Blog posting #6, in which Gil plays a minor role and Joe Patron is introduced, or tech - knowledge - me, or 1/2 Derrida and 1/2 Plato

so i'm supposed to blog about technology again, so i'm going to address this topic indirectly by discussing the assumptions of the western (platonic) metaphysical tradition. i'm inspired to do so because just the other day a friend of mine said, "Joel, I'm not a platonist." He was happy to announce this fact, but I'm not entirely sure what he meant. Ok, so i do know, but Gil thinks that for this blog post to work in an aesthetic literary, not the actual manual labor sense of the word, I should replicate the steps that Joe Patron might encounter were here to overhear that juicy bit of dialog my friend laid on me. (Cast of character up until this point: Joel, Gil, Vic, my friend, Joe Patron)

Joe patron wants to know what a "platonist" is. He goes to google, enters his search term "platonist" and hits I'm feeling lucky. Turns out Joe Patron is lucky indeed as the first line of text on the webpage he is sent to contains "A 'Platonist' is a follower of the Greek philosopher Plato (428-348 B.C.). Joe Patron is satisfied with this answer because he doesn't really know me or my friend, and he doesn't care about Philosophy. What he really cares about is whether the episode of Coach that has been in his head all morning is available in some form on the internet. It's not. He wants so badly to hear the goofy little song that is played on this episode: "You're a winner. A free dinner! You're a winner at Mr. Putts!"

Stop the narrative; make the indirect connection to the established theme. I wonder why Joe Patron's appetite for a goofy little song that he hasn't heard in at least ten years has led him to the internet. I wonder why a sitcom about tender-hearted ex-jocks occupies a higher place on his list of concerns than Plato. I'll let Gil, an ardent Platonist, take over now. The continental philosophers are all wrong! Thanks, Gil, but we're looking for something a little more constructive:

In what remains, Derrida makes some important general points about imitation: "a perfect imitation is never an imitation," he states, adding that imitation "is only good insofar as it is not good" (139). To process this one, consider the fact that a truly perfect imitation of me would be, and could only be, me. So, for an imitator to be an imitator, she would have to not be me. --- Tim Spurgin

so while the literary value of an episode of Coach is debatable, the ontological value--if we posit that Derrida is correct--is on the same level as reading about Plato. thus, the episode of Coach with the goofy song that Joe Patron was secretly hoping to find on Youtube, if it is a perfect imitation of the original, is the Real deal. Sidenote: In some situations online information and print information be ontologically equal even according to Plato. For the purposes of my argument here, I'm interested in the exceptions to these situations.

Stop the indirect connection-making; start getting explicit. A paradox arises. Well, will arise. Information retrieval behavior seems to assume what Derrida argued for philosophically. Namely that a copy is good enough. We act as if information available online is no worse than that in a book, and though other qualitative standards of the information retrieved are up for debate, the desire to get closer to the source is most often trumped by the desire for convenient access to information. The advent of widespread electronic information was not met, at least to my knowledge, with deep-seated concerns that we, as librarians and as information consumers, were somehow walking further away from the Truth. Off the cuff, it would seem that this is because we were already accustomed to the copy, and indeed the copy itself is what made our profession in the first place--the printing press. To us electronic information is just another type of copy. So, information-gathering behavior and the printing press seem to confirm that we are by virtue of our actions and behavior not platonists in this regard.

But even when we are acting like the non-Platonic disciples of Derrida, we aren't acting like the non-Platonic disciples of Derrida--this is the paradox that has arisen. Let's magnify it. Technology makes the abundance of copies possible--the printing press. Technology is the virtual embodiment (how's that for an oxymoron) of the Western Metaphysical Tradition according to the Continental philosophers that Gil says are all wrong.

According to Heidegger, today's metaphysics, in the form of technology and calculative thinking related to it, becomes so pervasive that there is no realm of life that is not subjected to its dominance. It imposes on man its technological - scientific - industrial character and makes it the sole criterion of his sojourn on the earth...In modern technology there speaks the today's claim of being. It masters and dominates beings in various ways. ---W. J. Korab-Karpowicz

I guess one conclusion I would like to draw from this blog posting is that there is a certain irony at play. In the LIS world, the use of technology leads us to some ontological Continental assumptions even as use of technology exhibits opposing assumptions. Such a paradox, I might add, is very continental. Maybe next time, I(Joel)'ll record this interaction between platonic man (Gil) and technology (Vic) in fiction using technology.