Knowledge is a constructed artefact, and the way that we as humans think about our world determines what we record, how we record it, what we remember and what we regard as knowledge. In turn, the form of knowledge, and the way that we access that knowledge – whether it is as manuscripts, printed books, indexed lists or online databases – determines how we think about the past and what we are able to say about it. It is well known and accepted that the technology of writing and then of the printing press changed the way we think and act. Geoffrey Bowker takes this basic idea, that form determines function, and shows how the information infrastructure used to record and store information in each age subtly interacts with how that age conceptualises knowledge and how the sciences create knowledge, and that a different infrastructure would have produced a different knowledge. What science “knows” is an outcome of the technology for organising information.
In this challenging and erudite book Bowker ranges over several centuries, looking at how information was stored in those times and examines the relationship between the knowledge technology and the knowledge that seemed natural and inevitable those in the sciences at that time. He looks at the social and political processes that shaped that relationship, the selection, storage and preservation of information and how these have changed over time, and how in changing, those processes have continually reconfigured our understanding of the past. Indeed the social and political processes we apply in the sciences today will shape the understanding of our sciences to future generations.
The essence of history, especially in the sciences, is what we choose to forget. We use the tools of the present to shape the past and we impose on nature the cognitive structure predicated by our primary organising science.
The book shows how scientific knowledge can be thought of as having gone though three epochs. In the nineteenth century, the main organising science was geology and that revolutionised how we think of time. In the twentieth century cybernetics did the same and today's biotechnologies are determining how we understand our world and our part in it. Bowker argues that our understanding of the past depended on whatever “traces” we access, traces that were either deliberately chosen or accidentally survived, and that we have interpreted these through the lens of major sciences of the time. In each epoch the interpretation was different. However in our present age, digital archiving in all its forms will create a totally new way of interpreting history. There will not only be almost complete information instead of mere traces, we have a technology capable of recording and storing that information in an almost limitless number of new ways. This new technology and how we manage it has profound implications for what gets defined as “knowledge” now and in the future.
This is a densely written and meticulously researched book. That is both its strength and its weakness. It is comprehensive in scope and challenging in its breath. It is also so densely packed with information that the reader might at times feel overwhelmed with the detail. The constant weaving of analogies and metaphors, allusions to philosophical standpoints, and excursions into esoteric scholarship is dazzling in its execution but possibly is more hard work than the average reader will want.
This is an excellent book, but one for the specialist rather than the general reader.
