Talk:New encyclopedism

Timeline of new encyclopedism

1. What about Wikipedia having something like v: User:KYPark/Encyclopaedism/Timeline in evolution? It's ready to be imported here.
2. French encyclopaedism was an enlightenment movement, which assuredly led to the French revolution rather than the like elsewhere. As such, it may have been too French to be fully utilitarian.
3. In contrast, Wells always stressed the universality hence full utilitarianism of new encyclopedism of his initiative.
4. Take the Internet for example. Until 1975, the precursory ARPANET had been neither utilitarian (universal) nor egalitarian; it aimed to serve for the advanced researchers of America, hence the name.
5. The Internet proper has begun with the transatlantic network of networks with TCP/IP since 1975 indeed, again hence the name. Thus the year marks the year of new encyclopedic (intellectual, educational, informational) revolution, at least from the infrastructural point of view.
6. Strikingly coincidentally but strangely unnoticedly, however, it was the year of a full information revolution -- a highly intellectual, superstructural as well as infrastructural, revolution indeed!
7. Nevertheless, this new encyclopedist success story yet remains one of the greatest historical mysteries, while a variety of egocentric interpretations are all over. Very surely, there must have been so many "invisible hands" of "invisible colleges" in context in action in full.
8. The alleged cognitive revolution since 1956 may be an instance of such egocentrism. Jerome Bruner is said to be one of the revolutionaries. In 1990, however, he dared to replace the cognitive with the contextual revolution.
9. In fact, you may greatly regret the neglect of new encyclopedism for the two decades until the Sputnik 1 was launched in October 1957 and the Westerners were stricken. You may more regret the neglect for the two more decades until 1975.
10. From then on, so many academics suddenly started regretting the neglect of hopeless pedagogic flaws and claiming the secret of the resolution and revolution.
11. Surprisingly, they were sharing the same hypotext or subtext as their common secret, which looked like a UFO mainly revolving around new encyclopedism and contextualism of improper origin!
12. The infrastructural information revolution was chiefly ascribed to the loud marketers or commercialists of the "hypertext" commodity, who made little or far less sense of new encyclopedism in itself.
13. The intellectual, superstructural information revolution was unjustly ascribed to epigones, and maybe often abused by the church in attacking scientism and eventually science itself, such as:
    • Walker Percy (1975) The Message in the Bottle.
    • Michael Polanyi & Harry Prosch (1975) Meaning. (near postumous)
    • E. F. Schumacher (1977) A Guide for the Perplexed. (near postumous)
14. These three men of honor shared a lot and commonly insisted that their new work was destined to be the best of all, hence revolutionary. They took advantage of the invisible intellectual revolution that may be best ascribable to Wells's new encyclopedism associated with Ogden and Richards's contextualism, all in consilience and synthesis!

Preface

The human individual is born now to live in a society for which his fundamental instincts are altogether inadequate. He has to be educated systematically for his social rôle. The social man is a manufactured product of which the natural man is the raw nucleus. (p. vii)

World Encyclopaedia

My particular line of country has always been generalization of synthesis. I dislike isolated events and disconnected details. I really hate statements, views, prejudices and beliefs that jump at you suddenly out of mid-air. I like my world as coherent and consistent as possible. So far at any rate my temperament is that of a scientific man. And that is why I have spent a few score thousand hours of my particular allotment of vitality in making outlines of history, short histories of the world, general accounts of the science of life, attempts to bring economic, financial and social life into one conspectus and even, still more desperate, struggles to estimate the possible consequences of this or that set of operating causes upon the future of mankind. All these attempts had profound and conspicuous faults and weaknesses; even my friends are apt to mention them with an apologetic smile; presumptuous and preposterous they were, I admit, but I look back upon them, completely unabashed. Somebody had to break the ice. Somebody had to try out such summaries on the general mind. My reply to the superior critic has always been -- forgive me -- "Damn you, do it better." (pp. 3-4)

— H. G. Wells (1938) World Brain

-- KYPark (talk) 03:59, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Put otherwise, the new encyclopedic revolution, if any since 1975, consists of the visible hypertextual medium and the invisible hypotextual message, as the two sides of a coin. At least on this occasion, Marshall McLuhan has turned out to be wrong to say that "the medium is the message." While the crowd has spoken loud of the explicit, visible hypertext medium, the real crux of the revolution has been to realize that there are the implicit, invisible hypotext message hidden or sunken deep in context to be taken very seriously. Say,

• Metaphor (Paul Ricoeur 1975, Michael Polanyi 1975)
• Implicature (Paul Grice 1975)
• Implicit Meanings (Mary Douglas 1975), and so on.

The visible hypertext is simply a mere means to help make the implicit hypotext explicit or visible. So it is childish or foolish to speak loud of hypertexts only regardless of hypotexts in consilience in context at issue. Something unforgivably wrong may be hidden behind the childish cry to shy away from the due new encyclopedism in process and progress in context in need indeed.

-- KYPark (talk) 05:32, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

This is more or less in response to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 August 23#Category:New encyclopedism. -- KYPark (talk) 10:56, 30 August 2010 (UTC)