Monday's Read: A Social History of Knowledge

Peter Burke. A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. (Cambridge: Polity, 2000)


Related links of interest:

http://heterodoxology.com/2011/04/13/peter-burke-the-social-history-of-knowledge-and-agnotology-notes-on-a-lecture/

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=652

This book - dealing as it does with European Enlightenment era knowledge and its development and transmission - and the related links posted above, are of particular interest because they set the stage for many of the ideas that later (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) Middle East intellectuals were to encounter and engage when they traveled to Europe. I am particularly struck by the new field of agnotology, referenced in the heterodoxology link. Coined in 1995 by Stanford history of science and technology professor Robert N. Proctor, agnotology is "the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt" (see the above linked wiki article). This seems a particularly relevant field in our new information age, where, as sociologists and media scholars have noted, people are likely to seek out information that conforms to the views they already held. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the well-publicized google algorithms that tailor results to a person's previous searches would, it would seem, amplify the "information bubble," making ignorance, or confusion regarding how to come to accurate conclusions when faced with a glut of contradictory information, a hallmark of the social history of ideas and knowledge in the information age.