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 the bus are supposed 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 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 needs an update.
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 the relationshnip we have with 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 man-made thing—by suiting it to the purposes that must be served. What would 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 would emerge? How would the information technology be applied? What would our public informing be like? And our academic communication, and education?
The substance of our knowledge federation proposal is a complete and academically coherent answer to those and other related questions; an answer that is not only described and explained, but also implemented—as a collection of real-life embedded prototypes.
In the language of our metaphor, what we proposed is a complete prototype of the 'lightbulb'.
Seeing things whole
The Information ideogram, shown on the right, serves to explain the general idea of the information that will emanate from the proposed 'lightbulb'. And also its principle of operation of 'the lightbulb'. The ideogram shows an "i", which stands for "information", as composed of a circle placed on top of a square. The square represents the details; the circle represents the function, which is the main point of it all. The whole ideogram points to the idea (which is an adaptation of a very basic idea in computer programming called "object orientation") that the details are to be hidden, and the function is to be offered to the next larger whole. This idea can easily be understood by analogy with the automobile, where the details (the engine, the electrical circuitry...) are hidden under the hub, and only what is needed for operating the vehicle (the steering wheel, the instruments...) is offered and made visible.
Information ideogram.
We here refer to our proposal by its pseudonym holoscope, to highlight its distinguishing characteristic: It helps us see things whole.
Every whole has sides that are obvious, and sides that are hidden. A purpose of the holoscope is to illuminate what has remained obscure, so that we may correctly see our object of interest's shape and proportions.
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The holoscope complements the usual approach in the sciences:
Science gave us new ways to look at the world, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that were too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye. At the same time, science had the tendency to keep us focused on things that were either too distant or too small to be relevant – compared to all those big things nearby, which now demand our attention. The holoscope is conceived as a way to look at the world that helps us see any chosen thing or theme as a whole – from all sides; and in correct proportions.