Science and knowledge on the Internet

The communication methods of the sciences started to change even before the appearance of the Internet (Odlyzko 2000b). The changes partly took place in the contents of scientific activities, and partly in the social and economic processes connected to scientific publications. It seems that in the long run, the significance of individual scientific achievements decreases and (even in mathematics and philosophy) the number of papers written by several authors increases. At the same time, the number of conferences which make personal encounters and thinking together possible, personal contacts, and fellowships significantly increase. On the other hand, we can also observe that even big Western universities (not to mention research facilities in Hungary) cannot afford the increasing number and price of scientific journals. What is more, most of the journals do not perform their task very well, and are often published with a significant delay or irregularly. The protests and spontaneously organized movements against the profit oriented behavior of scientific publishers (real or otherwise) have existed for decades. With the appearance of the Internet, the solution of the “crisis of journals” immediately seemed to be obvious: we have to relocate sci-entific publication on the Internet. The technological conditions of the change and the possibility of accessing publications on the Internet worldwide have been basically given for decades. However, the social conditions of the change have only permitted a little progress so far.

People, groups and institutions following various strategies are working on developing an appropriate solution. It seems to be a common need to ensure that each author is able to publish his papers and continuously make them available on his own website and/or on a website created to collect such papers, even without the permission of the journal that published the paper in the traditional form. For example, the movementPublic Library of Science, the initiatives created by Stevan Harnad (Hernád István) (Skywriting, Open Archives Initiative, etc., Harnad 1998a;

1998b; 1999) and many others, have similar aims. Harnad’s objective is that only those papers should be published on the web whichsurvive professional criticismorganized with the help of experts and which use some elements of the traditional system of references. With the help of this selection method, he would like to avoid presenting papers together on the web which lack any scientific value or are mistaken, and papers which are valuable (Harnad 2002). Obviously, such selection can only have a local effect, since nobody can prevent the authors of the papers refused by the peer reviewed websites to publish their work on their own website. According to this approach, we can develop sites in the whole of the Internet which are worth visiting for those who are interested in scientific truth. On other sites, they provide an opportunity to publish without anycontent based selection(see for example the website of the Los Alamos Physics Archive, which accepts papers in physics: http://xxx.lanl.gov). There were many debates about publishing on the Internet and there are still many today in journals and websites likeNature (Harnad 1998b; Odlyzko 2001),Science(Bachrach et al. 1997),American Scientist(Harnad 1998a) and several others and on their mutations on the Internet. Meanwhile, as a consequence of all this the habits of publishing science are slowly transformed (Thagard 1997). The reason for publishing online is not only economical and fin-ancial, but chiefly the fact that many more people read and cite papers available on the Internet (such papers are cited 3 to 5 times more often than papers published on paper, (Lawrence 2001)). Slowly, papers which are not published on the Internet will remain unnoticed. Recognizing this, even traditional publishers – nowadays almost compulsorily – create online, internet versions of their journals published on paper. Meanwhile, they use various business strategies from free downloadable volumes to download permitted only for subscribers and to versions which only publish contents and abstracts. The publication of scientific books is quite similar, but with changes of less intensity.

Communication in the late modern age

We can collect further arguments for publishing on the Internet based on the ideological ground of the principles regarding the nature of intellectual property, its inalienable nature and the right to share it freely. Such ambitions are anyway always present in Internet use, for example in the creation and spreading of freely distributable computer software (Kelty 2001). Activists with a background in information technology invent various tricks in order to acquire downloadable programs, songs, or films freely. These causes are not (or not only) motivated by financial gain but rather, they represent the struggle between the personal knowledge of the “the poor,” and the immensely rich, impersonal multinational capital. Scientists who publish their scientific results freely are in a similar situation:

through their activities, they are trying to damage the property rights that scientific publishers have regarding sci-entific results and they are trying to preserve their free control over their own intellectual product for themselves (and for the whole scientific community).

At the same time, publishing on the Internet is presented in a quite peculiar light by its online environment because most of the ideas presented on the Internet are typicallynotsituation independentknowledgebut rather, ideastied to situations. In this way, we might easily have the impression that scientific knowledge published on the Internet is practically lost in the sea of “unscientific”, practical, or even completely useless ideas. Two strategies are usually attempted in this situation. On the one hand, we can try to establish sites which contain certain scientific ideas in a concentrated way, as for example Harnad suggests, or as the above mentioned Los Alamos Physics Archive or countless online journals do. On the other hand, we can develop sufficiently sensitive search techniques, with the use of which scientific contents can be sorted out effectively. Regardless of their dynamic development, search engines are presently still working with a low efficiency, what is more, judging the scientific quality of a text is not only a semantic task but requires philosophy of science as well. We are hardly mistaken in expecting a signi-ficant development in this area in the near future. Certain internet pages such asYahoo!are trying to combine the two strategies somehow, and they are striving to maintain continuously renewed thematic collections and to offer sensitive search methods at the same time.

