Chapter Three: Techne

…people, institutions, companies, and society at large, transform technology, any technology, by appropriating it, by modifying it, by experimenting with it.

Castells 2001

 Techne is the reflective component of this exegetical-thesis that describes some of the opportunities and limitations of electronic scholarship (as an independent post-graduate student) in the context of this work. The articulation of this socio-technical (or even a ‘historio-technical’) viewpoint is on the whole a key erudition of this exegetical-thesis.

 

Technology is a modern word that combines the Greek techne (skill, metier) with logos (knowledge). Techne crudely translates into the ‘skill of knowledge’ and is not just the skill of technique or the skill of creating a form. As I will illustrate, a techne intellectual schema is critical to the development of interdisciplinary electronic scholarship. Without this skill it is difficult to find a balance between employing the right technology to the right historical question. For a humanist it is not simply the technology that is important, it is the cultural context of the meanings and values that are placed on the technology. Castells says that technology and society cannot be separated; we cannot understand society without communications devices, and technology cannot exist without society. This may seem like a common sense statement, but it is worrying just how little of this common sense actually prevails.

 

Historians, for instance, use technology to write history but often do not reflect upon the technologies that they employ to do this. Those trained in the academic monologue and its cognitive ‘mind map’ often find it impossible to think outside of the ‘knowledge construction’ parameters of the tools of their craft. And technologists often embrace new media tools uncritically without the slightest awareness of the political values that they may be advancing.

 If the Internet is a ‘revolution’ then it is a revolution that emanated from privilege rather than oppression. The Internet came from some of the world’s richest societies and their richest universities and wealthiest military research laboratories and corporations. From Switzerland, to Harvard, to Berkeley, to Stanford, to MIT, to Bell Laboratories, to the University of Melbourne, the Internet began as a top-down technological insurrection from within a class that often has a predictable set of values as guiding principles.[1]

 

Some of these principles include a privileged appreciation of the value of education, global opportunism, an anti-Labourist tradition, Libertarianism, and scepticism for any form of governmentality that seeks to moderate economic and political power. It is not surprising then, that many of these ideas have become some of the dominant ways that we understand the Internet.[2]

 

However, the Internet has also been an incredible democratising medium through giving political expression to marginalised groups and individuals whose voices would otherwise be muffled by restrictive information flows. Through the work of a number of people, we can now understand some of the plights of cultures around the world that would not otherwise have access to a publishing mechanism with worldwide retrieval.[3]

 

Radical and progressive groups (for better or worse) are now able to hastily exchange their ideas internationally and form alliances that may help to moderate some of the more oppressive forms of globalisation. Although much work still needs to be done in terms of the provision of access to the medium for less-advantaged groups, we are a long way in front of where we were just a few years ago.[4]

 

Accordingly, at a time when many of the public aspects of academic culture have largely been marginalised by the pressures of a consumerist and product based society, academic thought has been quick to migrate to the new scholarly communication mechanisms.[5] As previously noted, this project has been largely built online with the assistance of email discussion lists and other academic publishing initiatives.

 

For a student of the Humanities it is now easy to find useful resources online, largely placed there by the Humanities Computing field and the library and information sciences. However, there is still much work to be done in terms of providing access to post-graduate work online or even encouraging post-graduate students (as an independent course of study and as part of a post-graduate qualification) to move the medium forward in the Humanities field.

 

 In reflection, as an independent and inter-disciplinary researcher, perhaps the greatest challenge that I have faced in this project is not so much learning the Internet tools, but learning to navigate through research cultures that are often antagonistic to one another. Although the Internet and Information Technology are groundbreaking in terms of their passage across many aspects of society and its cultures, it is a medium that is by no means egalitarian rather it is characterised by hierarchies and competing communities of interest.

 

Some of these political and economic interests are within the field of critical theory, some are in the Information Technology sector, some are artistic, some are corporate, some are vocational, and some are educational. Learning to pilot through competing cultural capitals is a must for electronic scholarship, especially since there is enormous resistance and misunderstanding about technology within the Humanities. more>>

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Authored by Craig Bellamy© 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002

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