The knowlege of feeling and looking

It is obvious that different artefacts require different kinds of knowledge; you cannot use a calculator based on experiences from using a radio. Hence, the introduction of new artefacts into a setting often changes what is hold to be relevant knowledge in that particular setting. However, this is not obvious in every context; let us use the paper producing industry as an example. In earlier times, to check the quality of the cellulose in such a factory, the workers went down to the big combs, took a little cellulose in their hands and felt it. They analyzed it between their fingers and actually determined the characteristics of the cellulose by feeling it. They new instantly what component to add if the “feeling” was not right. No one could ever tell the workers what the cellulose should feel like; this had to be learned by experience. The workers had a physical contact with the process in which they made use of certain kinds of knowledge to affect the process.

These days, the workers do not need to get “their hands dirty”. What was previously felt and analyzed through the fingertips must now be “felt” through computer screens. The workers are removed from the actual process of making paper; they might never actually see the product they are making at all; they are investigating it from a distance, through numbers and graphs on the screen in the control room. This, of course, demands a quite different kind of knowledge than before, a kind of knowledge that is more intellectual than tactile and “embodied”¹. The machines are trusted in doing the “feeling” on our behalf; all we have to do is to take action when the machines tell us to. The question, however, is what we lose when the brain (apparently) is all we need.

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¹ The question about wheter or not information has to be “embodied” is a big (and interesting!) one, and I will come back to this in a later blogpost.