“In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one ‘episteme’ that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.” – Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

When the movie Johnny Mnemonic came out in 1995, I often heard people mispronounce the word “mnemonic” as “pneumonic”. I speculated at the time, rightly or wrongly, that more people knew the term “pneumonia” than “mnemonic” or maybe one was simply easier to say. Strangely enough, I’ve now associated the concepts of memory and sickness because of the similarity, and confusion, of those two concepts. Maybe a pneumomic device helps you remember something…or maybe it helps your lungs function properly. Are we concerned about another pneumonic plague or a pending mnemonic plague? Who can say?

The Mnemonic Plague

If we live in a knowledge zeitgeist, it may someday later be defined as the death of knowledge. Or, more accurately, the death of the belief in knowledge and expertise in favor of opinion and belief. The results of successful misinformation campaigns include a skepticism of expertise and knowledge, feelings that opinions are equal to or supersede knowable facts, or even the inability to know anything at all. Postmodern philosophy has concerned itself with the idea that there is no objective truth, either foreshadowing the imminent knowledge paradigm or driving it. Baudrillard has predicted, quite accurately, that simulations and simulacra will become so prevalent that all meaning will be meaningless.

Add to this another sociological trend, the current workplace generational turnover from a larger, knowledgeable, older generation to a younger generation buried in and swept up by these currents of skepticism. With reality changing so quickly, and so many people being distrustful of what reality is anyway, are we on the cusp of a mnemonic plague? A plague in which no one remembers anything? A plague in which we all doubt the ability to remember it correctly? A plague in which we are convinced by others that reality is not reality, facts are not facts, and that memory is susceptible to convincingly reality-sounding alternative histories?

Johnny Pneumonic

When we began the great shift from paper to electronic documentation, the speed at which we would be able to create, store, and access information grew exponentially. Imagine a library which could feasibly contain all knowledge from human history across all countries, languages, ethnicities, and religions. An electronic library that would make the Library of Alexandria, the Library of Congress, and the Bodleian Library look like corner news stands. One library to rule them all. That happened, sort of, with the expansion of the World Wide Web. Vast troves of information were digitized and made available online even as people continued to create informational web pages and create documents which were born digital, never seeing the pulpified remains of a tree. In parallel, all the other kinds of news, information, and entertainment were also being born digitally and, in the great democratization of the Internet, anyone anywhere could theoretically have access to the ability to view and create information assuming they had some kind of device and network or satellite infrastructure.

Imagine the possibilities! Imagine how knowledgeable we could all become! Imagine knowing anything, anywhere, at any time, at the moment you need to know it! And some of that is true. What is also true is that people create patently false information reflecting their personal beliefs and agendas. There are millions of mediums, channels, and formats available to anyone to tell us what magical healing herbs will make us live longer and with fewer wrinkles; entire video libraries dedicated to documenting the horrors of vaccines and Western medicine; travel logs with erroneous anecdotes and false facts with the only verification being the person who created the content; videos of lizard-people trafficking human children; videos of directors faking the moon landing. All of this available to anyone, anywhere who wants to be an audience.

Whether an individual or a state actor, whether the content creator believes their own content or not, whether we can decipher what is true and what is not, all of this information is there for us to consume and form our own opinions about. That is freedom. That is democracy. That is the democratization and platform of eight billion voices. We no longer have to be slaves to a single narrative; no, we can write our own narratives and gather our own followers, forming fragmented communities in a new-world Splinternet in which we can all, finally, show everyone else a picture of what we had for lunch.

The Codification of Memory

I could say things were better back in the good old days, whenever those were and for whomever they were good, but that’s also an opinion, not a fact. The genie is out of the bottle. The train has left the station. The die is cast. We have crossed the Rubicon. The horse has left the barn. We now live in a world of snowclones, memechés, and information of dubious provenance. Compounding the intersection of easily creatable and accessible information, skepticism of expertise, and generational turnover is the ever-improving use of AI tools to generate very impressive, lifelike, and believable images to support textual messages. Don’t believe we faked the moon landing? Here’s a photo! Didn’t that famous Hollywood actor appear in a porno? Here’s the video!

And now for something completely different. Or, rather, here is me now getting to the point for my target audience of information professionals: what do we do in the face of all this misinformation? Our jobs…the best we can.

I’ve been working on taxonomies for over 20 years. At various times–sometimes from one year to the next and other times one hour to the next–I have experienced that overwhelming sense of doom, frustration, or hopelessness in the face of shockingly ignorant misinformation and opinions. I have long since abandoned any hope for the Semantic Web’s promise that real, verified meaning could be captured in logical, formalized, human and machine-readable structures like taxonomies and ontologies. Despite the acknowledgement, both philosophical and practical, that there is no Truth with a capital “t” and that all facts are context-dependent, I still try to build semantic structures that codify the truth of my organization at the moment we are building it.

In the context of any moment, there are truths we can build and verify. We can create preferred concepts and connect them with human-readable, sensible relationships and build taxonomies into interconnected graphical knowledge bases applied to a variety of content vetted by subject matter experts. Verified and vetted content may no longer be true in a week or a year or a decade. The relationship between two concepts may quickly become outdated. A preferred concept may fall out of use or fashion. Despite all of this, codifying knowledge in taxonomies and ontologies is not an act of futility; it is an act of capturing truth and memory at a moment. We can document these changes over time and look back over the history to see what was true versus what is true now.

These semantic structures are a way we can document organizational knowledge and pass this knowledge on to the next employee, the next generation, the next iteration of a company. Creating good historical records in semantic models serves a knowledge management function in being one way we can enable knowledge handover from one person to the next, one team to the next, one project to the next.

The organizational book of knowledge as written in taxonomies is often edited and changed, but it is still a book to which we can refer with confidence that what we tried to build was accurate and true to the best of our abilities. Taxonomies are the new black. Ontologies are the mother of all semantic structures. In space, no one can hear you taxonomize…but your work is still valuable.