N-ideograms
Contents
Federation through Ideograms
(Neil Postman, televised interview to Open Mind, 1990)
An ideogram can condense one thousand words into an image; and make the point of it all recognizable at a glance; and turn overloads of information into shared meaning; and communicate the know-what in a way that incites action.
An Ideogram can communicate a gestalt.
Which is (the keyword we use to define) what the word informed means. "Our house is on fire" is a canonical example: You may know the temperature in all rooms and even the CO2 data; but it is only when you know that your house is on fire that you also know what to do. A gestalt can ignite an emotional response; it can influence the level of adrenaline in your bloodstream.
Our traditions have instructed us how to handle situations and contingencies by providing us a repertoire of gestalt-action pairs.
But what about those situations that have not happened before?
The existing knowledge federation ideograms are only placeholders—for a variety technique that will be developed through judicious use of new media.
Modernity ideogram
By depicting our society as a bus and our information as its candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram renders the gestalt of our situation in a nutshell.
Imagine us as passengers in a bus—which rushes at accelerating speed through dark and uncharted terrain; toward a destination we cannot foresee; because its headlights are too dim to illuminate even the very the road it is following!
How could this uncanny error be made?
Certainly not by considering the options; but by adopting an inherited source of illumination—which had been created with an out-of-date technology to serve a different function.
I coined a pair of keywords to make the nature of this error precise; and defined design and tradition as a pair of antonyms pointing to two ways in which society-and-culture can evolve; and to two alternative ways to wholeness; and to two distinct ways being in the world: We are traditional when we rely on what's been inherited from the past; we are designing when we consider ourselves accountable for the wholeness of it all. You'll now easily comprehend the gestalt of our situation the Modernity ideogram is pointing to:
We are no longer traditional; and we are not yet designing.
Our situation is a (still unenlightened and half-hazard, and increasingly dangerous) transition from one stable order of things or way of evolving or paradigm (which is no longer functional) to another (which is not yet in place).
In Guided Evolution of Society in 2001, systems scientist Béla H. Bánáthy surveyed a broad range of sources and reached this conclusion:
“We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity, and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.”
To foster the awareness of this opportunity and responsibility, and help develop “the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution”—is the communication challenge the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.
Information ideogram
You may already be sensing some of that effortless enthusiasm that distinguishes holotopia: We do not need to occupy Wall Street; it is not necessary to wrestle with "the 1%"; the "way to change course" is in our hands—in the hands of publicly sponsored intellectuals! The people out there already look up to us to tell them what information is to be like; and we have education too in our control!
The key to comprehending the next step, what remains to be done, is to observe that (unlike our traditional ancestors) we must be able to see things whole. I call knowledge federation by its pseudonym holoscope when I want to emphasize that it's been designed to provide us that very advantage.
The Information ideogram is an “i” (for "information"), composed as a circle on top of a rectangle, inscribed in a triangle. The rectangle stands for a myriad of documents; and also for looking at a theme from all sides. The circle stands for the point of it all; the triangle symbolizes the metaphorical mountain.
You'll easily comprehend what this all means if you just think for a moment what information must be like to enable us to see things whole: We must be able to look at them from all sides; and we must be able to condense a myriad documents to a single and simple point—without which thousands of documents can be pointless, or worse.
In Chapter Two of the Liberation book I introduce this theme through the analogy with the Object Oriented Methodology for computer programming: When in the early days of computing ambitious software projects too often resulted in a chaos (thousands of tangled up lines of code, which nobody could comprehend or correct)—the solution was found in the creation of "software design methodologies"; whose creators considered themselves accountable for the tools they gave to programmers. You'll easily comprehend the Object Oriented Methodology if you think about how technical objects tend to be structured, for instance the automobile; where the details of the machinery are hidden under the hood, and only what's necessary for steering the vehicle is visible and available to the driver.
We academic people are now in a closely similar position toward the people at large as the creators of Object Oriented Methodology were toward computer programmers: Our traditional books and research articles are flagrantly unsuitable for turning information into knowledge; and making our world comprehensible. In Structured Programming, in 1972, Ole-Johan Dahl and C.A.R. Hoare pointed out that "precise thinking is possible only in terms of a small number of elements at a time; and concluded: "The only efficient way to deal with complicated systems is in a hierarchical fashion. The dynamic system is constructed and understood in terms of high level concepts, which are in turn constructed and understood in terms of lower level concepts, and so forth.”
The Information ideogram depicts how information needs to be structured.
The information holon is designed to serve as basic unit or "piece" of information. A holon is both a whole in itself and a piece in a larger whole. When a myriad of documents are federated to produce the point—this point can then be used to compose a higher-order holon; so that holons can be combined into a holarchy—which is what the mountain stands for, and knowledge federation too.
The mountain enables us to rise above "the information jungle" and see things whole.
Holotopia ideogram
The holotopia vision resulted when we applied the procedure I've just described to five pivotal categories (I call something pivotal if it decisively influences our evolutionary course; whereupon it turned out that in each case (when we federated what's been academically published or otherwise reported) the habitual comprehension and handling of that category or theme had to be thoroughly reversed.
The Holotopia ideogram comprises five pillars representing the resulting five insights, which delineate the holotopia. And when we considered other themes—including creativity, religion, education, happiness and politics—in the context of the five insights—they too appeared in a completely new light; so we created the ten themes to illustrate that.
Albert Einstein warned in an interview to The New York Times, in the aftermath of Hiroshima: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” You may comprehend this ideogram as depicting an elevated way of thinking—where resulted by applying the procedure I've just described to five judiciously chosen pivotal categories or themes; and showed that when we base them on knowledge (and not on belief)—our comprehension and handling of life's core themes will change beyond recognition!
The stars in Holotopia ideogram represent prototypes; and point out that when we elevate ourselves above "the world"—we become able to also act as our situation demands; instead of only reacting.