static in the ear tonight

have been reading blogs and blogs. english blogs indonesian blogs. and after a while all i can hear is static. the era of interactive new media is heralded as the beginning of a new age in which the intensity of human interaction increases across the globe, and perhaps also amongst existing communities within established national boundaries. this should allow greater cross fertilization of ideas, and lead to a fluorescence of scientifc and cultural progress...a new renaissance if you will.

but i dunno. i'm not wholly convinced. i'm a little undecided as to whether the rate of human progress is largely determined by the intensity of the global human conversation...when all most of us have to say, is "hey how you going, will be in Melbourne later this week, wann catch up". i mean the argument has a lot going for it, if we all put our minds together, keep yammering back and forth to each other, faster and faster ...surely we'll arrive at new points of consensus, find ways over those epistemic stumbling blocks Foucalut talks about alot quicker....come to a new consensus and then move on. the interenet just allows us to pool our collective consciounesss and move forward faster.... okay.

but what if the key to human progress (if you're still wont to believe in such a thing - the the ideals of the enlightnemoent projetc...namely that throuh appliaction of our human reason we can transform ourselves, and our environment to progress across technological and moral plains)...but what if the key factor in determing the rate of scietinfic and moral/cultural progress is not from the intensity of interaction betwee the bulk of humanity but from the existence of a few isoloate loners, idoit savants and dreamers who are cut of from the general discourse, isolated, quarantined such that they are able to revision a whole paradigm...see the weak link right at the base of the curret episteme, and call it...thus pulling the rug right out from under all of the rest of us who are busy stuttering static into one another's ears along with hackneyed reassurances that the wrold really is the way we think it is.

Wot i mean is, would Isaac Newton have happened upon Newtonian physics if he'd had a billion bloggers yelling in his ear. or did his insight come from being the loner in the pack? Likewise Einstein...didn't he benfit from sitting alone in that patent office rather than attending conferences attended by the opinionated established figures of physics at the time. is their such thing as too much interaction when it comes to developing and refining ones' own scientific or artistic vision.

Cross-fertilisation is one way think of it but it could be equally termed 'contamination', surely.