ingiliz bilim tarihçisi ve nazarımda bir yirmibirinci yüzyıl peygamberi.

kendisi hakkında aylardır yazmak istiyor ancak kendisini halen yeterince kavrayamamış olmanın verdiği eziklikle tek bir kelime dahi yazamıyordum. herkesin tanıması ve bilmesi gereken bir insan olduğunu düşündüğümden bu probleme bir çözüm olarak, kendisinin 2002 senesinde cornell üniversitesinde verdiği bir konuşmanın şimdilik deşifre ettiğim kadarının transkriptini yazarak başlamayı uygun gördüm.

kendisinin ne dedigini anlaya baslamak icin ozet bir yazisi http://www.forbes.com/asap/2000/1002/278.html adresinde bulunabilir.

eğer ki biraz dahi olsa "yarın ne olacak" diye düşünen bir insansanız, james burke'ü tanımıyor olmanın hayatınızdaki eksikliğini kendisini tanıdıktan sonra fark edeceksiniz.

çok önemli işleri connections ve the day the universe changed isimli onar bölümlük iki belgesel olmakla beraber, scientific american'da yazdığı yazılar, beyin üzerine yaptığı the neuron suite ve diğer birçok belgeseli de internetten bulunabilir. ayrıca halka hizmet adına tüm bu belgeselleri isteyen herkese bilaücret ulaştırmak da kendimi topluma faydalı kılmak adına üstlendiğim bir misyondur, sağlam bant genişliği olanlara download, olmayanlara da eve dvd postalamak suretiyle üstesinden gelmeyi düşündüğüm bu görevin ne kadar önemli olduğunun ise ancak aşağıdaki konuşmayı okuduktan sonra anlaşılacağını düşünüyorum.

(mengus - 29 Aralık 2005 04:19)

james burke'ün 2002 yılında cornell üniversitesinde verdiği konuşmanın elimden geldiğince çıkarttığım transkripti aşağıdadır.

teknoloji, geçmiş ve bugünümüz arasındaki bağlantılar, bugünkü kurumsal yapılarımızdaki problemler ve internetin gelişiyle ortaya çıkacak daha büyük problemler üzerine çok masif, çok compress edilmiş veriyi bulacağınız bu knouşmanın tamamını ve james burke'ün diğer işleri ile ilgili bilgi için benimle kontak kurmaktan ya da google'ı kurcalamaktan çekinmeyin.

ingilizcesini türkçeye çevirecek ne vaktim ne de ingilizceme güvenim olduğundan, o işi bir başkasına bırakıyorum.

tüm yazım, semantik, gramer hataları bana aittir. james burke aslında derdini şahane anlatmıştır.

"don't get too excited. this is not the edited version on tv. this is much lower.

as some of you probably knows, i have kind of wasted the last 35 years of my life as a science historian and a journalist making tv programs and writing books and columns about technological change and its social effects.

first, in order for you to be able to get into perspective with what i'm going to say this morning two things.

number 1: i make television programs for a mass audience if you want the horse's mouth stuff talk to your faculty. i'm just here to rattle your cage.

second thing i want to tell you is to remind you the thing that was said by the late great mark twain, when he might have been talking about people like my profession, he said "in the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. it is the task of journalists and historians to rectify this error."

so i want to rectify this morning a few things about the general social and historical context of change. and the process is exercising about in the minds of people these days that is what the technology coming down the pike is going to do to us, how to best prepare for it and why that has not been easy up until now.

and i want to argue that the high rates of innovation we live with today and the historical difficulty we have had in *predicting* change accurately up to now and finally the opportunities the coming technologies may offer to take a really different approach to knowledge management, all spring from one creative moment 500 years ago, well it probably springs from a dozen but i choose one. when somebody triggerred all this shmear with it today, with a solution to a local contemporary problem back then, then changed the world.

but let me start with the problem of predicting the future because, if you get that right, you've got it made. grades, degrees.. that stuff.

the unfortunate problem about the future is, if you think about it, it hasn't happened yet. and, never will, if you get my drift. the great danish quantum physicist neil bohr once said with great prespacasity: "prediction is extremely difficult, especially about the future." i don't think it was just danish humor. although, it could've been. i think he was talking more about the humongous number of variables involved in any change.

and those variables have multiplide through history. once upon a time, not that long ago, decision making was simple. you would have any color model t ford, as long as it was black. today, by the time you get'round to reading the manual, there's been an upgrade. if, you can read the manual in the first place.

by the time you decide to use a new piece of software, it's already obsolete. by the time the high schools are teaching material that they need to keep up with innovation, the material is already out of date. and as a consequence the reaction of the average person on the street and the many people in business and institutions to the flood of technology that hits us everyday, reminds me very much of the depressive who takes a couple of days off to get out of the clinic, to go to the beach, get himself a tan, the next day his psychiatrist back at the hospital receives a postcard from him. the message on the card is, i think very much like the average individual's reaction to the present very high rate of change, the card from the depressive on holiday reads: "having a wonderful time. why?"

