To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex
and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each
other the questions they are asking themselves.
In the most recent publication my mind stuck on "everybody knows". Sanger tells us that: "Everybody knows that Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, that 2+2=4, that most people have two eyes." I will admit, however, that the reason I got stuck on this phrase was that I regularly say to the significant other in my life (aka husband not dog) "well, I'm not everybody". He seems to assume that the knowledge that in his head is also in mine. OK, 2+2=4. The inner workings of a computer? Forget it - I don't even understand the words he uses.
What is knowledge? How do we "know" what we know? Or, as Sanger titles his essay, "Who says we know".
In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media—in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals.
But we are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web—the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. It is particularly the aggregation of public opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge.
