Is there any interest in following the evolution of the Sugar Loaf or Corcovado?
Where are the “mountainlogists”?
They are unmoving mountains, which evolve very slowly, and were formed millions of years ago.
There are no “mountainlogists”? Why?
There is no need for them.
A volcano is a horse of a different color.
Volcanoes are pro-active mountains.
And they kill people.
It’s logical to affirm that a volcano is not just any mountain. Do you agree?
Then, by necessity, volcanologists were invented.
Whatever has movement and social impact is studied.
What doesn’t, we leave alone.
Information ecologies have something to do with volcanoes.
Because they were unchanged for centuries, human beings looked at them as static mountains.
I resort to my phrase collection:
“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.” (Alan Kay)
Today, a child thinks that we always had television; and a cell phone is already part of our body.
Volcanoes looked like mountains.
The problem is that they began to erupt constantly in the last century – from the radio to the Twitter.
Everything was very fast and people ask on the streets: where are the information volcanologists to explain these phenomena and protect us from them?
Whoever runs into one of them, please let us know.
Who might know the exact dynamic of the current and the next eruption of the informational ecology volcano?
Different information ecosystems always existed, but they looked like “mountains,” and we had no idea of their capacity to spew, all of a sudden, lava and more lava, such as the Internet and its developments.
There is a theoretical knot hanging in the air, because if information environments are being modified and are shaping society, we need to study them.
I agree with Castells when he said:
1. We are not the knowledge society. Knowledge has always been important.
2. We are the network society.
Here is the text in which he calls into question the notion of information or knowledge societies:
“This approach is different from the conceptual framework that defines our societies as information or knowledge societies. To be blunt, I believe this is an empirical and theoretical error.” (pg-8)
Later on, he asserts in the very title of the article that we live in a network society: INFORMATIONALISM, NETWORKS, AND THE NETWORK SOCIETY: A THEORETICAL BLUEPRINT.
Our current informational ecology is based on the digital network, not on knowledge or information – the latter factor has always been fundamental. Its importance increases in proportion to the growth of the planet’s population.
Thus, the digital network is next in the volcanic world of information.
We have always been information and knowledge societies, based on an ever-changing informational ecology.
The ecology does change, but the need for information and knowledge remains the same.
Without them, we would not have survived as a species!
It’s necessary to have a new science and new scientists to profoundly study informational ecologies, if we are to undo past theoretical knots, and especially not to entangle further this mess of wires in the future.
A new scientist to help us to put everything in the right places.
Do you agree with me?
Translated by Jones de Freitas. Edited by Phil Stuart Cournoyer.
Yes, I agree!
Well, the metaphor is a bit off. Most volcanoes are mountains. Non-volcanic mountains are studied also. Mountain range formation can be every bit as cataclysmic as volcanic eruptions. For instance, the recent earthquakes in Pakistan and China are related to the ongoing formation of the Himalayas.
But the main point of this post — study things that are active and can affect you the most when their rapid changes impact you. By studying this types of phenomena, maybe you can come to an understanding of their driving forces and start predicting impacts. This has happened with volcanoes. Before the 1980s, it was understood that active volcanoes could awaken (start rumbling), but what happened next was not predictable. Sometimes they would settle down again, sometimes they would blow up. But due to hundreds of vulcanologist studying properties of volcanoes such as seismic signals, historical behavior, gas emissions, and chemical properties of the magma there have been many recent successes in predicting violent eruptions in time to evacuate people and save lives. See:
http://volcanoworld.wordpress.com/2009/03/06/how-do-volcanologists-predict-volcanic-eruptions/
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_of_volcanic_activity
But, I agree that there is some underlying principles behind the current web-based communication, collaboration and information sharing activities and their affects on us all.