Open Password – Wednesday, November 3, 2021
#993
Steve Patriarca – Herbert Huemer – Institute for Information Competence and Information Infrastructure – Bernd Jörs – Future of Information Science – Critical Rationalism – Karl R. Popper – Herbert Huemer – Lifelong Learning – Authorities – Theory of Knowledge – Key Skills – Critical Thinking – Necessary and Sufficient – Inter-disciplinary Skills – Umbrella Term – Open Society – Search for Truth
Phil Jones – Work Without Worker – Platform Capitalism – Amazon – Mechanical Turk – Clickworker – Global South – Dorothee Beck – Thomas Gesterkamp – Andreas Gerster – Barbara Siegler – Henning von Bargen – Heinrich Böll Foundation – Antifeminism – Masculinism – Equality Policy – Funding – Social Inclusion Forum – Discourse Piracy – Fathers’ Rights Scene – BMFSJ – Richard Seymour – Internet – The New Statesman – Civil Impoverishment – Diminished Democracy – Theda Skocpol – Facebook – Google – Björn Brembs – Academic Publishers – Destructiveness of the Publishing System – Digital Sovereignty – Open Infrastructure
I
Title:
Information literacy gives us the tools to check sources and to verify factual statements – What does Popper`s “ There are no authorities ” mea- By Steve Patriarca (Answer by Bernd Jörs in the November 15th issue of Open Password)
- Outside the box:
Recommendations of the week
Work Without Workers in the Age of Platform Capitalism
Antifeminism on its way through the institutions
The Internet was built for connection – How did it go so wrong?
The destructive journal system of academic publishers
letters
Information literacy gives us the tools
to check sources and to verify factual statements
What does Popper’s “ There are no authorities ” mean?
To: Bernd Jörs, Future of Information Science and Critical Rationalism – Against the overestimation of the representatives of “information competence”, a return to Karl R. Popper is required, in: Open Password, August 30 – Herbert Huemer , Information competence as a competence for lifelong learning, in: Open Password, #965, August 25, 2021 – Huemer referred to the article by Bernd Jörs “How “information competence” can be examined methodologically and operationally” in Open Password on August 20, 2021.
I wonder if you would consider an English perspective on the exchange between Bernd Jörs and Hermann Huemer. In my career in the independent education sector I can recall many discussions and government reports about cross-curricular issues such as logical reasoning and critical thinking, In the IB system this led to the inclusion in the Diploma of “Theory of Knowledge.” In the UK we had “key skills” and “critical thinking.” One such key skill is what we now call “information literacy.”
In his parody of information literacy, Dr Jörs seems to have confused a necessary condition for a sufficient condition. The fact that information competence may be necessary for serious academic study does not of course make it sufficient . When that is understood the joke about the megalomaniac rather loses his force. (We had better pass over the rant which follows, the snow at “earth sciences” and the German prejudice towards Austrians).
Has Jörs inadvertently made the case for inter-disciplinary skills? The distinction between the necessary and the sufficient, although a central issue in western philosophy, is not dependent on a particular academic discipline. We find it in all serious discursive writing, classical theology, mathematics, even computer programming. The fact is that information literacy can be helpful as an umbrella term for that range of skills which are necessary – although not sufficient – for serious study.
As Jörs develops his polemic, again perhaps inadvertently, he offers further illustration of the case for information literacy.
However, it is strange that these attitudes are coming from Vienna, the home of the chased and expelled Jewish scientific theorist Karl R. Popper.
Popper was not reading ot a Jew (except perhaps to a Nazi). His grandparents were secular Jews, but his parents converted to Lutheranism before Popper was born and he was a baptized Lutheran. Nor was he expelled from Austria. Indeed, he declined a post in Cambridge designed for escaping Austrian academics as he felt there were those who needed it more. He instead accepted a post in New Zealand and he and his wife resigned their teaching posts and moved in 1937, a year before the Anschluss. (Karl Popper; Unended Quest. Routledge London 1992 p. 111)
Nor is it true that Popper had to “re-emigrate” to England a second time, rather that when his wife was terminally ill they moved to Austria for her to be near her family. He returned to his home in England after her death.
My point here is not a pedantic one, but that information literacy gives us the tools to check sources and to verify factual statements. Despite his skepticism Popper would not share Jörs’ relativism. As Popper himself wrote “One of the main arguments of The Open Society is directed against moral relativism. “The fact that moral principles may clash does not invalidate them.” (ibid P, 116) The young child being taught concepts like truth and lies; fact and fiction is not being indoctrinated with a particular moral view. He or she may well acquire different moral perspectives from different members of his own family. But crucially in developing the concepts he learns to make judgments of his own. The child cannot make judgments without a conceptual framework in which those judgments make sense.
For Jörs, Popper is a “Viennese philosopher”. Popper would not have liked the term. As he was to discover “that English standards of writing were completely different, and far higher than German standards.” (Ibid P 114). Popper clearly thought he could make himself better understood in English.
Jörs quotes very briefly from “In Search of a Better World”, Munich 1989, pp. 227-229;
- Our objective conjectural knowledge continues to exceed what a human can master. There are therefore no authorities.
In his rejection of Scientism and his insistence that “the search for truth” is not a search for certainty, Popper is not I think saying that there are no authoritative tests of the way that search might happen – indeed the falsification principle is one such test .
It may well be that the skills and the knowledge appropriate to areas we now call “information literacy” belong to other disciplines but they come together as being necessary in “the search for truth.”
Steve Patricia
Vice-President, Institute for Information Competence and Information Infrastructure
https://iiciis.org/home/iiciis/team/steve-patriarca/
Read Bernd Jörs’ answer in the November 15th issue of Open Password.
