Knowledge Disembodied: From Paper to Digital Media
| Author(s) |
Abdullah Ibrahim Omran |
| Contact |
Abdullah Ibrahim Omran, Indiana University, 107 S Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. E-mail: abdomran@iu.edu |
| Issue |
CyberOrient, Vol. 14, Iss. 1, 2020, pp. 72-95 |
| Published |
June 30, 2020 |
| Type |
Article |
| Abstract |
Print and digital media are believed to have shaken religious authority in the Muslim
world, essentially because they popularize and pluralize Islamic knowledge. But how
exactly did these novel technologies affect the nature of knowledge production and
the behavior of scholars and the public? The pages that follow explore the historical
relationship between technological developments and the production and transmission
of knowledge over the course of Islamic history, commencing with the adoption of
paper and concluding with the spread of digital media. A role-based approach is
employed to reflect the gradual diminishment of the early methods of knowledge
acquisition as “knowledge” came to be commodified according to the market logic of
capitalism and subject to mass production and consumption via the technologies of
print and electronic media. This approach reflects the interplay between knowledge
producers, consumers, and communication mediums. The writer concludes that new
media introduces new means of communication and contributes, along with other
social, economic, and political factors, to the gradual disintegration of earlier forms
of knowledge acquisitions. |
| Keywords |
media, knowledge production, scholars
|
