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I've got so much work due next week that I almost haven't got the time to complain. Almost.
Today our TOK teacher was telling us about a former student of his who believed in past lives and thought he was a pilot during WWII. I asked him what side this kid thought he fought on and he said "clearly the wrong side because he ended up wearing [our school's] uniform in his next life." I'm writing my exhibition on "the challenges raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge." I wanted to tackle different aspects of this question with my three chosen objects.
I've got "river crab" as my first one. It's a Chinese internet meme poking fun at the CCP's decision to censor the Internet to produce a "Harmonious Society" (a concept that originated as a reaction to increasing inequality in Mainland China resulting from unchecked economic growth). "River crab" (héxiè) and "harmonious" (héxié) are homophones, so netizens use it as a tongue-in-cheek way of mocking censorship. This doesn't change a thing, of course, but most forms of online activism rarely do. I'm thinking about using this as my example of the restrictions censorship puts on communication.
For my second one I felt I needed to address the medium that knowledge is disseminated through, which is why I wanna write about fiber-optic cables. They're arguably the most critical infrastructure supporting long-distance connection via the modern Internet and telecommunications, and it's all done with modulated pulses of light producing strings of binary code. But they're so susceptible to environmental damage! Critical communications may be cut off w/o the ability to repair them. That's part of why I think they're so fascinating. Nations, societies etc. are so fragile. When the Roman Empire fell all of a sudden nobody came around to repair the roads anymore, and think about what happened to the infrastructure in the USSR's constituent republics after 1991! I could easily imagine something similar happening to our global information superhighway, and all the knowledge that would be lost. It'd also be interesting to analyze a map of these undersea cables and what that says about how material conditions impact where knowledge is spread and who gets to access it.
Haven't decided on the third one yet, but I know I wanna get into the limits of language itself. Claude Shannon's Prediction and Entropy of Printed English (1951) gets into quantifying the redundancy of written English. Shannon found that 50% of words in the typical sentence are redundant, easily predictable, and only exist due to the conventional rules of the language. This affects how efficiently words can be communicated as bits: the standard transmission is 1 word/bit, but Shannon predicted it could go to approx. 4 words/bit. I could also write about Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), where he famously asserted that "... the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world", which I interpret as the limit of logical possibilities that a language gives to its speaker, ergo their "world". I don't know much about formal linguistic theories, but I always found it fascinating how language naturally limits the maximum efficiency of communication, or even what can be experienced/communicated. At times I wish I could beam my consciousness directly into someone else's head and make them understand me without all the ambiguity of language, like a Vulcan mind meld.
Today our TOK teacher was telling us about a former student of his who believed in past lives and thought he was a pilot during WWII. I asked him what side this kid thought he fought on and he said "clearly the wrong side because he ended up wearing [our school's] uniform in his next life." I'm writing my exhibition on "the challenges raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge." I wanted to tackle different aspects of this question with my three chosen objects.
I've got "river crab" as my first one. It's a Chinese internet meme poking fun at the CCP's decision to censor the Internet to produce a "Harmonious Society" (a concept that originated as a reaction to increasing inequality in Mainland China resulting from unchecked economic growth). "River crab" (héxiè) and "harmonious" (héxié) are homophones, so netizens use it as a tongue-in-cheek way of mocking censorship. This doesn't change a thing, of course, but most forms of online activism rarely do. I'm thinking about using this as my example of the restrictions censorship puts on communication.
For my second one I felt I needed to address the medium that knowledge is disseminated through, which is why I wanna write about fiber-optic cables. They're arguably the most critical infrastructure supporting long-distance connection via the modern Internet and telecommunications, and it's all done with modulated pulses of light producing strings of binary code. But they're so susceptible to environmental damage! Critical communications may be cut off w/o the ability to repair them. That's part of why I think they're so fascinating. Nations, societies etc. are so fragile. When the Roman Empire fell all of a sudden nobody came around to repair the roads anymore, and think about what happened to the infrastructure in the USSR's constituent republics after 1991! I could easily imagine something similar happening to our global information superhighway, and all the knowledge that would be lost. It'd also be interesting to analyze a map of these undersea cables and what that says about how material conditions impact where knowledge is spread and who gets to access it.
Haven't decided on the third one yet, but I know I wanna get into the limits of language itself. Claude Shannon's Prediction and Entropy of Printed English (1951) gets into quantifying the redundancy of written English. Shannon found that 50% of words in the typical sentence are redundant, easily predictable, and only exist due to the conventional rules of the language. This affects how efficiently words can be communicated as bits: the standard transmission is 1 word/bit, but Shannon predicted it could go to approx. 4 words/bit. I could also write about Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), where he famously asserted that "... the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world", which I interpret as the limit of logical possibilities that a language gives to its speaker, ergo their "world". I don't know much about formal linguistic theories, but I always found it fascinating how language naturally limits the maximum efficiency of communication, or even what can be experienced/communicated. At times I wish I could beam my consciousness directly into someone else's head and make them understand me without all the ambiguity of language, like a Vulcan mind meld.
