Holotopia
Holotopia
Imagine...
You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flimsy, flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes where the headlights of bus are meant to be. Candles? As headlights? You rub your eyes in disbelief. What sort of nonsense is this? A weird joke? An art project?
Well of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why talk about it? The reason is that on a much larger scale—where the the things such as our society, and the way we handle information, are so large that we cannot see them with naked eye—this absurdity has become reality.
Our handling of information must be changed.
Our proposal
The crux of our knowledge federation proposal, which is detailed on this website,is to change the relationship we have with information; and with knowledge. And by doing that, to change the relationship we have with the world; and with ourselves.
What is our handling of information presently like? Here is how Neil Postman described it:
"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."
Suppose we handled information as we tend to handle other human-made thing—by suiting it to the purposes that need to be served. What would our information be like? By what methods, in what ways and by whom would it be created? How would information be used? What new information formats, what new kinds of information would emerge? How would the information technology be adapted and applied? In what way would our public informing be different? Or academic communication, or education?
The substance of our knowledge federation proposal is a complete and academically coherent answer to those and other related questions; an answer that are not only described and explained, but also implemented—as a collection of real-life embedded prototypes.