Phronesis

Thesis: the internet increases practical wisdom.

(more info about Phronesis in the Wikipedia)

Description

From [1]

"The Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a are very important notions to consider in the context of "transitioning," i.e. developing collective intelligence and wisdom.

Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated "practical wisdom" and is the kind of rational skill doctors and entrepreneurs have that is based on experiential knowledge and provides the ability to take the best action in particular circumstances. We are much less likely to have thought of this as a separate kind of rational capacity.

Proposition: Whereas the printing press was an episteme engine, the Internet is a phronesis engine.

Alternative long phrasing: The printing press and the Internet are cognitive technologies that provide people and cultures with "mechanical advantage" or leverage for the development of the Aristotelean intellectual virtues of epistome and phronesis respectively.

It's pretty easy to see how the printing press is responsible for the massive scaling of epistome into the general culture. It's a bit harder to see how what the Internet is doing is the same for phronesis because our first viewing of the Internet (the web at least) has been that it's just one giant sales brochure/advertising billboard/encyclopedia/etc, i.e. that it is a global source of knowledge. My proposition is that the key thing going on with the Internet is not access to knowledge, but rather access participation in knowledge processes. Three examples:

1. Wikipedia. What really matters about it is not that we have access to a massive knowledge font, but rather that each of us can become encyclopedists and have to face the questions of ontological classification, neutral voice, objective/subjective reality, etc, that that entails.

2. Blogs. A word perhaps for at least three information processes moved out mass culture: journalism, publishing, political analysis. Again the key shift is not that there is all this reporting/publishing/political analysis available for our consumption, but that that each of us can become journalists/publishers/political analysts.

3. The online-writing workshop. People come to the site thinking that they will get reviews of their writing which will improve it. They invariably discover that reviewing the work of others is how they end up learning to improve their own writing.

In each of these cases the key thing is the shift from access to static information, to active participation in an information process. The Internet is providing a "mechanical advantage" for putting people together in a place where they can jointly engage in the kind of information processes and processing that I think leads to the developing of phronesis." ([2])]

More Information

The Wikipedia entry is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis