To harness the free flow of information is crucial for the success of this symbiotic process. If information needs arise then there is a gap in the state of knowledge. Information seeking and use are inseparable from our human and social activities. Without information, without fresh knowledge and without their derivatives such as creativity and innovation, we cannot become contemporary humans. Being informed is a dynamic, non-linear, disorderly, chaotic, postmodern process. Student’s cognitive needs, affective needs, situational demands should be taken into consideration in the manufacturing process. The student’s surging feelings of confidence and self control add much to the quality of the product.
By processing information, we acquire new knowledge. According to Chun Wei Choo, eight classes of information are used: Enlightenment, problem understanding, instrumental, factual, confirmational, projective, motivational and personal or political. The principal information activities in sense making are scanning, noticing, and interpreting, Chun Wei Choo adds. The main medium of sense making is face-to-face conversation between different sets of people who engage in human activities such as talking, thinking, and seeing. This can remind us of Levinas’ face-to-face encounter with the other for the sake of peace making by the ‘sameness’ process which installs a responsibility for the other in the Self. By Choo’s understanding of face-to-face feature of the process, the output is a net of shared meanings which assigns significance to ambiguous cues. Information can be meaning oriented allowing dissimilar interpretations to coexist. Mobilized internal knowledge helps to promote the sharing of information. By the symbiosis of knowledge and information, the market and information technology rejuvenate in this Symbiotic Era.
We murdered the real, if we comment on Baudrillard’s Murder of the Real in the Vital Illusion. “The perfect crime no longer involves God (of Nietzsche), but Reality, and it is not a symbolic murder but an extermination” writes Baudrillard. Nothing is left of reality, no trace, not even a corpse as ‘extermination’ suggests. Nothing is either true or false, but reality is not dead absolutely as no crime is perfect, jokes Baudrillard.
“...today there is nothing left but a map (the virtual abstraction of the territory), and on this map some fragments of the real are still floating and drifting.” (2000:63)
The hyperrealization of the real is a crime with a total mystery. There is no suspect. There is no weapon. All traditional functions, the critical, the political, the sexual, the social survive only in simulation.
“We seem to be driven by a huge and irresistible compulsion that acts on us through the very progress of technologies ( expanding for example in what we call ‘information highways’ and could as well call ‘disinformation highways, a compulsion to draw ever closer to the unconditional realization of the real.” (Baudrillard 2000:65)
Because there is too much of the Real, it is disappearing, Baudrillard acknowledges, just as the excess of information puts an end to information, or the excess of communication puts an end to communication and too much creativity puts an end to innovation.
Until now in this paper we advocated the idea of symbiosis between Information and Knowledge, between Creativity and Innovation. But now we should add that we would better not exaggerate this notion as well, taking the French philosopher’s warning into consideration against excess. Just like Plato, we would better champion his well known phrase ‘moderation in everything’. In the cases of too much reality, too much information, too much innovation we do not know exactly what is taking place. That is true Messieur Baudrillard, it may be that humankind is doomed to disappear in this catastrophic process.
Baudrillard’s solution for this problem of total disappearance is that we must no longer assume any principal of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm. Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events. It is not easy, as he says, to renounce truth is the most difficult thing although truth no longer affords a solution. To crown it all, absolute truth is another name for death. We must find better quests than going after the absolutes.
An underlying and unifying truth and certainty that can render the world coherent and meaningful can be split into a multitude of reigning units, can be pluralistic with no horizantal or vertical order by the power of popular culture. Decentered knowledge can produce multiple meanings. The unified subject of modernity can be the fragmented subject of postmodernity. Maybe only a symbiosis can reduce the drawbacks of the fragmented whole to turn into dust and irritate humans by whirlwinds. The expected result is certainly not nihilism.
A symbiotic student should not deny truth altogether, but should be aware of the multiplicity of local contingent truths; should not claim to abolish all norms but should know that they have to be struggled over and should assume a personal responsibility in this struggle. To the Enlightenment ideals of critical reason and humanistic individual freedom, it is only added a rational subject capable of exercising self motivation and self direction. There is still subjectivity but more ambivalent and less fixed in positioning. The symbiotic student’s education is going through profound changes as well. Interdisciplinary and experiental approaches in teaching and learning can help to realize the promising symbiosis: To create and produce the symbiotic student educated both by modern and postmodern practices. In Postmodernism and Education Robin Usher and Richard Edwards warn us against ‘emancipatory intentions’ which can turn out to be the means of a new oppression.
“Self-referentiality is perhaps one of the key aspects of a postmodern perspective. Its particular significance lies in providing a constant reminder that all discourses can have power effects. It is, for example, attractive to replace notions of individualistic humanism with those of social empowerment but care is needed to ensure that this does not result in the substitution of one oppressive discourse for another. As Foucault reminds us, discourses of emancipation despite their emancipatory intent, are still bound up with the ‘will to power’. Educators find it hard to accept that their emancipatory intentions, their desire to enlighten may be implicated with the ‘will to power’ and may, therefore, have oppressive consequences. A postmodernist perspective reminds us that historically this has been the case and that we as educators, therefore, need always to question any discursive practice, no matter how benevolent, for the configurations of emancipation/oppression within it.”(Usher-Edwards 1994:27)
Ayten Suvak
(To be continued)
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder