AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): On Thursday, June 8, 2023, with the efforts of the Office of Islamic Studies on Cyberspace (OISC) the nineteenth live webinar titled “Obstacles of Reflection and Visionary in the Cybernetic World” was held.
The meeting was organized by the Office of Islamic Studies on Cyberspace (OISC), in collaboration with ABNA News Agency.
Hujjat al-Islam Dr. Yahya Jahangiri, the Head of the Organization of Islamic Culture and Communication in Qom, said: From one angle, we observe Cyberspace as an opportunity for human to reach what they need in a very easy way. But beyond these facilities, there are some challenges. One of them is that Cyberspace reduces the visioning.
Referring to the meaning of visioning, he added: Visioning means futurizing and predicting the future. learning has three phases. In the first phase which called science (al-elm), the person collects information. In the next phase which is knowledge(al-Marifah), he evaluates that information and makes new idea and finally, in the last phase which is visioning (al-Hikmah), he is able to see clearly what is going on and to predict what will happen in the future. The point is Islam says the first and the second levels are not enough and people need to reach the third phase. But Cyberspace bans us to reach this level.
Then he referred to the difference between the past and the present: In Fiqh (jurisprudence) it is said that there are two types of researches, Absolute research (Istiqra) and Incomplete research. In Absolute research, the person goes through all relevant information sources. Accordingly, in the past, researchers had to travel further to gain the documentary and reliable sources and then he was able to collect information.
Therefore, some scholars used to believe that doing absolute research was impossible because that was not possible to reach all of those sources. Thus, they used to make do with incomplete research. While nowadays, information is in your hands easily by Cyberspace. You only have to google something, then it shows you all the papers and sources you need. You may think that is a positive point, but the most important questions are who organized them, what his purpose was, by which criterion he decided a specific information is important and needs to be accessible for people and vice versa.
Nevertheless, some people readily accept what Cyberspace prepares for them.
Additionally, these data are too much and incoherent. So they occupy all the time and the mind of a person. Because of this reason, that person doesn't have enough time and patience to analyze them. So how he could reach the level of visioning?
Dr. Yahya Jahangiri shared a story highlighting the importance of thought in today's world: There was a villager man who had lots of knowledge. A scholar asked him," which sources did you read?" He answered," I have only one book." The scholar was absolutely amazed and asked," how can it be?" The villager answered," I read that book more than thousand times and thought long and hard about it. Hence, I was able to get new idea by careful analysis."
Dr. Jahangiri, the professor of the Hawzah and university, then summed up his speech and said:
learning has three phases named science which means collecting information, knowledge which means evaluating those data and finally, visioning which means predicting the future. Cyberspace, beyond the providing data you want, has some challenges which each user should be aware of them. Its first problem is changing a human being into a cybernized man which means people receive lots of information, but they have no time and ability to analyze them. Moreover, it is unknown that who provides and releases this information. This matter causes the lack of visioning and futurizing in people.
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