Ezrahi and Knowledge

How are knowledge claims voiced in society?  Who voices them?  How is knowledge gained and what qualities does it have in its transmission from one person to another?  What is the role of power and authority in creating and disseminating these knowledge claims?  Ezrahi’s piece approaches these questions from a largely historical/political angle, charting the development of claims to understand reality through four stages:  a “wisdom” paradigm; a “knowledge” paradigm; an “informational paradigm”; and what he refers to as an “outformational” paradigm.  Ezrahi presents these stages as a progressive “alienation of the means of knowing from personality,” in which the understanding of reality is essentially democratized and de-personalized (in a singular sense) in each successive stage.  The stage he identifies as the one we are currently inhabiting, outformation, represents something like a consensus reality (or perhaps a competing set of consensus realities) that immerse an observer in a constructed world that orients them toward a set of shared fictions through which knowledge is created and political decisions are formed.

 I have to say I enjoyed this chapter.  Overall, Ezrahi’s conceptualization of knowledge and authority in each successive stage is intuitively understandable and accurate, in the sense that it can serve as a framework through which many of his assertions can be further explored.  His coining of “outformation” is witty and encapsulates his characterization of the current knowledge-period pretty well.  I was a little disappointed as I felt that he somewhat abandons his pursuit of the implications that outformation will have on the way we determine “correct” policy and perform politics, but it is also understandable due to his piece being more descriptive in nature.

With that said, his article lacked an exploration of two important points:  the role of new media in this process of outformation, and a connection between the progression of his four stages and markets.  The first is forgivable, due to the book being published in 2003 when the full impact of the Internet and other newer technologies was yet to be felt.  Although democratizing, the Internet facilitates a balkanization of information and, when combined with infotainment, creates a fertile ground for different outformations to spring up.

The second, which he hints at in his discussion of high-cost and low-cost realities, exhibits market logic in that knowledge acquisition costs for the majority of the citizenry drop in each successive stage.  In the wisdom stage, there is essentially no other way to come by knowledge than through many years of experiencing the world.  Knowledge is also very personal, and knowledge for one may not be easily translatable to another.  Acquisition costs are high in that the barrier to translating knowledge from one to another and the time taken to gain that knowledge is formidable.  In the “knowledge” stage, the barriers to translating knowledge from one person to another are overcome as a shared scientific language is developed, but the time required to gain that knowledge is still sizeable.  In the “information” stage, the time factor is heavily reduced and knowledge becomes much more affordable for the vast majority of people, but the framework within which to understand and place this knowledge is still lacking.  In the final “outformation” stage, this last hurdle is overcome as the framework required to lend meaning to knowledge is provided by infotainment and popular culture.  In each successive stage, the cost of transmitting knowledge, gaining knowledge, and giving meaning to that knowledge is successively reduced as to become more easily affordable to the vast majority of people.

To use an analogy, it’s a bit like a fast food company.  Creating the food, shipping the food, and contextualizing the food by branding is provided to the customer at a lower cost than if the customer were to create the food, ship the food, and create a brand for the food themselves.  In much the same way as fast food, though, a steady diet of this type of knowledge leaves a person sickly unless it is supplemented by something more wholesome.

Although the idea needs some work, in a sense what Ezrahi was describing in the article could be summed up as the McDonaldization of knowledge, leading to the creation of “McKnowledge” if you will.  His progression of stages represents the application of market logic to knowledge sources, in that cost barriers are lowered in each successive stage which leads to the dissemination of a demanded but, some would say, an ultimately deleterious product.  The effect that it can have on the body politic, with which I believe Ezrahi would agree, reflects the effect that fast food can have on the health of the human body.