fervently awaited news not about what was debated in the Senate, but about city life gossip such as the story of the dog that saved his master from drowning or the visit to the temple of a man who came to sacrifice himself with his 8 children, 28 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren or the crucifixion of Mythridate, or to record the crops.

At this time, the first SMS messages appear or at least codes are used for quick communication. Codes such as SPD, 3 letters that we find at the top of letters next to the name of the sender… Salutem Plurimam dicit - sending you many greetings. In the signature, six letters often figure, SVBEEV, which is not the BIC code of a bank but a summary of Si vales, bene est, ego valeo - if you're okay that's fine, I'm fine. Again, oral tradition takes over. The Romans dictated their letters and those received were read to them. These letters were semi-public: those who were present heard the contents.  A letter could be copied and distributed to multiple recipients. Communication was via networking. As for the distribution of these letters, this was carried out through the networks of friends, colleagues and their servants.

The book also appears at this time, without publishers or bookshops. The book was dictated to scribes who took note on parchment. There was only one existing copy, which was shared among relatives to get their opinions. Cicero had very high expectations of this feedback. Some of the wealthy had several scribes and they copied interesting books in order that they be more widely distributed after requesting that some passages be corrected. They acted as agents and their support was very important for authors.

If all this was reserved for the elite, the people found happiness in graffiti. It seems that the walls of the Roman cities were covered in writings, rubbing shoulders with advertising, political slogans and personal messages of all kinds. These were engraved, drawn with charcoal or painted on the walls of the buildings open in the centre and darkened outwards, such as in Pompeii and Herculaneum. It was common to write on a wall, one’s own or those of others. In Pompeii, a graffiti alluding to Vatia humorously declared that the robbers support the candidacy of Vatia as edile of the city. There are also listings of stores for rent. It goes without saying that Christianity benefitted from this Roman social network.

The New Testament contains twenty-one epistles, that is to say, letters. Here, distribution becomes unilateral and serves to spread the truth: dogma. More than 9,000 letters of Christians dating back to antiquity have been found, the most famous being those of Paul of Tarsus. Fourteen of the twenty-one letters of the New Testament are attributed to him. They were aimed at groups of the population such as the Romans or the Corinthians and copies were also released between churches. Paul managed these churches as hubs, creating a sense of belonging to the community. To some, he announced that he had asked others to support this or that city, asking them to do the same. Other church networks join the movement and Christianity will spread through the networks and eventually reach the masses. Little by little. The texts of Paul of Tarsus are still read today