(mengus - 30 Aralık 2005 22:52)

"the other way to go with this problem, is to try and catch up by trying to match the brain and the technology better. because now the technology is beginning to simply "mimic" the capabilities of the brain by becoming semi-intelligent, heuristic, distributed, low-power, high-storage, cheap.

the catch-up approach i'm talking involves the other key effect of these technologies that i haven't mentioned yet. the way the new systems are being able to bring any kind of education to anybody from a dallas high-rise, to a mud hutt outside bangalore. i won't talk about distant learning 'cause you know all about that. but maybe we also need to introduce some new educational mode you might say, the products of what we can do with the new technology to lay alongside our reductionist systems to act as adjuncts.

soon, in terms of what people do with their lives the software will be doing the old reductionist things anyway that would take the pencil-chewing human beings a lifetime to learn. and it seems to me not a good way to prepare for what that's going to do to us, is to go on limiting education to the kind originally designed to train medieval priests. in which you were judged intelligent or stupid, because you passed or failed a set of tests . designed to exclude all but the very few.

and that's very few as in *western* very few. any minute now, american technology will make the shabang of technology i'm talking about, a global affair. and i'm not talking about the irrelevent small affair of "which company's going to get the bigger slice of the global market" or "how you sell your gizmos in a hundred different cultures." but the scary possibility that the globaly community is not necessarily lie down and do it the western way. the vast illiterate majority out there is still a kaliedescope of diversity with their roots firmly in their cultures. and information technology is going to enhance that diversity, empower it, support it, foster it, make it valuable.

in ways it could never before, when the best we could do was very crude stuff: colonize the country, make them all speak english and wear wigs in their law courts. we never managed that with you guys. but that's all we didn't manage. "

(mengus - 31 Aralık 2005 02:38)

"it's no use giving information technology to everybody and that's all, just give them the toys and let them play. it would be like putting a loaded machine gun into the hands of an ape.

first of all i think, in the chaotic and innovatory world of tomorrow if we try to organize ourselves with the old ways of division of labor top-down method, there will be anarchy. because in that old culture of scarcity the way control was maintained, stability was kept through the application of what you might describe as "mushroom management": keep them in the dark, and feed them a lot of manure.

and anyway it's too late for that. people anywhere already know that they know just enough to know, that there's still a lot they don't know, but they need to. a lot of people out there working out various ways of making knowledge available in what you might call a "post-reductionist" form. that's the fancy word for it. i took it off the web. that match the kind of thinking the technology makes possible."

(mengus - 31 Aralık 2005 02:38)

"but as the new power increases and as virtually unlimited bandwidth causes information media, the knowledge media, the fragments of thousands of sources, some final questions: when almost all the aspects of life go virtual, what will happen to the nation state when frontiers and customs and local laws have no more meaning? if i can buy my goods anywhere on the planet, who taxes the purchase? who makes the goods? who has the jobs? in which case, what happens to my national commercial structure? my national employment strategies? my nation's ability to provide social services? my.. nation?

when i can educate myself in any classroom on earth, expose myself to sources of information from a thousand different sources, what happens -and this is something very relevant right now- what happens to my local cultural values? when online electronic agents representing me go on to the web and bring back what they know i want? will i ever get anything other than total self qualification? will i ever emerge from starrin in my own utterly personal virtual reality paradise? and all i ever hear is the news i tell my agent i want to hear, what does that do to my political and social opinions? and in any case how will we run a country? because until we have solved this problem, how do we run a country when each person's individual electronic agent is out there inputting each citizen's viewpoint on every single issue in every single part of the country every single second of the day a 186.000 times a second?

what happens to the old pre-internet structures like the european union or the united states, when the internet removes the limitations of space and time from international political relations and on the international level, whose law operates in cyberspace? moving from a culture of scarcity to a culture of information abundance is not going to be easy. to leave behind the comfort that specialists, only the specialists are valuable and trustworthy, to live by standards established for you by somebody else, knowing where you're standing because you've passed or failed a set of tests designed to serve a culture of scarcity."

(mengus - 31 Aralık 2005 02:38)

"my guess is that first effects of open access when it really hits, that period of transition i told about will show themselves in 2 or 3 negative ways. i mean at the artistic level, in this transition, will it be a world of home videos and illiterate scribblings and the kind of rock-bottom untrained junk that the so-called empowerment of the individual would allow the ordinary citizen to bring to the world of the arts.

and in sciences, how can the average person today with access the global databases make an intelligent contribution to the political decision about how many billions of dollars to spend into research on invertebrate paleozoology.

in other words, will open access and the closing of the gulf between the ordinary person and the world of information also bring with it a whelter of mediocrity, instability, mindlessness and self gratification the light of which has never been before, because the ordinary person has been excluded from these processes.

