Chapter 1 Blog Response
The first thing I noticed when reading Badke’s book is that he is the kind of author that is not afraid to give you his advice and point of view about research and documentation related topics. I enjoyed reading his unique way of describing how humanity’s information and “tradition”, which is his way of seeing what knowledge is, has evolved during time. He tells us how information was passed on from generation to generation and what the advantages and disadvantages are from each evolving method. For example Badke, tells us how before there was print, people would pass on information only verbally because there were no other ways. Then when written languages came along, it was easier for people to contain knowledge because it was documented. However because everything was handwritten by a small group of people, only a small amount of people, who understood the written language and had enough money, within the society knew about the knowledge base. Soon after the printing press became the solution to that as documents about knowledge were no longer being hand written but instead printed, which resulted in there being vastly more copies. Finally the introduction of the internet is what really spread knowledge worldwide because now everyone had access to spread their own thoughts, opinions, and knowledge on to the rest of the world. However one serious disadvantage the internet has is that it makes useful information more scarce as there is more information to eliminate because of unreliability.
