The Ordinal Society by Marion Fourcade

Author:Marion Fourcade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

The Searching Disposition

As we saw at right at the beginning of the argument, the dream of the World Wide Web was about the accessibility, diffusion, and democratization of knowledge. Something like this vision of universal, interconnected learning has long been central to radical, romantic, or at least “antisystemic” critiques of education and science. In the 1960s and 1970s, to pick one example from many, the Catholic sociologist Ivan Illich argued that society needed to be “deschooled.” By this he meant that the functions of education and training needed to be deinstitutionalized and the cultivation of knowledge returned to a loosely connected network of people cooperatively solving problems. He thought people should discover and learn things together in the context of immediate tasks at hand. To this end he imagined “learning webs,” something like a bulletin board or knowledge-matching system for a whole society:

The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description.… In its most rudimentary form, communication between client and computer could be established by return mail. In big cities typewriter terminals could provide instantaneous responses. The only way to retrieve a name and address from the computer would be to list an activity for which a peer was sought. People using the system would become known only to their potential peers.… A publicly supported peer-match network might be the only way to guarantee the right of free assembly and to train people in the exercise of this most fundamental civic activity.31

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