Holotopia

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Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice the flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?

Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it? Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.

The Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation by depicting our society as an accelerating bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it as guided by a pair of candle headlights.

Modernity.jpg Modernity ideogram


Our proposal

In a nutshell

The core of our knowledge federation proposal is to change the relationship we have with information.

What is our relationship 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."

The motivation of our proposal is to restore agency to information; and power to knowledge.

Postman.jpg
Neil Postman

In detail

What would it take to restore the connection between information and action? What would be the practical consequences of such an act?

What would information and our handling of information be like if we treated them as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted them to the purposes that need to be served?

What would it mean, practically and academically, if instead of assuming that when our ideas are published in a book or an article they are automatically "known", we treated the other half of this picture with the thoroughness and attention that characterize our technical work? If we asked What do people actually need to know? If we turned the massive volumes of information we own into something that the people can comprehend and make use of? If we developed the "social life of information" in a similar manner as the nature developed our brain and nervous system—to allow us, and our society, to adapt to the complex reality we have created, by changing our perception of it, and our behavior? To empower us to comprehend our world correctly?

What would the academic field that develops this approach to information be like? How would information be different? How would it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would it be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

The substance of our proposal is a complete prototype
that provides detailed answers to these and other related questions. (A prototype is a model that is already embedded in practice, so that it not only embodies and exhibits solutions, but also acts upon practice to change it—while showing to its creators what works and what needs to be changed.) The Knowledge Federation prototype is conceived as a portfolio of about forty smaller prototypes, which cover the range of questions that define an academic field.

We use our main keyword, knowledge federation, in a similar way in which "design" and "architecture" are commonly used—to signify both a real-world praxis (informed practice), and an academic field that develops and curates it.

Technically, we are proposing a paradigm. (We adapted this keyword from Thomas Kuhn, and it stands for (1) a new way to conceive a domain of interest, which (2) resolves the reported anomalies and (3) opens up a new frontier to research.) The proposed paradigm is not in a specific scientific field, where paradigm changes are relatively common, but in "creation, integration and application of knowledge" at large.

Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and as a real-life praxis.

To be continued...