El uso de nuevas tecnologías de comunicación como un elemento vital para la cooperación humana y, por otra parte, la capacidad de almacenar enormes bases de datos de acceso público, nos lleva a la pregunta de si estamos en una sociedad del conocimiento o de la información. Aquí una parte de la entrevista del “networker” y crítico Geert Lovink al escritor Alan Liu sobre su libro “The laws of cool”. (ver la entrevista completa)

Geert Lovink: Lately I had a short but interesting dispute on the phone. In the midst of a conversation the lady I talked to used the phrase “knowledge society” and I objected. I told her that I preferred “information society”, despite all its troubles. She said: “but that term is only used by technocrats.” Yes, I answered, but I like it more, compared to the hyped up term “knowledge” that, for me, stands for well meant, soft exclusion combined with ugly intellectual property right clauses. Why should others define what knowledge is, and is not? Information is a much broader term. It’s cold and technical, perhaps even anti?human, and leaves the possibilities. Your book circles around “knowledge work” in the age of computerization. How do you judge the current knowledge society craze?

Alan Liu: I think that you were exactly right in your phone conversation with the person who preferred “knowledge society” to “information society.” “Knowledge” is supposed to mean a deeper, cohesive, integral, and more spiritually real apprehension–less a way of knowing, really, than a way of being. Even some business books (for example, Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization) treat it that way. The problem, of course (paceBourdieu) is that knowledge is also a way of life or lifestyle. I call it in my book “work style” (lifestyle = work). As such, it is dominated by institutions that know better than you how to work at knowledge. Such institutions shape knowledge at the level of workaday protocols (”this is the document format you will use”) and also at the level of overall social protocol (”corporate culture”). Indeed, the power of contemporary institutions is that they enforce a seamless fit between workaday and cultural protocols. It is all one protocol, which substitutes for what we used to call culture. In this situation, the apparently reductive, purely “technical” notion of “information society” is preferable to “knowledge society.” “Information workers” are peons of the knowledge-work regime who don’t always need to conform to the knowledge ideology. Some good engineers and sysadmins I know are like that. They do their thing without needing to pretend that they are integral parts of the whole corporate culture of knowledge. On the one hand, they can be perceived reductively (”just a sysadmin”). But, on the other hand, they have powers and capabilities that spread out in decentralized ways beyond the institutional knowledge construct. The so-called “professions” used to function in that capacity (with their own professional associations and guilds spreading out beyond any particular company). Now that professionalism has been increasingly subordinated to corporatism (as in the corporate attorney or accountant), the techno-people are stepping into the role. They do biz; but, for example, they also do open source.