Communication in the late modern age

Chapter 4. The transformation of culture in late modernity

It was easy to identify the technological and communicative aspects of the Internet; their significance is so obvious that it was impossible to forbear from analyzing them. The difficulty only consisted in choosing useful conceptual tools and methods of analysis of the philosophy of technology, communication theory and the philosophy of communication. However, the case is somewhat different with the “cultural aspects” of the Internet. It is more or less clear that Internet use has certain cultural aspects but it is often doubted that these aspects have any significance for the state and evolution of culture. Such point of view usually points out the fact that the Internet does not sub-stitute any traditional cultural sphere, medium or form of activity; at most it complements their versions and makes them more colorful or even more complicated. The situation is made more difficult by the multiple meanings of the concept of culture. Earlier we discussed a similar difficulty in connection with the concepts of information and communication, but facing the task of interpreting culture, the difficulty obviously gets more serious: many discip-lines involved in understanding culture (cultural anthropology, literary theory, semiotics, critical research of culture, communication theory, sociology, philosophy, etc.) work on hundreds of definitions of the concept (Márkus 1992;

Wessely 1998; Niedermüller 1999; Geertz 2001; Lévy 2001; Alan Liu’s Voice of the Shuttle; popcultures.com).

Even a simple review of such an abundant collection (not to mention its analysis) would be impossible here merely for a practical reason and thus we do not attempt to do so. Nevertheless, since in what follows we would like to argue that the cultural aspects of the Internet are crucially important both for understanding late modern culture and the nature of the Internet, we are forced to realize another – intellectual – difficulty, namely: to develop and apply a useful sketch of a concept of culture. Meanwhile, we will of course necessarily utilize numerous available theories and understandings of culture, but we will ultimately set aside a systematic presentation of the connections between our approach and the theories used.

The understanding of culture used here is strongly connected to the problems of technology and communication discussed earlier. We described communication as a community creating activity in earlier chapters. We derived the most important characteristics of the communities created through communication from communication situ-ations. However, we did not say much about what kind ofaimscommunities (of different levels) might have, what kind of particular ambitions andideologiescommunities might express and represent, what features are character-istic of communities as regards theirformandcontent, and whether features of form and content can be separated at all, and so on. We will discuss all these questions as problems of identifying culture. It is the common interpret-ations of culture of a similar basis which offer an opportunity for this solution the most obviously. The principles which make a common interpretation possible usually follow asemioticapproach and they regard culture as a

“system of signs organized in a particular way” (Lotman 1973, 274) and as a certain interpretation of this (Andor 1980; Eco 1998; 1999; Kellner 1995). At the same time, we also find the more traditional point of view in which the appropriately shapedmedia(e.g. texts) are regarded as the common basis of culture and culture is identified as the shaped medium or the contents expressed by it.

In what follows, taking chiefly into account the results and problems of the mentioned semiotic and media theory trains of thought, we will describe the relationship between communication and culture through applying a compu-tational simile as a relationship between the social hardware and software. More precisely, we will try to find ar-guments showing that thecommunitiesthat can be developed through communication can be characterized as the hardware of societyandculturecan be characterized as thesoftware of society. By this simile, we would like to stress that in our view, communication and culture, the existence and way of functioning of communities and the components of form and content of social systems can be differentiated clearly and they come to existence mostly through processes independent of each other; at the same time, their simultaneous presence in the social system and their harmonious functioning are indispensable for the whole system of society.Thus, culture can be understood as a program which operates communities. If needed, we can successfully identify the programming languages, programming rules, the commands that we can store and execute, the goals to be reached, and so on. To put it in a more traditional way, culture is a system of interests and values followed or chosen by the given community and which is preserved in the communities and made effective in the social system, that is, it is the content of the social system. Perhaps it is not surprising that in what follows we will try to avoid traditionally used phrases since while using them, we would necessarily be forced to use additions and dissociations continuously, as a result of which putting our ideas in a clear form which can be followed easily would be completely compromised.

The possibility of various versions of culture obviously follows from the characterization of the nature of culture.

In order to clarify the processes that led to the development of the Internet, we have to examine the characteristics of modern culture, the symptoms of its crisis as well as the possibilities and perspectives of overcoming the crisis.

Modern cultureobviously realizes the “program” of modernity. However, the unfolding of the program of modernity led to unbearable social consequences and as a result, there was a need for a radical reexamination of the program.

The postmodern point of view reflects on the modern problems of various kinds and depth of the late modern age.

The “program” of thepostmodern cultureof the late modern age clearly dissociates itself from the modern program.

The most obvious sign of the dissociation is the “revaluation” of the interests and values connected to power, the restructuring of building the world individually and in community and exerting power and a radical break with certain situations of power.

