Plato and the internet

Kieron O’Hara

In the new knowledge economy, competitive advantage no longer derives from labour and raw materials, but from knowledge and creativity. A staggering amount of knowledge is now available through the Internet. But amidst billions of documents, we find ourselves drowning in information, while being starved of the knowledge we need. When the economic imperative is to get clever things done in smarter ways, it is clear that we need to know more about knowledge.

And yet – what is knowledge? Though the arguments have changed little since Plato’s writings of 2,500 years ago, Kieron O’Hara contends that the essential contrast is not between knowledge and belief, but between knowledge and information. In Plato and the Internet, he argues that what is important is not ‘what facts you know’, but ‘what you know how to do’, and that we should expect to find knowledge not only in our heads, but also in our surroundings.

Kieron O’Hara is a senior research fellow in the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group at the
University of Southampton. He co-wrote the script of the computer game Tomb Raider 4, and is the author of the only scholarly paper about Carry On Cabby.