§ one: humans cannot think alone.

Human beings are social animals; it is an essential part of what it is to be human. Moreover, this sociability is crucial to thought. Without society, humans lack the means to preserve knowledge beyond the span of a single life. Societies provide us with a variety of ways to preserve our knowledge. Pre-literate cultures offer oral tradition. What we know is passed down from generation to generation in face-to-face exchange. Here, knowledge has no life of its own; it is all contained within human beings and passed along interpersonal lines. Knowledge here is relational.

Literate (print) cultures objectify knowledge. Literacy and the printing press offer us the ability to give knowledge an existence independent of any individual¹s possession of it. When we record our ideas in a book, the book and the ideas endure as long as the book exists, regardless of whether or not the ideas are actually held by anyone. If the record of ideas blinks out of existence, so do the ideas. The book constitutes technological mediation, and when we read it, we engage the book and the ideas rather than another person (see Ong, Olson, Plato for elaboration). Knowledge here is objective.

Our culture, however, is neither a print culture nor an oral culture. We live in what might be called a network culture. We record our knowledge in a variety of ways: books, television shows, movies, magazines, Web pages, video games, etc. Some of these ways are more permanent, some more ephemeral. At the same time, we have become increasingly saturated and embedded in this network, as Ken Gergen documents in The Saturated Self. Because the network brings to light the connections and relationships that sustain the production and preservation of knowledge, engaging with that knowledge becomes an activity that is at once objective and relational.