Technopharmacology

Proceedings of the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Studies (ICIS 2016) - Interdisciplinarity and Creativity in the Knowledge Society, 2016

Many discourses tend to consider change in techniques as the main trigger for social change and economic development. This paper proposes the original hypothesis that the development of new techniques occurs at the end of a long lasting societal process, not as its cause. The rising of the knowledge society since the 17 th century is engaged today in what we called the medial turn-defined as a cultural shift through the generalized digital communication. This process is the conclusive stage in the modernization process of societies conceived as positive-sum-game networks. Based on MacLuhan's famous idea that the "medium is the message", we address a few questions specialists and engineers are to be confronted to in the medial age.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2012

Like old science, old media also seem unacceptably unreal. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New In media studies circles, it is now almost trite to discuss the term remediation: the liminal, ambivalent staging of a media life caught between older and newer forms, and the functional tussle that happens between them. Nevertheless, scholars today work within this oscillating, in-between space -a space fraught with cross pressures of how we used to do things and how we ought to do things. As (post)medievalists, we study the very old with the very new, but remain constrained by the cultural logic of earlier and increasingly archaic media production. So the theme 'Becoming Media' applies as much to the entire process of this issue and its own immediately historical context as to its organizing theme and published product -a product realized here traditionally in print and then again, digitally and differently, on postmedieval's website. This process has been in many ways a stochastic one, infused with prediction, probability and randomness. We guessed about the new as we studied the old: the form and function of the online crowd review for early drafts of our contributors' essays necessarily developed out of the moment, as there was relatively little precedent for how such a process would or should

ABSTRACT: Internet and the Explosion of Knowledge The impact of information technology revolution has been so globally comprehensive that all the available tools of academic inquiry – media theory, cultural studies, political economy, philosophy etc. – have been employed to study them and we have a vast literature addressing this issue. What is conspicuous by its relative absence is any concerted attempt to understand the explosion in the field of knowledge and major changes in the rules of the knowledge game as a result of the Internet revolution. This is despite the fact that such an inquiry was inaugurated even before the advent of world wide web by the well-known French philosopher Lyotard in this book ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’ in the early eighties. “As the economy becomes postindustrial, the culture becomes postmodern” was the formulation Lyotard advances his enquiry from. He went on to analyze the transformations of knowledge in the wake of new information technologies. At the level of practice, however, the academic world is abuzz with the impact of the restructuring that is going on accompanying the information revolution and is plagued by enormous anxieties regarding a whole range of issues from diluting of standards to subjection of researchers to the management. Outside the academia, however, the theme of ‘knowledge’ and ‘explosion of knowledge’ has been circulating widely in the spheres of media, economy, politics and society. ‘Knowledge society’, knowledge economy, knowledge management, dot the pages of policy documents, conferences, blogs, mailing lists etc. With the emergence of open source software and the attempts to apply its underlying philosophy to other fields, the idea of ‘knowledge commons’ has become the repository of utopian longings as well as inspiration for practical efforts to open up access to knowledge and advance cooperative models of knowledge production. In this whole discourse of ‘knowledge’ it is understood implicitly that computers and Internet are going to play a central role in the organization of knowledge globally and that they are already doing so to a great extent. This state of affairs can be understood on the assumption that the meaning of knowledge itself has changed in the transition to the information age. That is why one can often find the argument that what has changed with the Internet is merely the communication of knowledge and the assertions to the effect that information is not knowledge. The conception of knowledge that the university is built upon is no longer the same in the realm of the Internet and in some sense information is indeed knowledge. In the proposed paper, we seek to explore the new conception of knowledge that is in the making in the era of pervasive information technology. For example, what kind of knowledge does software constitute? Software is merely a ‘tool’, or a technique, if seen from the old perspective. But construction of software constitutes one of the most important knowledge activities for the connected world. Or, what is the knowledge that knowledge management speaks of and seeks to manage? We will try to look at the range of knowledge activities that take place in and through the Internet to explore whether the contours of a newly emerging conception of knowledge can be discerned. In the process we will attempt to clarify in what sense can the ‘digital information’ be considered to be knowledge. It is our understanding that only when armed with such a clarity on the question of the relationship of knowledge and information, can we approach the question of the significance of the ‘explosion’ of knowledge seen to be occurring with the rise of the new information technologies. We examine whether we can characterize the transition that has taken place in the conceptions of knowledge as a transition from science to information, i.e., as a transition from knowledge as representation to representations and organization of knowledge. In this paper, we examine some of the consequences of this transition on the world of knowledge.

Knowledge delimits and limits simultaneously. While the former effect is apparent, the latter effect is often implicit, hidden. At the same time knowledge is not possible without mediation. This entails, engenders exaggeration, distortion. The concept of knowledge is thus problematised. Further, knowledge and power are entangled in a -cause-effect-cause- relationship. Knowledge feeds on power and power feeds on knowledge. In the mean time, the metaphysics of presence that emanated from the west, has spread to the rest of the world and valorized the concrete and the immediate over the abstract and the distant. This has created a heady mixture of knowledge-power-material possession (profit) and charmed our policy makers, academia, corporate world, institutions, and individuals in such a way that they notice only science and technology, and grudgingly acknowledge the disciplines willing to be converted by putting on ‘wigs’. Media is no exception and has been co-opted to further the agenda of unidirectional expansion that ruthlessly commoditizes and markets even if it involves some sort of warfare. As a result, media only highlights the problems and prospects of disciplines having the flavour of science and ignores the decay that has affected others, and becomes complicit in this ‘crime’. If it wished, media could have and should have prevented or at least slowed down the decline by devoting more space and time to the problems and prospects of humanities and social sciences by exposing the bias against them in terms of funding, allocation of space and institution of awards and scholarships. All over, it is ‘dil mange more’ science and technology. And media has been a very busy and creative party to this clamour creating a kind of scientism that is not only against other disciplines, but also science itself. The paper attempts to link the idea of metaphysics of presence, Foucault’s and Lyotard’s take on power and knowledge, the sorry state of social sciences and humanities, and the complicity of media in this vicious chain that has resulted in “kya kya khaein?” for science and technology, and “kya khaein?” for other disciplines, especially humanities.