N-ideograms
Contents
Federation through Ideograms
(Neil Postman, televised interview to Open Mind, 1990)
According to dictionary definition, ideograms are pictures that represent ideas; according to popular wisdom, they can condense "one thousand words" into "a picture" and make the point of it all discernible at a glance; but knowledge federation ideograms are a lot more than that.
A good way to comprehend them is through the notion of gestalt; which in knowledge federation serves to define what the word informed means; of which "Our house is on fire" is the canonical example: You may know the temperature in all the rooms; but it is only when you know that your house is on fire that you also know what needs to be done. A correct gestalt points to correct action and ignites correct action. By definition, we are informed about a theme if our gestalt of that theme is correct; and we are informed if our gestalt of our situation is correct.
Ideograms enable us to communicate gestalts.
Which is of vital importance when we are in a new sort of situation; for which our traditions have not provided us an action plan and an emotional response—as they did for the traditional gestalts like "our house is on fire" and "our country is at war".
Aurelio Peccei summed up in One Hundred Pages for the Future: “The arguments posed in the preceding pages […] point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole. From all points of view, this loss represents a backward step, an unfortunate involution—especially since it has occurred at the very moment when many systems, old and new, are expanding and intertwining, thus deepening the complexity of the great metasystem of the world which gives humanity, willy-nilly, a substantial unity. A sense of the global and universal harmony, which is characteristic to philosophical and religious thought and is the eternal quest of science, has also become an indispensable basis for informed political action. That sense must be restored to present-day society.”
Ideograms restore our sense of the whole.
The present knowledge federation ideograms are only placeholders—for a variety technique that will be developed through informed and artistic use of new media.
Modernity ideogram
The Modernity ideogram depicts our society as a bus and our information as its candle headlights; and invites us to see ourselves as passengers in this uncanny vehicle—rushing at accelerating speed (which technology made possible) toward a future we can neither influence nor foresee. In One Hundred Pages for the Future, in 1981, based on a decade of The Club of Rome’s research into the future prospects of mankind, Aurelio Peccei—this global think tank’s leader and co-founder—concluded: “It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course.” The Modernity ideogram points to "a way to change course":
We must change those 'headlights'!
We must institute transdisciplinarity! In his 1969 MIT report and call to action—to institute a transdiscipline—Erich Jantsch quoted Norbert Wiener, the iconic progenitor of cybernetics:
“There is only one quality more important than ‘know-how’…… This is ‘know-what’ by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.”
Academic disciplines cannot provide us know-what; and the media informing, such as it is, won't do it either. A system that provides us knowledge must combine disciplinary and other evidence; it must transcend academic and cultural fragmentation; it must communicate to the public with the authority of science—in ways that are beyond the modalities of outreach that the sciences are able to produce.
The Modernity ideogram explains also why our situation is as it is:
We are no longer traditional; and we are not yet designing.
Nobody in his right mind would design that weird vehicle; the only way such an uncanny error could arise is if the people who created it never even considered the options! So I defined design and tradition as keywords and a pair of antonyms; pointing to t two alternative ways to wholeness: We are traditional when we rely on what we've inherited from the past; and designing when we consider ourselves accountable for the wholeness of it all. The Modernity ideogram depicts our situation as a (still unenlightened and half-hazard, and increasingly dangerous) transition from one way of evolving and order of things or paradigm, which is no longer functioning, to a new one that is not yet in place.
Information ideogram
You may already be sensing some of that effortless enthusiasm that distinguishes holotopia: We do not need to occupy Wall Street; it is not necessary to wrestle with "the 1%"; the "way to change course" is in our hands—in the hands of publicly sponsored intellectuals! The people out there already look up to us to tell them what information is to be like; and we have education too in our control!
The key to comprehending the next step, what remains to be done, is to observe that (unlike our traditional ancestors) we must be able to see things whole. I call knowledge federation by its pseudonym holoscope when I want to emphasize that it's been designed to provide us that very advantage.
The Information ideogram is an “i” (for "information"), composed as a circle on top of a rectangle, inscribed in a triangle. The rectangle stands for a myriad of documents; and also for looking at a theme from all sides. The circle stands for the point of it all; the triangle symbolizes the metaphorical mountain.
You'll easily comprehend what this all means if you just think for a moment what information must be like to enable us to see things whole: We must be able to look at them from all sides; and we must be able to condense a myriad documents to a single and simple point—without which thousands of documents can be pointless, or worse.
In Chapter Two of the Liberation book I introduce this theme through the analogy with the Object Oriented Methodology for computer programming: When in the early days of computing ambitious software projects too often resulted in a chaos (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 tools they gave to programmers. You'll easily comprehend the Object Oriented Methodology if you think about how technical objects tend to be structured, for instance the automobile; where the details of the machinery are hidden under the hood, and only what's necessary for steering the vehicle is visible and available to the driver.
We academic people are now in a closely similar position toward the people at large as the creators of Object Oriented Methodology were toward computer programmers: Our traditional books and research articles are flagrantly unsuitable for turning information into knowledge; and making our world comprehensible. In Structured Programming, in 1972, Ole-Johan Dahl and C.A.R. Hoare pointed out that "precise thinking is possible only in terms of a small number of elements at a time; and concluded: "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.”
The Information ideogram depicts how information needs to be structured.
The information holon is designed to serve as basic unit or "piece" of information. A holon is both a whole in itself and a piece in a larger whole. When a myriad of documents are federated to produce the point—this point can then be used to compose a higher-order holon; so that holons can be combined into a holarchy—which is what the mountain stands for, and knowledge federation too.
The mountain enables us to rise above "the information jungle" and see things whole.
Knowledge Federation ideogram
The Knowledge Federation ideogram comprises the realm of experience or "the real world" on its left, and the realm of ideas on its right; and there is also the bridge joining those two sides, and the metaphorical mountainin the background.
"The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth", Morpheus told Neo; to introduce him to the dystopian vision that The Matrix epitomized. As long as "the world" is our only reference—we can only adapt to it; no matter how dysfunctional and outright harmful our systems may have become! And it is only when we have an independent reference system—that we become capable of improving the world.
Albert Einstein shared his "epistemological credo" in Autobiographical Notes:
“I see on the one side the totality of sense experiences and, on the other, the totality of the concepts and propositions that are laid down in books. […] The system of concepts is a creation of man, together with the rules of syntax, which constitute the structure of the conceptual system. […] All concepts, even those closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen posits, just as is the concept of causality, which was the point of departure for [scientific] inquiry in the first place.”
We may begin to federate knowledge by looking at the realm of experience or "the real world" from a high point on the mountain; and identify a theme that demands attention; and then take that theme over the bridge to the realm of ideas, along with the data that might provide it a suitable context; and theorize it and comprehend it; and then take the result back over the bridge and act in an informed way.
Science gave us "Newton's laws" and other "laws of nature"; and empowered us to comprehend the natural world in terms of simple insights and principles. Knowledge federation empowers us to comprehend all themes in a manner we can rely on.
Holotopia ideogram
The Holotopia ideogram comprises five pillars representing holotopia's five insights; which resulted by applying the procedure I've just described to five judiciously chosen pivotal categories or themes; and showed that when we base them on knowledge (and not on belief)—our comprehension and handling of life's core themes will change beyond recognition!
And when we considered other themes—including creativity, religion, education, happiness and politics—in the context of the five insights—they too appeared in a completely new light; so we created the ten themes to illustrate that.
The stars in Holotopia ideogram represent prototypes; and point out that when we elevate ourselves above "the world"—we become able to also act as our situation demands; instead of only reacting.