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Federation through Ideograms
(Neil Postman in a televised interview to Open Mind, 1990)
"[...] of people not having any basis for knowing what is relevant, what is irrelevant, what is useful, what is not useful, where they live in a culture that is simply committed, through all of its media, to generate tons of information every hour, without categorizing it in any way for you", Postman continued.
To federate knowledge means to connect the dots.
And add insight or correct meaningto an overload of data; of which "Our house is on fire" is the canonical example: You may know all the room temperatures; but it is only when you know that your house is on fire that you are empowered to act as your situation demands. An insight can ignite an emotional response; it can add adrenaline to your bloodstream.
Our traditions have instructed us how to handle situations and contingencies by providing us a repertoire of insight and action pairs. But what about those situations that have not happened before?
We use ideograms to create and communicate insights. An ideogram can condense one thousand words into an image; and make the point of it all recognizable at a glance; and communicate know-what in a way that incites action.
The existing knowledge federation ideograms are only a placeholder—for a variety of techniques that will be developed through artful and judicious use of media technology.
Modernity ideogram
By depicting our society as a bus and our information as its candle headlights, Modernity ideogram renders our situation in a nutshell.
Imagine us as passengers in a bus—which rushes at accelerating speed toward a disaster; because its headlights are too dim to show us the way.
Information must now intervene between us and the world.
And not any information—but information that's been conscientiously designed for the pivotal function it needs to serve.
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 new opportunity and responsibility, and develop the information that can provide us “evolutionary guidance”—is the all-important new creative challenge the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.
I qualify something as pivotal if it decisively influences our society's evolutionary course; and as correct if it corrects it.
Information ideogram
What I've just shared explains some of the realistic optimism that distinguishes this proposal: To solve "the huge problems now confronting us"—we do not need to wrestle with "the 1%"; we do not need to convince the politicians; the key to solutions is in our hands—in the hands of publicly sponsored intellectuals! The people out there look up to us to tell them what information needs to be like; we only need to act in accord with the social role we already have.
In the Liberation book I sketched the gist of this strategy by drafting a parallel between information and computer programs; and sharing in a vignette how—when in the early days of computing ambitious software projects resulted in 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 (conceptual and technical) tools they gave to programmers.
We academic people too must become accountable.
For the (conceptual and technical) information tools we give to researchers and to society; because it is those tools that now determine whether information will result in chaos—or a new order.
How should information be structured? Ole-Johan Dahl and C.A.R. Hoare wrote in Structured Programming in 1972, in a chapter called “Hierarchical Program Structures”:
“As the result of the large capacity of computing instruments, we have to deal with computing processes of such complexity that they can hardly be understood in terms of basic general purpose concepts. The limit is set by the nature of our intellect: precise thinking is possible only in terms of a small number of elements at a time. 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.”
Dahl received the Turing Award (the computer science equivalent for the Nobel Prize) for co-authoring the Object Oriented Methodology; which empowers the programmers to deliver comprehensible, reusable, verifiable and modifiable code by structuring it in terms of "objects". The answer I offered, which the Information ideogram illustrates, is a remake of the same idea; I call it information holon. Arthur Koestler coined the word "holon" to denote something that is both a whole in itself and a piece in a larger whole; and I applied it to information.
The Information ideogram is an “i” (for "information"), composed as a circle or dot or point on top of a rectangle; inscribed in a triangle representing the metaphorical mountain. You may interpret the rectangle as representing a multitude of documents; and the point as the point of it all; and this ideogram as a way to say what's obvious—that without a point, a myriad of printed pages are just point-less!
The triangle or the mountain stands for a structure of viewpoints I call scopes; which you'll comprehend if you consider that every standpoint on a mountain offers you a view; and this view is always coherent—you can either look at a tree nearby, or at a forest far below; you can bend down to inspect a flower, or climb up the mountain to see the whole terrain—but you never see both in the same view. The mountain stands for the purpose of it all.
We can come out of "information jungle" by climbing to a mountain top.
And see where the roads lead; and which one we need to follow.
We create meaning by using abstraction. The Information ideogram points to three kinds of abstraction:
- You'll comprehend horizontal abstraction, which is represented by the rectangle, if you think of projective geometry; where a complex object is depicted in terms of a collection of suitably chosen projection planes; so that each of them presents a simple image, while together—they show the object from all sides
- You'll comprehend the vertical abstraction, which is represented by the point, if you think of going up a mountain toward the mountain top—where the whole terrain is visible and the choice of direction is safe and easy
- You'll comprehend structural abstraction, which is represented by the mountain, if you think of the all-important capability a mountain may offer—to consciously choose your viewpoint; and have a simple and coherent view.
The mountain is more technically called information holarchy composed of information holons; where the points of more detailed holons serve as data points of more general ones.
Like "architecture" and "design", knowledge federation is both an activity or praxis (informed practice), and an academic field that develops it. Its function is to complement publishing or broadcasting, by organizing us in co-creating a mountain; and enabling information to result in knowledge; which subsumes, you'll recall, the action and re-building or "changing the world" that "guided" or informed evolution of society necessitates.
Holotopia ideogram
The holotopia initiative is knowledge federation's proof of concept application. It is also the vision that resulted when we applied knowledge federation to five pivotal categories (I qualify something as pivotal if it decisively influences our society's evolutionary course): In each case—when we federated what's been academically published or otherwise reported—the "conventional wisdom" had to be reversed.
“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels", Albert Einstein warned in 1946, an interview to The New York Times. The Holotopia ideogram comprises five pillars, each of which has a pivotal category at its base and an insight at its capital; which resulted by elevating us, as it were, above "the world" that has been pulled over our eyes, by applying knowledge federation to that category. The ten themes—represented by the edges joining the five insights—point to the fact that when other similarly important themes such as creativity, religion and education are considered in the context of five insights—their comprehension and handling too is revised and reversed.
An overarching insight resulted from this experiment; which I propose for consideration in our dialog:
We are not informed.
Our comprehension and handling of the core themes that determine our know-what, and set our society's evolutionary course—are at the level where our comprehension of natural phenomena was in pre-scientific times; we do not have any knowledge; all we really have to work with is belief.
The stars on Holotopia ideogram represent prototypes; and point to the informed course of action the holotopia initiative will enable and begin.
My appeal
(Albert Einstein, New York Times, 1946)
In the movie The Matrix, "the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth" epitomized a situation where people live in a devastated and dying world ruled by machines—and in a falsified "reality" that makes the world appear to them as normal; in the Liberation book it epitomizes the situation where people live without guiding insights or principles—which compels them to adapt to the world, instead of comprehending it critically.
My appeal is to institute a new science.
Which will liberate us from "the world" by providing us insights and principles.
And importantly—which will empower our next generation to create a different world.
My point is that this course of action is not only our human obligation—but also the necessary next step in academic evolution.
The knowledge federation prototype constitutes a case for this appeal—and at the same time makes it actionable.
