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 objective of our proposal is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

Postman.jpg
Neil Postman

In detail

What would it take to repair the tie between information and action?

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

What would our world be like, if academic researchers retracted the premise that when an idea is published in a book or an article it is already "known"? If the other half of this picture were treated with the kind of thoroughness that characterizes academic technical work? If the question "What do people actually need to know?" made us develop the "social life of information" that operates as a human nervous system does—that allows our society to perceive the world correctly, and navigate it safely; and that helps each of us benefit from what all the others have experienced and understood?

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 of knowledge federation, by which those and other related questions are answered.

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—from epistemology and methods, to social organization and applications.

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

Technically, what we are proposing is 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...