Is the world completely reverting to an oral culture of assertions held around an electronic campfire?
No. Not "reverting". This is how culture has always been. It's just that, now that the campfire is electronic, it's easier to perceive the truth about how culture works. It's a lot more like Twitter than like an academic journal's letters page.
Kay's right that the web makes it easier than ever to interject cited facts into everyday conversation, and that is having an effect on the discourse. But he's got the arrow of time pointing the wrong way. Once, people were even more ignorant of the real answers to questions like "what's the history of Smalltalk"? They just didn't advertise that ignorance in a worldwide publishing medium.
I think the fact that the "worldwide publishing medium" doesn't have any of the filters that a traditional publishing medium has is a big factor. From the dawn of time up until fairly recently, it took a fair amount of effort to spout one's nonsense, unfiltered, to more than a relatively small number of people.
It seems to me that this can be viewed as a "culture" of a sort, tied to the notion of writing and publication, where there an implied responsibility to some basic notions-- Derrida, in an interview, for example, says "it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy."
Thank you for pointing this out. Lately I'd been feeling despondent, thinking that the Internet is mostly a sea of unsupported opinion. The surfeit of opinion seems driven by the fact that (a) unsupported opinion is easier to write and publish than carefully researched facts and analysis, and (b) opinion is also easier and more titillating to read. But really, things are improving.
Another great morale-lifter was Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. When you read how common and insane were the myths and fads of previous times, you think how lucky you are to be alive now, when the irrationality quotient is so much lower.
you think how lucky you are to be alive now, when the irrationality quotient is so much lower.
I can't tell if you're being serious or if this is the most deliciously ironic riposte that I have ever had the pleasure to read. Either way, I'm grateful.
Yes, thank goodness for our increased rationality since the days of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. If not for all the rational thinkers we have today, we might have had to endure one or even two completely irrational economic bubbles in the last decade alone. Man, wouldn't that have sucked?
Anyway, I agree that the irrationality quotient is lower, but I wouldn't go so far as to claim that it's much lower. ;)
Sadly Mr. Kay's culture comment distracts from the best part of his response where he writes:
These seven influences got me to thinking about one abstraction that was indeed like a biological cell on the one hand and an entire computer on the other which could be universally used at all levels of scales in both software and hardware to "model anything" (including all the old inconvenient things computing was using).
That's perhaps the most enlightening statement about the history of Smalltalk I've ever seen.
...that can provide substantiations with just a little curiosity and work?
I think the answer is: People don't want to work. People are lazy. The very field of computer science was developed to help people do less work and still accomplish more.
The internet does this as well.
There's a scene in Waking Life that asks what the most essential human characteristic is: Fear or Laziness.
The most essential characteristic of life is the drive to replicate. That's the only reason why it still exists and will keep existing. Everything else is secondary to that.
The context seem to be a lisper who want to assert that Smalltalk has grown from Lisp, which seem to be only partially true.
Secondly there seem to be a slight misunderstanding - Smalltalk was influenced by biological concept according to Kay, while the poster he replies just denies that Smalltalk has its origin i biology - I would assume he meant used for research by biologist, which to me is something rather different than inspired by biological metaphors.
So basically different perspectives and misunderstandings escalate into a total unnecessary flamewar. What else is new.
No. Not "reverting". This is how culture has always been. It's just that, now that the campfire is electronic, it's easier to perceive the truth about how culture works. It's a lot more like Twitter than like an academic journal's letters page.
Kay's right that the web makes it easier than ever to interject cited facts into everyday conversation, and that is having an effect on the discourse. But he's got the arrow of time pointing the wrong way. Once, people were even more ignorant of the real answers to questions like "what's the history of Smalltalk"? They just didn't advertise that ignorance in a worldwide publishing medium.