![An oil painting by Jan Matulka depicts a Cubist-influenced scene with a man in a striped shirt and cap looking up at a ship's rigging, mast, and sails. A small boat is visible below, and the sea stretches out in the background [gen AI description].](/media/jan-matulka.jpg)
We are setting sail on an ocean of knowledge in an uncertain time.
Have you heard? It’s the age of AI. It’s 2025, and we are living in a new age of AI.
Are you as sick of hearing this as I am?
Over 10 years ago, I created an online guide to the process of researching a topic and crafting an argument in writing. I wanted my students to learn how to learn but to learn because I wanted them to be skilled thinkers but also to trust themselves and their own developing intellectual ability. The original guide was meant to help me convey things that I thought were crucial to students’ development as independent thinkers. But it was also a statement of the values I wanted to pass on.
I still believe that these two things—developing one’s skills in and embracing the ethos of independent, critical thinking—are the higher learning for which universities exist. More recently however these two things have come under attack. It’s 2025. And, no, I don’t just mean there are AI chat bots now. We are in the dark ages of the postindustrial knowledge economy. We live in cyberspace, and remember, cybernetics means a control system.1
Students, teachers, and scholars come together to learn from each other and to create new knowledge together. The main way we do this is by talking and listening—engaging in discourse. But if you have a smart phone, you are already firmly embedded in a perverted, fun-house version of the scholarly community for practically every minute of the day. From the moment we wake up, we are continuously prodded and prompted to consume and respond to discourse. Our responses are mobilized as labor without our consent or control. This engagement is used to perfect an all-encompassing information and communications system controlled by cybercorporations. And, yes, things are changing. These information systems are gaining more autonomy, including and especially with the use of generative large language models. LLM devices apply raw computing power to predict patterns in discourse, and out pops something that sounds … sorta intelligent… kinda human. Inundated with crap, forced to drink swill, it feels more and more like no one has room to think for themselves.
Students today face an existential crisis. They ask,
- What’s the point of learning how to learn when I am already part of a vast system of information, and I alone will never have any control over how this system works or what knowledge it generates on its own?
and
- Wouldn’t it be smarter to learn to use the new tools and technology to get by, since any career I’m going to have is going to involve submitting to this cybernetic system?
My old guide to the research and writing process has long been overdue for an update. It occurs to me now that some of its advice applies even more today. Although the goal I want students to embrace is independence, I don’t see this as isolation. To learn to think for yourself means learning to think as part of a community, and to be an independent thinker means to participate in a community’s search for new knowledge as a peer. For that reason also learning how to be part of a scholarly community is the antidote to the existential crisis of an age of cybernetic control.
The old adages about higher learning were always imperfect and now very outdated.
Firstly, instructors like to say “Think for yourself. Develop your own ideas. Be an independent thinker.” Discovering your own insights is worthwhile. But no one exists in such perfect isolation, so introspection alone is not going to lead you to the ideas in your head. New ideas come from dialogue. We react and respond to other people’s ideas to develop our own. And as such they aren’t only one’s own; they belong to a knowledge commons that we can help build.
Secondly, instructors like to say “Say what you think. Speak for yourself. Use your own words.” These too are good goals, but they are ideals. It can be daunting to speak for yourself when you are not sure of what you are saying, especially when so many automations seem to be able to speak effortlessly, even omniscently. But you know what AI bots don’t know? Who you are. Unlike most of the information in the global cybernetic system, each of is capable of participating in actual conversations with actual people. A better goal is to learn how to steer those conversations in new directions.
So this is not just a guide; I’m making a claim of my own. We feel powerless in a world of information saturation because other people and things are steering the whole system that generates, translates, inteprets, and represents information for us as its consumers.
To overcome this despair, we shouldn’t unplug. Rather we need to create new connections. We should embrace the fact that we depend on other people to learn and to be able to generate new ideas. But we should take control of that interdependence rather than simply accept what is drip fed to us from the media (and funnelled through algorithms and probably written by a robot). Indeed, there are digital tools that can help us take control of our shared information environment. Tech and bots don’t have to be the enemy if we learn how they work and how best to use them, that is, how to use them in ways that facilitate our conversations among peers.
In this new version of the guide, I present the steps in the process of discovering one’s own ideas by participating in discourse. Along the way, I want to present ways to learn to break with the artificial discourse in which we are all submerged. And I will discuss ways we can experiment with some technologies to regain control over our own participation in the global knowledge system.
Steps in the research and writing process
- Choosing a topic
- Asking a question
- Finding facts, learning from others
- Stating a claim
- Building an argument
- Drafting
- Editing and rewriting
Other topics
- Brainstorming, “being creative,” and what it means to generate ideas
- Feedback, how to get it and what to do with it
- Citing sources and managing bibliographies
- Give your documents style, class, panache, and flair
- How to prove you’re human
References
The word cybernetics was coined by computer scientists who were interested in how interconnected systems of signals can be designed to control and regulate themselves. Cybernetics comes from the Greek word kybernḗtēs, which means the helmsman of a ship, but also connotes the idea of a “governor” (Pickering 2010, 3).↩︎