CW2006 Presentation: More Heidegger

My knowledge of theory could be bound in nutshell, but for some reason I’m investigating Heidegger. Mostly, I think I just feel smart when I hear the sound of the word in my head. So this morning, instead of getting ready for work, I procrastinated and googled for [heidegger technology]. For no particular reason that I recall, I chose the third link: Professor Hubert Dreyfus. It turned out to be far to long to read when I was supposed to be in the shower, but I did scroll it a bit and found this (I wish there were a way to insert a named anchor in someone else’s page):

In a quite different domain, in a talk at Berkeley on the difference between the modern library culture and the new information-retrieval culture, Terry Winograd notes a series of oppositions which, when organized into a chart, show the transformation of the Modern into the Postmodern along the lines that Heidegger described. Here are a few of the oppositions that Winograd found:

LIBRARY CULTURE	INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL CULTURE
Careful selection a. quality of editions b. perspicuous description to enable judgment c. authenticity of the text	Access to everything a. inclusiveness of editions b. operational training to enable coping c. availability of texts
Classification a. disciplinary standards b. stable, organized, defined by specific interests.	Diversification a. user friendliness b. hypertext–following all lines of curiosity
Permanent collections a. preservation of a fixed text b. browsing	Dynamic collections a. intertextual evolution b. surfing the web

It is clear from these opposed lists that more has changed than the move from control of objects to flexibility of storage and access. What is being stored and accessed is no longer a fixed body of objects with fixed identities and contents. Moreover, the user seeking the information is not a subject who desires a more complete and reliable model of the world, but a protean being ready to be opened up to ever new horizons. In short, the postmodern human being is not interested in collecting but is constituted by connecting.

Either I’m losing my mind and totally lost, or I am completely on target and have a 500-page treatise to write. The columns are backwards from my notes—Winograd has B-A, and I have A-B. The need for “control of objects” in Winograd’s Library Culture parallels the Information Architecture control over agency that Marilyn Cooper identified in the CCCC session. The “protean being ready to be opened up to ever new horizons” is a more positive reading of the organic and systemic Information Ecologies. Library Culture is the “strict father,” and Information-Retrieval Culture is the “nurturing parent.”

As I said, I either suddenly undertand everything, or I’m totally lost and making things up.