the only answer to that question is "yes" in the short term. this side of the educative things the technology will be able to do. meanwhile perhaps you should try a few short term moves: relax the division of labor rules, become more flexible, maybe construct the virtual versions of an institution and let the people try and get in there and try to change it the way they think it should change, without damaging the real one. realize that any organization satisfied by the way it's doing things, is probably dead and doesn't know it. see that if as an organization or an individual, you stand still for too long now, then just as in the jungle, sooner or later, <caps>something will eat you.</caps>

recognize that in the virtual-mobile-individualistic-demanding marketplace of tomorrow, there will be so many alternatives washing around out there in the sea of information, that the newly enfranchised individual will be like admiral showel, you remember: in desperate need of a lighthouse.

searching for a trustworthy solution to their individual problem, and the kind of education tailor-made to suit them and noone else.

our brains.. quintessential examples of innovative convergence at work have always been able to handle those kinds of issues and now thanks to the technology, our institutions will be able to do so also.. if we don't use the technology at least to open a crack in the reductionist box descartes put us in to, we will not be ready for coming upheaval as we shift from a culture of scarcity to the free-for-all. it will be the first "free-for-all" in the history."

(mengus - 31 Aralık 2005 02:38)

i'll finish with this: the challenge we face reminds me a great deal the kind of thing that used to happen when i was working for bbc many years ago when i covered the space program and i was often in moscow. and sometimes, you'd be in a bar, far enough away from the comissars for one of the locals go "psst" and then ask you questions. and all of us report the same kind of questions from them.

they used to ask questions like: "how do you people in the capitalist west survive all that dangerous confusion and anarchy?" and we would say: "what dangerous confusion and anarchy?" and they would say -and it's something that encapsulates everything we face today ahead of us- they said: "all that choice!!!"

i have an absurd optimistic view of your ability to handle what technology will do to you and then we'll copy you and we'll survive too. because i believe that americans have a uniquely flexible view of technology. maybe it's a frontier thing and i came across it early on my work and it didn't leave me polyannish but it left me thinking that optimism's the right thing to have. because if you think about it, pessimists jump out of the window and are no longer involved right? so i became an optimist.

here's what made me an optimist:

back in the 60s the bbc has decided to cover the apollo moon mission. and for some reason or another they asked me to be the anchor chief reporter. they said "look, your mandate is this: tell the great british public why americans keep doing the same thing (go to the moon, bounce around, come back. go to the moon, bounce around, come back)" what they really meant was, go into great detail and explain why one mission's different from another, which they were. i did a good enough job, look? i'm here.

but there was one thing that i utterly failed to do and for which i've got hate mail. i used to get mail from people saying "you're paid *far* too much money to be on that screen to tell us things. so tell us what *this* thing is!" well i couldn't. and the letters kept pouring "what is the thing that they keep using?"

what they were talking about was a thing called a "cuff check list".

well.. here you are on the surface of the moon, you have this much oxygen, this much work, and this much time. there is not *that* much oxygen. so you get your work done properly and correctly, or you blow it.

this cuff checklist is a kind of little ringbinder with plastic leaves on it and on the leaves were printed instructions for what to do if things went wrong.

for example, you're on the surface of another planet for the first time, 240.000 miles from the nearest workbench.. you take a piece of white hot technology that some poor slob of an engineer has worked his or her entire adult life... you lay it reverendly on the lunar dust... you press its little button..

and it doesn't work.

back in the science room in houston, the person is tearing their hair out. but you are 240.000 miles away! so you turn to your cuff checklist. and this is something i never managed to explain to the audience and why i've got the hate mail.

i can't even get it myself i didn't understand it even and i would ask engineers and they would say "it's perfectly simple" and then i couldn't understand the simple answer. so we just avoided mentioning it, it wasn't there.

it said -i'm making it up- "if the lrq fails, technological repair option 1: squiltch the pc mode to outlock 2 and hit 5 5 x 5. if option 1 fails, option 2.." even more incomprehensible. if option 2 fails, option 3.. and each little thing would have about 6 options.

so here you are, with solutions to a way of staving off a technological crisis on the surface of another planet for the first time in history, watched by billions of people at the end of each of these notes, came a message from nasa, that could never have been written by anybody but an american. it could never have been written by an english, european, russian or chinese space agency. ever.

and it revealed something about your view of technology that has heartened me ever since. it shows the resilience you have.

it said: if all other technological options to this point have failed...

"kick with lunar boot"

(mengus - 31 Aralık 2005 02:39)

soyledikleri hakkinda ozet bir fikir edinmek icin http://www.forbes.com/asap/2000/1002/278.html adresine bakilabilir.

(mengus - 23 Ocak 2006 05:51)

connections ve the day the universe changed adli onar bolumluk belgesellerinde bilimin ve sosyal insanin gelisimini sahane sekilde, birbirleriyle olan baglantilariyla anlatan tarihci.

(matis - 30 Ocak 2006 01:37)

http://video.google.com/…9795&q=james burke&pl=true

(mengus - 9 Nisan 2006 11:19)