From Swiftrank: There’s no doubt that we live in an age where we like to measure things. This is a result of the kinds of holdovers from logical positivism, who saw its great moment at the end of the 19th century, when the industrial revolution, combined with the new advances in science, suggested that there was a knowable world out there, and we could understand everything if we just had the right tools. In the field of naturalism, there were sudden attempts to catalogue everything in the known world, and we have some extraordinary works of art that came from these attempts to catalogue all the discoveries from the previous century’s explorations.
It may very well be that we’re finding ourselves at the end of measuring, in terms of recent philosophical shifts that are a result of the kinds of science that came after relativity exploded everything. However, we still have the need to measure and to compare, and it’s a reflect to look at nearly everything and to give it a swiftrank in terms of popularity, elusive measurements of value, or personal interest. On good days, these attempts to rank everything seem very optimistic, but on most days, it is a kind of thinking that is nostalgic. But it does enter into the field of popular culture in increasingly complex ways.
Any surface look at the recent youtube video listings will show a considerably baffling number of responses, and many of these responses begin with an attempt to catalogue the video based on a very personal scale of interest. But they inevitably fall to a kind of self-promotion of personal opinions that often escalate into online flame wars. While these flame wars may be fascinating as a new kind of cultural phenomenon, they also point to a much deeper illustration of the history of science in contemporary times. While the initial responses are somewhat quantitative in nature, they very quickly devolve into a kind of chaos or entropy, and this is the same road that modern physics took when it moved from positivism into relativism, and the results of this turn are still being sorted out in the consciousness of the culture at large.
