PARIS EXPOSITION: 1900

At the Paris Exposition of 1900, Smithsonian Secretary S.P. Langley led historian Henry Adams through the halls of the exposition ... Langley introduced Adams to the Dynamo, the electrical generator that would define our current era in its reliance on electricity:

“To him [Langley], the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight ...”

Smithsonian Secretary, Samuel Pierpont Langley

Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams (1918)

“...but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity."

Henry Adams

Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams (1918)

But back to the dynamo. Today, the lowly, dynamo, is one of the key tools that powers our innovation and I want to use that as an example of the principles we need for tools in our current information-based environment.

For Adams, the Dynamo would replace the Cathedral, the electricity generated would create a light that shown on, and that lit up, not one that would illuminate, or show the inner light.

ON ILLUMINATION

MUSEUMS AND CATHEDRALS

One's first visit to a great cathedral is like one's first visit to the British Museum; the only intelligent idea is to follow the order of time, but the museum is a chaos in time, and the cathedral is generally all of one and the same time. Henry Adams, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904)

From the time of the European Middle Ages that saw the rise of the great cathedrals, through the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, when museums as we now know them began to form in the late 18th century, the chaos that Adams sees in the museum becomes the dynamism of our own time.

MUSEUMS AND CEMETARIES

Museums: cemeteries!… Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

F.T. Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909)

They become lost in their idea of a museum and forget its purpose. They become lost in working out their idea of a museum and forget their public. And soon, not being brought constantly in touch with the life of their community through handling and displaying that community's output in one or scores of lines …

they become entirely separated from it and go on making beautifully complete and very expensive collections, but never construct a living, active and effective institution.

John Cotton Dana, The Gloom of the Museum (1917)

A great city department store of the first class is perhaps more like a good museum of art than are any of the museums we have as yet established.John Cotton Dana, The Gloom of the Museum

(1917)

BOOKS AND LIBRARIES

When printed pages are bound together to make books or journals, many of the display features of the individual pages are diminished or destroyed. Books are bulky and heavy. They contain much more information than the reader can apprehend at any given moment, and the excess often hides the part he wants to see...

Books are too expensive for universal private ownership, and they circulate too slowly to permit the development of an efficient public utility. Thus, except for use in consecutive reading — which is not the modal application in the domain of our study — books are not very good display devices. In fulfilling the storage function, they are only fair.

With respect to retrievability they are poor. And when it comes to organizing the body of knowledge, or even to indexing and abstracting it, books by themselves make no active contribution at all.

J.C.R. Licklider, The Future of Libraries (1965)

If books are intrinsically less than satisfactory for the storage, organization, retrieval, and display of information, then libraries of books are bound to be less than satisfactory also.

J.C.R. LickliderThe Future of Libraries

(1965)

We need to substitute for the book a device that will make it easy to transmit information without transporting material, and that will not only present information to people but also process it for them, following procedures they specify, apply, monitor, and, if necessary, revise and reapply.

J.C.R. LickliderThe Future of Libraries (1965)

CECI TUERA CELA

And opening the window of his cell he pointed out with his finger the immense church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches, seemed an enormous two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle of the city.

The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence, then extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from the book to the church,—"Alas," he said, "this will kill that."”

As an agent of change, printing altered methods of data collection, storage and retrieval systems, and communications networks used by learned communities throughout Europe.

Elizabeth Eisenstein

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

A means to fulfill a human purpose (e.g. a specific tool, a pencil writes)

TECHNOLOGY ...

An assemblage of practices and components (tool boxes of individual technologies)

TECHNOLOGY ...

An entire collection of devices and enginnering practices available to a culture (think book printing in the 15th century, metal casting, wood carving, paper making, etc. etc.)

TECHNOLOGY …

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

A.N. WhiteheadScience and the Modern World (1925)

The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.

Martin Heidigger. The Question Concerning Technlogy | Die Frage nach der Technik (1954)

Dangerous tech … circa 370 BCE

You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Fowler, 1925. 275a

Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it.

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral.

Martin Heidigger. The Question Concerning Technlogy | Die Frage nach der Technik (1954)

OUR ILLUMINATING INSTITUTIONS

TIME MOVES IN ONE DIRECTION, memory in another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

William Gibson, "Distrust That Particular Flavor" in Distrust That Particular Flavor

'Forever' institutions such as libraries, universities, museums are especially important in uncertain times because they provide stability and continuity

G. Wayne Clough, 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (2014)

The worth and importance of the Institution are not to be estimated by what it accumulates within the walls of its building, but by what it sends forth to the world.

Joseph Henry, 1st Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1852)

BUILDING THE NEW ILLUMINATING INSTITUTIONS

He uploads it to the CIC database — the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore … even the word “library” is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say , ones and zeroes.

… as the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)

“The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator.” Benjamin

Benjamin, Work of Art, Part: XV

ILLUMINATING OUR LAMS

Traditionally, this is how we've viewed our culture on a collective scale. Our libraries, archives, and museums have put their collections on a pedestal and the role of the keeper, librarian, curator, was to control access to that contained in the "magic circle."

Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library

To me, audiences are second … Our primary responsibility is to the works of art. We are responsible for the guardianship, for scholarship. Then comes the matter of bringing it to the public.

Phillipe de Montebello (2000)

The museum of the past must be set aside, reconstructed, transformed from a cemetery of bric-a-brac into a nursery of living thoughts … and in the great cities co-operate with the public library as one of the principal agencies for the enlightenment of the people.

George Brown Goode, The Museums of the Future (1889)

And as for the Library (which was linked to its neighbour by a system of passageways whose subtlety would extend almost beyond the possibility of symbolic representation), here there lay mysteries which were greater still. The same Classification was used as in the Museum - the two buildings forming mirror images each of the other … Each object in the Museum … would have been associated with a book (or several books) in the Library.... One had then … a perfectly balanced edifice, in which everything which the human mind is capable of inventing or understanding has its place.

Andrew Crumey. Pfitz (1995)

DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

The people’s museum should be much more than a house full of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas, arranged with the strictest attention to system.

George Brown Goode, The Museums of the Future (1889)

Probably the most conspicuous connotation of the word knowledge for most persons to-day is ...the rows and rows of atlases, cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books of travel, scientific treatises, on the shelves of libraries … The mind of man is taken captive by the spoils of its prior victories; the spoils, not the weapons and the acts of waging the battle against the unknown, are used to fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact, and truth.

John Dewey, Democracy and Education

In the name of 'progress', our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old … We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses to the old ... Both represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old.

Marshall McLuhan, Medium is the Massage

HOMO LUDENS

A HAPPIER age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens. In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable after all as the Eighteenth Century, with its worship of reason and its naive optimism, thought us;

hence modern fashion inclines to designate our species as Homo Faber: Man the Maker. But though faber may not be quite so dubious as sapiens it is, as a name specific of the human being, even less appropriate, seeing that many animals too are makers.

There is a third function … and just as important as reasoning and making—namely, playing. It seems to me that next to Homo Faber, and perhaps on the same level as Homo Sapiens, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in our nomenclature.

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

In our heart of hearts we know that none of our pronouncements is absolutely conclusive. At that point, where our judgment begins to waver, the feeling that the world is serious after all wavers with it. Instead of the old saw: “All is vanity”, the more positive conclusion forces itself upon us that “all is play”.

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

CODA

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

It’s because it describes the power that even a twelve-year-old can have: the power to expose human hypocrisy, to shatter secrecy, to shine a light on truth, and to feel the freedom that lies beyond.

Lois Lowery, “Preface”, The Giver

...People of Earth: The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember.

Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)

Thank you!

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David WeinbergerToo Big to Know