The culture of communicative communities is characterized by the coexistence of virtuality and plurality in a pure form which is expressed by information technologies. Thus,cyber culture, the culture of the communities based on the usage of advanced information technologies, is necessarily postmodern by nature. The content of the com-munities created through the Internet, the “program” which operates these, the multitude of the stored, displayed and utilized interests and values obviously belong to the sphere of cyber culture as key components of it. That is, we can characterize the Internet as the empire of cyber culture, as a new human world in which the human com-munities maintained through the support of information technology are able to understand and virtually realize human ambitions, aims, values and interests of a great variety. As a further important difference between cyber culture and traditional culture, we can identify theabstract and impersonalcharacter of the creation and usage of traditional culture and theconcrete and personalcharacter of creating and using cyber culture. In this way, the Internet is the virtual empire of concrete and personal freedom.

4.1 The nature of culture

In order to understand the nature of culture, we above all have to examine the connection between culture and nature. Obviously, such discussion also necessarily touches upon the principles ofhuman nature, that is, we have to make a stand in this question as well. In our view, in order to characterize human nature, we equally have to take into account the process of becoming human, and the practice of man in which he continuously creates himself.

It is notable that human nature seems to bechangeablein both respects, it seems to be an entity the characteristics of which are equally shaped by naturally given and man made factors. Nevertheless, human nature isopen: it is determined together with its possibilities. These possibilities, being realized and realizable, are the basis of human freedom.

Out of the crucially important factors of becoming human, we have already discussed some important questions of tool use, tool making, communication and language use in sections2.1.1., 3.1.1.and3.1.2and we also tried to show what role they have in shaping human nature. We pointed out that thanks to these “technologies” built on natural endowments, man became able to operate a “strategy of control over situations”; he could make it happen that most of the time, instead of the naturally given consequences, certain situations lead to the realization of goals set by man. Thus for example we are able to sustain particular human communities through operating our control over communication situations. The predictability of the possibility of the strategy of control over situations exempts man – at least temporarily – from being necessarily at mercy of natural conditions; that is, he himself can become a participant in shaping his own life. Without any doubt, this is the essential characteristic of human nature.

However, note that so far we have concentrated on the usable technologies of power and we have paid little attention to the examination of the results of the control over situations, that is, to studying the quality of the aims set in the situation and thus to studying the quality of human life. At the same time, it seems to be unquestionable that besides the ambitions to control life circumstances, human nature is also expressed by characteristic human features as well. In other words, through his own activities, man does not only strive for survival but for survival in a certain particular way. The difference between the two possibilities is culture itself. In this sense culture is the real human content, the sum of those characteristics which differentiate human life from the naturally given form of existence.

Thus, in what follows we will first of all try to identify the circumstances of the development of culture (as another factor to take into account in the process of becoming human) then we will characterize the relationships between human nature, communities, society and culture.

The transformation of culture in late modernity

4.1.1 Culture and human nature

Though it is risky, perhaps it is not hopeless if we start in the middle, and, sailing on the waters of philosophy, we set out towards our current destination, that is, towards a presentation of the relationships between culture, nature and human nature.

The infinite multitude of natural entities exist is a way determined by natural circumstances, the system of conditions of their existence is given once and for all. This naturally given system of circumstances – we often call it simply nature – presents itself as a single, all encompassing, self-preserving, self-moving, unreflective definiteness for all relatively autonomous natural entity. Nature identified in this way is not yet the “world” since we believe that en-tities having mere natural existence are “without a world” or perhaps, using Heidegger’s term, they are “poor in world”. Worlds are created by people, namely two of them: a natural world for the entities existing in a merely naturally given way and an “artificial” world for themselves. World creating human activity is based on reflection.

Through reflection, man continuously connects his various impressions, incentives and the results of his contem-plation and activity. The reflected representations of man’s environment recorded in a material and mental form come together into a world, an all encompassing system. The systems of worldview shaped from the whole of human experience become indispensable accessories of human life, they help us orientate ourselves in our present and future on the basis of the widest possible set of experiences and they show us the meaning of any existence or entity, human issue, ambition, act or idea.

The most important common value of all worldviews is their completeness since only those systems which are shaped from the whole of human experience are able to give a meaning to any kinds of human issues. Besides completeness, our systems of worldview also express countless further specific and characteristic values which prove to be useful. A certain accepted system of values – that is, a certain ideology – which carries the fullness of human experience as a “skeleton” makes up the basis of our systems of worldview. Each system of worldview takes into account all knowledge in some way (perhaps it is useful to note that most of them exist in a religious or

The most important common value of all worldviews is their completeness since only those systems which are shaped from the whole of human experience are able to give a meaning to any kinds of human issues. Besides completeness, our systems of worldview also express countless further specific and characteristic values which prove to be useful. A certain accepted system of values – that is, a certain ideology – which carries the fullness of human experience as a “skeleton” makes up the basis of our systems of worldview. Each system of worldview takes into account all knowledge in some way (perhaps it is useful to note that most of them exist in a religious or