In fact, even though we don’t consider them to be “technology” simply because they’re not new, books are really just an example of some of the most successful technology ever developed by humans. There’s an interesting post yesterday by Michael Wesch about how print media changed society (the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution) and the potential that participatory media could have. He also notes a potentially creepy idea brought up by Howard Rheingold – that such media records “a great deal of public behavior… in a way that makes it suitable for systematic study,” creating a digital panopticon.

Jeremy Bentham proposed such a design for prisons, so prisoners could easily be observed without their knowledge. All of which sounds an awful lot like Facebook, which takes the information from your profile (unbeknownst to you) to deliver targeted advertising messages. In China, there are supposedly “five-cent commentators” – people who are paid to post comments supporting government viewpoints.

This is not to discount the potential for change that participatory media has, but just something to keep in mind. Books, certainly had their own problems at the beginning (“So if I want a copy of this book I have to copy it by hand?”).

On a completely unrelated Jeremy Bentham note (how many times a day does one get to write that?), Lost is starting in a little over 2 weeks, and I am super stoked.

Prison photo by Friman, from Wikipedia.

After a brief Google search, I was able to find a translation of some slides for his class at China Digital Times. Here’s one of the slides:

“Suspect all” is a motto of Karl Marx’s. People tend to accept answers rather than to examine the process of searching for answers. Many simply accept other people’s conclusions. They don’t think hard about how the conclusions are reached and whether they are valid. Thus the knowledge they get is superficial, or might even be fake.

So to understand a complex issue, you need to get a large amount of information, and carefully consider it, especially when it contains opposing opinions.You also need to be ready to challenge the way of thinking indoctrinated by traditions and the education system.

Nothing too out of the ordinary here. In fact, it sounds like a very good description of the skills necessary in our information overloaded society (skills clearly lacking in many of the people in our own supposedly enlightened nation).

Something that gives me a bit of hope is the comments on Yang’s blog (that he apparently took down after being flooded with attacks) translated at The Foreign Expert. Here in the US we’re lead to believe there is no freedom of expression in China, but the discussion taking place seems to show that there is at least some room for dissenting voices.