Outside the box:
Recommendations of the week
Work Without Workers
in the Age of Platform Capitalism
Book: Phil Jones, Work Without the Worker: Labor in the Age of Platform Capitalism, Verso, October 2021, $18.35. An accessible analysis of the new forms of work whose seismic changes will increasingly determine the future of capitalism
Automation and the decline in industrial employment have led to rising fears of a workless future. But what happens when your work itself is the thing that will make your job obsolete?
In the past few years, online crowdworking platforms – like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Clickworker – have become an increasingly important source of work, particularly for those in the Global South. Here, small tasks are assigned to people online, and are often used to train algorithms to spot patterns, patterns through machine learning those same algorithms will then be able to spot more effectively than humans. Used for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the digital economy. But what happens to work when it makes itself obsolete. In this stimulating work that blends political economy, studies of contemporary work, and speculations on the future of capitalism, Phil Jones looks at what this often murky and hidden form of labor looks like, and what it says about the state of global capitalism.
Antifeminism on its way
through the institutions
E-Paper: Dorothee Beck, Thomas Gesterkamp, Andreas Gerster, Barbara Siegler, Henning von Bargen, Antifeminism on the way through the institutions, Heinrich Böll Foundation, October 2021, https://www.boell-bw.de/sites /default/files/importedFiles/2021/10/06/E-Paper%2520%25C2%25ABAntifeminismus%25C2%25BB%2520Endf.pdf
Conclusion: The authors examined the question of where and, above all, how anti-feminist and masculist groups are active today and what strategies and arguments they use to try to gain influence on equality policy and acquire state funding. Using the example of the Forum Social Inclusion association and its network, the strategic changes that have taken place in this scene in recent years were examined.
We assume that attacks against women’s, gender and equality policies will take place in a new context in the early 2020s. We see this thesis confirmed in the discourse piracy described and the reinterpretation of terms. In a kind of mimicry, these groups give themselves names that have positive connotations and present themselves as serious equality policy organizations. In this way, they disguise their actual concerns and goals, which often contradict equality policy. If you look closely, you get the impression that the same few but very active men have been appearing again and again for ten years.
Many lobbyists in the fathers’ rights scene have a strictly binary and hierarchical understanding of gender. For them, family only consists of father, mother and child(ren) who are biologically related to each other. They share this ideology with anti-feminist, right-wing extremist and right-wing populist positions. They operate with their argumentation patterns and thus construct a discourse bridge; extreme right-wing positions are popularized and strengthened. Although the examples listed here do not prove a closed right-wing sentiment, they do show right-wing mosaic pieces and arguments that can be connected to right-wing positions.
It is not always easy for actors in the gender policy field, in administration and politics, to assess whether the respective actors or applicants are serious groups that really pursue equality policy objectives. In any case, the prerequisite for a lively democratic process is that the actors and lobby groups involved act transparently and in a dialogical manner and do not pursue a hidden agenda – especially when they demand state money.
The criteria we present that an organization should fulfill help to assess
whether it can be considered a serious gender equality actor. Important dimensions are the organizational structure, the positions on equality policy, the breadth of gender policy issues and representation as well as the strategies and concrete behavior of these organizations.
In view of the examples and analyzes collected as well as the proposed criteria for equality policy actors and the funding guidelines of the BMFSFJ, the authors have considerable doubts as to whether projects of the father’s rights initiative Forum Social Inclusion can and should be funded according to equality policy principles.
The Internet was built for connection –
How did it go so wrong?
Richard Seymour, The internet was built for connection – how did it go so wrong?, in: The New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/internet/2021/10/the-internet-was-built-for- connection-how-did-it-go-so-wrong . The World Wide Web celebrates its 30th birthday this year. Its users are less empowered than ever.
The power of the social industry is political, not just economic. Although social media platforms operate for profit, they also create human communities. They don’t organize us as a market or a democracy: rather, they encourage us to accumulate likes, shares and retweets, to build followings and behave like celebrities. This feverish, competitive world is lucrative, but it also changes who we are and how we socialize – this is real political power. Our dependence on these platforms, and the social life they promote, perpetuates our civic impoverishment. It leaves us disorganized, dependent on professionals and defenseless against power: what sociologist Theda Skocpol calls “diminished democracy”.
Yet in the 20th century, as Skocpol writes, hundreds and thousands of civic organizations were run on a democratic, federal basis. We can do the same with online platforms. Business empires such as Facebook and Google are unlikely to be taken into public ownership. But it would be possible to experiment with digital cooperatives, eroding the grip of these behemoths and dispelling the myth that our internet is inevitable.
The destructive journal system
of academic publishers
Björn Brembs, The Trinity of Failure, in: https://www.jmwiarda.de/2021/10/06/die-dreifaltigkeit-des-Failings/ . The major academic publishers remain firmly in the saddle. It can’t be the quality of their work: more and more calls are calling for the broken and destructive magazine system to be replaced with contemporary solutions.
The current debate about digital sovereignty in academia makes no sense without a decisive redirection of resources away from journals towards an open infrastructure and its upgrading as the basis for reputation building. After 30 years of standing still, this would finally put an end to the trinity of failures in our publication system
OpenPassword
Forum and news
for the information industry
in German-speaking countries
New editions of Open Password appear three times a week.
If you would like to subscribe to the email service free of charge, please register at www.password-online.de.
The current edition of Open Password can be accessed immediately after it appears on the web. www.password-online.de/archiv. This also applies to all previously published editions.
International Cooperation Partner:
Outsell (London)
Business Industry Information Association/BIIA (Hong Kong)
Open Password Archive – Publications
OPEN PASSWORD ARCHIVE
DATA JOURNALISM
Handelsblatt’s Digital Reach