IB Philosophy 3.3.3 Knowledge and Technology Notes

Technology as a Means of Disseminating Knowledge

1. The previous two topics examined how knowledge and power are intertwined (3.3.1) and how access to knowledge is shaped by built-in assumptions about what counts as knowledge, censorship, and institutional gatekeeping (3.3.2).
2. This final topic considers the role of technology in transforming how knowledge is produced, stored, and shared, and whether these transformations ultimately promote or undermine epistemic equality (fairness in who gets to know what).
3. Throughout history, technological innovation has been one of the primary drivers of change in how knowledge is disseminated. The invention of writing enabled knowledge to be preserved beyond the limits of individual memory, creating the possibility of cumulative intellectual traditions.
4. The development of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century democratized access to texts that had previously been restricted to monasteries and universities.
5. The printing revolution illustrates a recurring pattern in the relationship between technology and knowledge. Each major innovation in information technology has expanded the number of people who can access knowledge, while simultaneously creating new forms of control and exclusion.
6. Printing made books widely available, but it also enabled censors to identify and suppress dangerous ideas more systematically than in the era of hand-copied manuscripts.
7. The internet represents the most significant transformation in knowledge dissemination since the printing press. By the early twenty-first century, an unprecedented volume of information became accessible to anyone with a network connection.
8. Open-access platforms, digital libraries, and educational websites such as Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseWare have made high-quality educational content available to learners who would previously have had no access to such resources.
9. Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist, argued in Understanding Media (1964) that technologies of communication are not neutral carriers of content but actively shape how we think and what we can know.
   1. His famous words, "the medium is the message," suggests that the form of a technology (print, television, digital media) transforms the nature of knowledge itself, not merely its distribution.
10. McLuhan's insight connects to the overarching Unit 3 question, "What are the sources and limits of knowledge?"
    1. If the medium through which knowledge is transmitted shapes the knowledge itself, then technology is not just a delivery truck for ideas but a constitutive factor (something that actively determines what is possible) in setting the limits of what we can know.
    2. Digital media, for instance, favour short, visual, and instantly accessible content over the slow, step-by-step reasoning that characterizes traditional philosophical inquiry.

The Infosphere and Information Overload

1. Luciano Floridi, a contemporary philosopher of information, has argued that we now live in an "infosphere": an environment saturated with information in which the boundaries between online and offline, between digital and physical, have become blurred.
   1. Floridi argues that this transformation raises fundamental questions about knowledge, how we tell reliable knowledge apart from misinformation, and how we navigate a world where too much information can be just as disorienting as too little.
2. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates Floridi’s infosphere problem vividly. During 2020-2021, the World Health Organisation described an “infodemic” alongside the pandemic: reliable public health information circulated through the same digital channels as conspiracy theories, unverified treatments, and politically motivated disinformation.
3. Citizens could not easily distinguish WHO guidance from viral misinformation because both appeared in the same feeds, with similar formatting, and were shared by trusted contacts. The infosphere turned the knowledge challenge on its head: the problem was not a lack of information but an inability to filter signal from noise.
4. The concept of information overload captures one of the paradoxes of technological dissemination. While technology has made more knowledge accessible than at any previous point in history, it has also made it harder to identify what is reliable and significant.
5. As discussed in the analysis of truth (3.1.2), the question of what counts as true becomes more pressing when competing claims proliferate faster than they can be evaluated.
6. Neil Postman offered a critical perspective in Technopoly (1992), arguing that modern societies have surrendered their cultural institutions to the authority of technology.
   1. He argues that the danger is not that technology restricts access to knowledge but rather that it creates a culture where every problem is assumed to need a technological fix, crowding out the kind of slow, careful, human thinking that genuine understanding actually requires.
7. Consider the dominance of standardised testing in American education. Postman would argue that when schools organise their entire curriculum around preparing students for machine-scored tests, teachers' professional judgment gets replaced by what a machine can measure.
8. The teacher’s capacity to recognise a student’s philosophical insight, creative potential, or moral growth becomes irrelevant if it cannot be captured by a multiple-choice instrument. This is technopoly in action: the technology of testing does not merely assist education but redefines what education means, reducing knowledge to what can be quantified.
9. The philosophical question at stake is whether technology merely changes the speed and scale of knowledge dissemination, or whether it transforms the very nature of what we know and how we know it.