Digitality, (Un)knowledge, and the Ontological Character of Non-Knowledge

Abstract

The dialectic between knowledge and non-knowl-edge may obscure the very fact that digitization has also “remedied” knowledge, lending it the character of a commodity instead of a norm (which it was previously considered, despite the disagree-ment on its proper characterization entertained by philosophers and epistemologists). Hence, one is required to situate not only non-knowledge vis-à-vis knowledge but also knowledge vis-à-vis digitization and a third term I would call “unknowledge.” Non-knowledge is taken to be a necessary condition of many phenomena that are not reducible to knowledge, which, at the same time, is threatened by the generalization of digitally fueled unknowledge.