A New Digitally Enabled Social Veracity

A citizen’s understanding of his or her city, county, state, country, and planet is determined in large part by the scope and veracity of the information they receive. If the information citizens obtain—via print, radio, online, television, film and/or video media—contains logical fallacies that distort reality or, equally destructive, if reports fail to cover crucial issues entirely, then it stands to reason that their understanding of reality will be impeded, which will, in turn, hinder their ability to reach enlightened positions on crucial issues facing humanity.
 
Immanuel Kant defines enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity” in his 1784 essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”  The essay, which was written in response to a prompt issued by the German journal, Berlinische Monatschrift, demonstrates the philosopher’s willingness to put his reputation on the line, leave the safe, rarified air within the academy and enter the public fray to discuss how individual enlightenment is the first step toward collective enlightenment in a society.
 
I recently had the pleasure of reading two essays that echoed aspects Kant’s philosophy on enlightenment; the first was Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” a prescient piece written in 1945 that urged the burgeoning military industrial complex and its members to turn their focus to the development of technologies that would revolutionize the way knowledge is disseminated and accessed; the second was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” an essay that the editor of The Atlantic referenced in the introduction to Bush’s essay (which appeared in the July 1945 issue): “Like Emerson’s famous address of 1837 on ‘The American Scholar,’ this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.”
 
Indeed, both Emerson and Bush called upon their generations to step forward and boldly innovate, not merely replicate the past.
 
“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this,” Emerson stated. “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.”
 
Bush too urged for bold steps into the future via innovation that keeps pace with the evolution of human consciousness. “Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose,” Bush wrote. “The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”
 
Many credit Bush as one of the earliest pioneers in the development of the Internet. And while Kant and Emerson predated the digital age, both their writings undoubtedly advocate systems of thought that promote enlightenment in all channels of media.
 
My next series of posts will delve into the most inspiring and disturbing developments currently taking place in our globalized, digital world; both leverage vast networks and never-before-seen computing power. Stay tuned.