Promiscuous Knowledge
Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History
Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to the "mind of God". As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google's divine omniscience traffics indifferently in news, maps, weather, and porn. This book, begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main time periods – the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present. Cmiel's original text examines the collapse he saw in the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel's study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies over filter-bubbles, echo chambers, and "fake news". A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, "Promiscuous Knowledge" is an enlightening contribution to our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time.
About the Author
Kenneth Cmiel was professor of history and American studies at the University of Iowa and director of the Center for Human Rights at the university. He is the author of "A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare", also published by the University of Chicago Press, and "Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America".
John Durham Peters is professor of English and film and media studies at Yale University. He is the author and editor of many books, including "The Marvelous Clouds", "Courting the Abyss", and "Speaking into the Air", all published by the University of Chicago Press.
