Knowledge in the information age

The second theme of the conference was rather less satisfactory perhaps because it was dealing with vaguer concepts (or because it was straight after lunch!). Charles Leadbetter introduced "What happened to Digitopia". The core here was comparing the 70s and 80s view of automation leading to a greater quality of life with current reality.

After an aside of "2 weeks of watching 2 minute soundbites on TV in the USA" He led into a discussion of Utopian Things. Utopias (from Moore to Swift to Huxley) are characterised by A journey to a new land of abundance; created by human design not fate; a product of eductaion and rationality; of community and sharing; with a new culture of work, governance and forms of organization. The internet version of this should have had no limits, unlike the physical world. it should have produced changes in Business, Community, Democracy, Technocracy.

But we have instead created a Dystopia. We are fatigued by the rate of change; by the cacophony of trivia; by coercion; by enforced migration. We are producing a culture of Surveillance; Interim solutions; Ignorance and instability; inequality; and worst(!) constant upgrades. Our reactions to this Dystopia are Opposition; Withdrawal; Nostalgia and Endism.

If we are going to break out of this, we need come up with new models. Models that encompass hybrid evolutionary approaches that encourage self governance.

Dr Frank Furedi gave the second talk on this subject. His talk centered on the semantic differences between knowledge and information. Our vocabulary for describing knowledge is often the reverse of of what it should be. We actually have much less knowledge than we think. As the sheer quantity of information grows, this has side effects if in our ability to cope with change and the resultant fear of the future. There is a Frankensteinian problem that the more we know, the more risky the the world becomes. It's unsustainable to say that we know what we are doing as the future is too unpredictable.

Society has coped with this by becoming more and more obsessed with unreason, whether it is astrology or Nostradamus. We have begun to believe that intuition is somehow more reliable than science. Strange terms such as Emotional Intelligence have appeared. Part of the reason for this is that the old gatekeepers of knowledge are being sidestepped or have lost their authority. So we have to rely on niche knowledge "experts" and hoaders of information. Even here, the sheer assemblage of information has become more important than the conversion via analysis of that information into "Knowledge".

It's instructive here to consider an idea about the exponential growth of information. If we represent all the information in the world at the birth of Christ as 1 jesus, it took until AD1000 to double this, 1500 to double again, 1750 to double again and so on. The number of jesus in the world now is doubling every 4-5 years and is still speeding up. And yet our ability to abosrb and integrate this information is only increasing linearly.

Question time for this session was particularly irritating. Many of the comments could have done with a good dose of E-Prime to rid them of the verb "is" and the attendant mis placed certainty. If I hear one more person begin a sentence with "The Internet is..." or "Most people think... I think I'll scream!

There were some good points however. We now have access to an unprecedented quantity of the whole world's information via the Internet, but with little basis on which to judge it. The Hegemony of the knowledge priesthood is over. But it has been replaced by faster and more global feedback. Where previously a few of us might send a "Letter to the Editor" now we all have the capability to wack off an email or forum entry. It's just that too much of this feedback is simple denyal which doesn't further the debate.

Then we must consider the Info-Poor and understand that the access that we now take for granted is not universally available. There are many voices that are still not heard.

Now people are pragmatic and we must learn to use these technological riches pragmatically. We should focus on the problems and use the technology pragmatically to solve them.

As an aside here, fantasy does drive reality as long as we also recognise the difference. There's few more graphic examples of this than the demonization of bin Laden. We are being led to believe that he is Candyman, that he's Kobayashi, your worst nightmare. And most important of all *not a man* but a symbol.

go to Part III
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