PERSPECTIVE
Knowledge and Conversation
Albert Borgmann
Good conversations open up a common world. The boundaries of that world are defined by shared knowledge. The normative content of knowledge is the concern of general education, and its force comes to life as background knowledge in conversations and in the way we experience the world. Background knowledge is present in memory. Information technology tends to make memory dispensable and ignorance normal—it’s no longer the absence of knowledge, but rather the ability to know, the availability of information, accessed when needed. The result is an attenuation of our being in the world.