"The Future of Knowledge, and the Fate of Wisdom, In the Age
of Information"
Lance Strate, Fordham University
Sydney University, NSW Australia June 2024
Abstract:
John Henry Newman defined the university as “a place of teaching
universal knowledge,” which suggests that it is also an environment
for the teaching and creation of knowledge, and therefore a medium
for the teaching and creation of knowledge.
Based on the field of media ecology, defined by Neil Postman as “the
study of media as environments,” and following Marshall McLuhan’s
famous maxim that, “the medium is the message,” we can understand
knowledge to be the product of a particular type of medium or
environment.
Taking inspiration from the poetic questions posed by T.S. Eliot,
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the
knowledge we have lost in information?”, this lecture takes issue
with the view expressed among internet boosters that information is
the basis of knowledge, and knowledge is the basis of wisdom.
Instead, an alternative understanding is that information as a
contemporary phenomenon is a product of the electronic media
environment, knowledge is a product of the chirographic and
typographic media environments, and wisdom is a product of the oral
media environment.
This is a hybrid event: zoom link will
be provided upon registration.
Lance Strate is Professor of Communication and
Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City, and President
of the Institute of General Semantics. He is a founder of the Media
Ecology Association, and served as the MEA’s president for over a
decade. He is also a past president of the New York State
Communication Association, and the New York Society for General
Semantics, and the current co-chair of the Global Listening Centre’s
Academic Board.
He held the 2015 Harron Family Chair in Communication at Villanova
University, and received an honorary appointment as Chair Professor
in the School of Journalism and Communication at Henan University in
Kaifeng, China, in 2016. He is the author of ten books, including On
the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and
Media Ecology; Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New
World Revisited; Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the
Human Condition; Concerning Communication: Epic Quests and Lyric
Excursions in the Human Life World; and three poetry collections.
Dr. Strate is the co-editor of seven anthologies, including two
editions of Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an
Electronic Environment; The Legacy of McLuhan; and Taking Up
McLuhan's Cause: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality; and he
has served as editor of the Speech Communication Annual; General
Semantics Bulletin; and Explorations in Media Ecology, a journal he
founded and edited for 9 years.
He is the recipient of the Media Ecology Association's Marshall
McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book and their Walter J. Ong Award for
Career Achievement in Scholarship; the Eastern Communication
Association's Distinguished Research Fellow Award; the New York
State Communication Association's Neil Postman Mentor Award and
their John F. Wilson Fellow Award for exceptional scholarship,
leadership, and dedication to the field of communication; the Global
Listening Centre’s Outstanding Research Award; and the J. Talbot
Winchell Award for Service from the Institute of General Semantics.
Translations of his writing have appeared in French, Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Hebrew, Mandarin, and Quenya.
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