E-pisteme - How the World's Information is Organised.

In October I wrote a post taking credit for the invention of the word e-pisteme. I was being both facetious and ambitious. Epistemology is not a subject I know a great deal about and to be honest I'm not at all confident of my knowledge of the subject matter. Nevertheless, I think that e-pisteme is probably a useful word that bears some explanation.

In a brilliant but dense book of 1966 called Les mots et les choses (translated to The Order of Things Michel Foucault set out a disciplined and thorough argument illustrating the relationship between culture, history and perception. His thesis was, roughly, that human experience is structured according to the prevalent culture within which an individual lives. He organised history between the Renaissance and the late 19th Century into different epistemes. Each episteme consists of a set of ideas and beliefs that structure the language, art, science, politics and commerce of the age.

In his preface, he makes reference to a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that quotes a fictional chinese encyclopedia that divides animals into "
(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed ones,
(c) those that are trained,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) mermaids,
(f) fabulous ones,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) those that are included in this classification,
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones,
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush,
(l) others,
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase,
(n) those that resemble flies from a distance."

Foucault's point was that this is an altogether non-sensical approach to organisation to a modern western reader but, within Borges' fiction atleast, it represented a sensible system.

Effectively, the episteme within which we lives defines the way that we structure our knowledge, experience the world and interact with others.

When you consider that Google's mission statement is to "organise the world's information" you realise that there might well be plenty of opportunity to apply an epistemelogical approach to the changes brought about by the internet.

My ambition with this word is to try to find tangible examples of an epistemelogical shift driven by the internet. This means going beyond the banal observations about 'the democratization of the media' or that 'You' are the person of the year.

It's quite possible that someone more knowledgeable and dedicated has taken this idea further or that there are bigs flaws in these ideas. Either way, feedback would be appreciated.