The instability of truth in our time
Where did it come from?
Weaving a Genealogy of "Muddled Knowledge," a Mixture of Dependence and Distrust

Google co-founder Sergey Brin once likened Google's perfect search engine to "the mind of God."
This metaphor for Google is the face of our current knowledge, omnipotent yet confusing, floating between news, maps, weather, and porn search results.
We live in an age where we have more information and images in more diverse forms than ever before.
But the question is how it has been reviewed, classified and interpreted.
After the age of enlightenment and modern science, the hope that knowledge would bring progress has faded, and the phenomenon of distrust in the knowledge system is also a major topic of discussion in modern society.
Meanwhile, we also need a new framework that can connect facts and knowledge.
This book traces the genealogy of knowledge from the origins of the information age in the late 19th century to Google's dominance in the 2000s.
It focuses on how facts and truth, and claims about them, become more complex as they reach more people, and continues to engage with the messy knowledge we now find ourselves surrounded by: text and images, facts and information, media and the internet.

This book is about information politics as a communication problem.
...
Examining the history of how different cultures have attempted to manage and systematically organize the flow of facts and images can tell us a lot about what they considered "truth," as well as their hopes and anxieties at any given time.
From this perspective, the key to understanding contemporary knowledge is not the proliferation of scientific publications, the data 'cloud', or the competition for legitimate knowledge, but a new attitude toward these things.

--- From "Introduction"

Godard acknowledged later in his life that no image can fully 'capture' the essence, saying, "It is too much to put the whole world in one image."
As with images, as with facts, there is always an outside world that we cannot capture.
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Facts and photographs create knowledge and serve as metaphors for prejudice, but they also reveal ambiguity and confusion, and bear witness to many ongoing world events.
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But if we pay attention, facts and photographs can also teach us how to speak in different times and places.

--- From "Chapter 1: Warning Horatio"

Disseminating information to ever-increasing numbers of people was considered crucial to the development of civilization and democracy.
The idea that human liberation is linked to the growth of knowledge gained significant momentum in the mid-19th century.
...
This popularization of the Enlightenment raised questions about the authority of truth and who could participate in its discovery.
The question of whether science is only for the privileged gentry in terms of class and gender has now become more complex.
Women, children, artisans, slaves, and formerly enslaved people all experienced knowledge and knowledge production.
--- From "Chapter 2: The Spread of Victorian Culture and Learning"

The summary also offered political advantages.
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The curators did their best to appeal to a public weary of propaganda by avoiding the promotional tactics that had already taken over many other institutions.
“Museum staff have consistently earned people’s trust by consistently asking, ‘Is this true?’ rather than ‘Will this work?’” Museum visitors have enjoyed the democratic freedom to use their own senses.
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The best condensed culture was an oasis between the jarring noise of advertising and the monotonous, repetitive sound of political propaganda.

--- From "Chapter 3: The Culture of Appropriate Summary, 1920-1945"

Hollywood has never expressed its suffering as much as photojournalism.
Hollywood was more inclined towards fantasy than reality.
Still, the image of Hollywood was that mythical and that iconic.
The story was an allegorical tale of ordinary people fighting corruption, overcoming class and gender gaps, facing the unknown, and learning to stand up for themselves.
The practice of ending films with a generally uplifting ending has limited diversity in Hollywood, but it has helped flesh out such narratives.
The film defined the values ​​of the entire nation.
Scholars, writers, and journalists of the time commonly argued that films had the “power to create national myths and dreams.”

--- From "Chapter 4: The Age of World Vision, 1925-1945"

The question remains whether the images can no longer accommodate the facts, or whether the facts themselves are simply too numerous to be tolerated.
Deconstructing the image is...
It is a cultural expression that shows that a much larger set of changes are taking place within the infrastructure of communal living.
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The point is that since the 1970s, no one has figured out how to build a new framework to hold the nation or the planet together.

--- From "Chapter 5: Confused Images, 1975-2000"

The digital age is an age of messy knowledge.
One of the most significant trends in recent decades has been the blurring of the lines separating public knowledge from expert knowledge.
It's not that the boundaries have been erased, it's that the boundaries are constantly being challenged.
Although expert knowledge and public sentiment are increasingly clashing, this does not mean that promiscuous knowledge is simply characterized by public resistance to formal knowledge or common sense.
Promiscuous knowledge is an ongoing negotiation between elite knowledge producers and those outside the formal system or not formally recognized.
It is a reliance on expertise, but also a doubt about expertise.

--- From "Chapter 6: Promiscuous Knowledge, 1975-2000"