History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
John Monk
Department of Telematics, Faculty of Technology
Open University
Milton Keynes
United Kingdom
e-mail: j.monk@open.ac.uk
Rhetorical determinism
Talk of a knowledge economy signals a shifting vocabulary. "Knowledge" becomes the keystone in a final vocabulary used in explanations of human activity. The change inspires redescriptions of institutions or reappraisals of their role. Hospitals become institutions that collect, catalogue and distribute knowledge, and taxation provides a metaphor for the collection and redistribution of knowledge. Surveillance becomes an economic activity, and universities are legitimated as creators, packagers and distributors of knowledge.
Knowledge is metaphysical. If it has any kind of existence then it is embodied and projected through the skills of the knowers. In a knowledge economy, material artifacts become warrants for the knowledge of the artisan. Significance is assigned to practices involving tokens such as measurements, books, recordings, surveys and the sounds of chatter - tokens whose worth is attributed to knowledge and gauged by the skills they bestow on people who themselves integrate into the economy as knowledge tokens.
Physical, chemical, biological, technological and social processes change what is to be known, make existing embodied knowledge obsolete and increase uncertainty. Offensive warfare accelerates these entropic processes. Fresh knowledge reduces the uncertainty. Power, then, becomes the ability to regulate the knowledge and hence the certainties and uncertainties of others.
Since technology connects with all human activity, the reformulation of institutions and priorities demands changes to descriptions of what technology is, so that within the rhetorical frame of the knowledge economy, technologies generate, reproduce, measure, distribute, protect, authenticate or undermine tokens of knowledge.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006