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Living in the age of convenience

taiwanese grass jelly herb (3.1/5) (cooling, bitter mint sensation that feels light but has an intense climate. apparently, when steeped with agar agar or gelatin, it can thicken into a jelly. however, i would prefer to drink the herb as is.) "And surely you have seen, in the darkness of the most innermost rooms of these huge buildings, to which sunlight never penetrates, how the gold lead of a sliding door or screen will pick up a distant glimmer from the garden, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow, a faint golden light cast into the enveloping darkness. How in such a dark place, gold draws so much light to itself is a mystery to me. Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of gold, but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value, for gold in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty." Tanizaki'...

Innerarity on the Education Disparity


Smith says, "It is a culture based on a ceaselessly interpretative notion of knowledge". Knowledge is a potential liberator for many individuals and groups. The difficulties and interpretative spaces that accompany knowledge open a series of opportunities for many people. The very necessity that knowledge should always be re-produced and that the actors should appropriate it affords the possibility in a manner of speaking, of imprinting a personal stamp on knowledge. The process of appropriation leaves a mark. In the course of this process, agents take on new cognitive capabilities, hone those they already possess, and generally deal with knowledge in a more efficient manner. This then affords them the opportunity to develop a greater critical capacity for new knowledge to discover new possibilities for action. The social distribution of knowledge is not a zero-sum game. 

The biggest challenge of a knowledge society is the creation of collective intelligence. What used to be a division of labor in industrialized societies is now a division of knowledge, in other words, the articulation of knowledge that is spread throughout society. A knowledge society is, from this point of view, a society that is particularly interested not so much in whether its component parts are intelligent as whether the society as a whole is. Collective intelligence designs an emerging attribute of social system that does not stem from the mere aggregate of individual intelligence: it is, instead, an intelligence that belongs to the system as a whole. 


-Excerpt from Innerarity’s The Democracy of Knowledge

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