N-ideograms

Federation through Ideograms

“We’ve entered an age of information glut. And this is something no culture has really faced before. The typical situation is information scarcity. […] Lack of information can be very dangerous. […] But at the same time too much information can be dangerous, because it can lead to a situation of meaninglessness […].”
(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. The question must be asked whether it is at all still useful to produce even more—before a different information process has been put in place; which will complement relentless production and make information useful to us the people and our society; and make knowledge possible again.

The function of knowledge federation is to turn information into knowledge.

Where knowledge is, by definition, evidence-based and collectively shared and acted on; unlike belief (its antonym), which is also collectively shared and acted on—but it's a product of conditioning of various kinds, be they social or cognitive or both.

You'll comprehend these ideograms correctly if you see them (not as what they presently are, but) as pointing to a function—to be implemented in a variety of new ways with the help of new media technology. An ideogram can condense one thousand words into an image; and make the point of it all recognizable at a glance; and turn overloads of information into shared meaning; and communicate the know-what in a way that incites us to act.

An Ideogram can communicate a gestalt.

And gestalt is (the keyword we use to define) what the word informed means. "Our house is on fire" is a canonical example: You may know all the room temperatures and even the CO2 levels; but it is only when you know that your house is on fire that you also know what to do. A gestalt can ignite an emotional response; it can even change the level of adrenaline in your bloodstream.

Our traditions have instructed us how to handle situations and contingencies by providing us a repertoire of gestalt-action pairs. But what about the situations that have not happened before?

Neil Postman

Modernity ideogram

The Modernity ideogram explains the error that is the subject of this proposal.

By depicting our society as a bus and our information as its candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram renders the gestalt of our contemporary global situation in a nutshell.

Modernity ideogram

Imagine us as passengers in a bus—which rushes at accelerating speed through dark and uncharted terrain; toward a destination we cannot foresee; because the headlights of our bus are flagrantly inadequate for their function.

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 challenge the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.

How could this uncanny error be made?

Certainly not by people who considered the options; but by simply inheriting an illumination source—which had been created with an out-of-date technology for an entirely different purpose.

I coined a pair of keywords to make the nature of this error precise; and defined design and tradition as a pair of antonyms pointing to two ways in which society-and-culture can evolve; and to two alternative ways to wholeness; and to two distinct ways being in the world: We are traditional when we rely on what's been inherited; and designing when we consider ourselves accountable for the wholeness of it all. You'll now easily comprehend the gestalt of our situation the Modernity ideogram points to:

We are no longer traditional; and we are not yet designing.

Our situation is a (still unenlightened and half-hazard, and increasingly dangerous) transition from one stable order of things (or way of evolving or paradigm, which is no longer functional) to another (which is not yet in place).

The Modernity ideogram points to remedial action.

The way(s) we see the world can no longer be inherited from the past; it (they) must be conscientiously designed to serve its (their) function. Different information must stand between us and the world; and our very relationship with information must be changed thoroughly and accordingly. I use information as keyword to signify both the material artifacts that (can) serve for communication, and the processes and even the very values that determine how those artifacts are created and used. My call to action is to reconfigure information thoroughly—in the manner and the degree that the change from the candle to the lightbulb metaphor points to.

Information ideogram

The Information ideogram shows what the socio-technical 'lightbulb' needs to be like.

You may already be sensing some of the effortless enthusiasm that distinguishes this proposal: We can solve "the huge problems now confronting us"; and we do not need to wrestle with "the 1%" or 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; and we also have education in our control.

Information ideogram

The Information ideogram is an “i” (for "information"), composed as a circle or a point on top of a rectangle; and inscribed in a triangle representing the metaphorical mountain. The rectangle stands for a myriad of documents; and for looking at a theme from all sides; the circle stands for the point of it all; while the triangle or the mountain symbolizes a different way to conceive and structure information; and the resulting different way to see the world. Albert Einstein warned in an interview to The New York Times, in the aftermath of Hiroshima: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. The Information ideogram points to (the quest for) the requisite "new type of thinking" and the information that will make it possible.

The Information ideogram explains what knowledge federation means as an activity.

Which is to complement document broadcasting by structuring and abstraction; which you'll comprehend easily if you imagine us in "information jungle"; and think of knowledge federation as a collective walk up the metaphorical mountain—so that we may see where the roads are leading to; and which one we need to follow.

The Information ideogram points to three kinds of abstraction:

• The horizontal abstraction is represented by the rectangle; you may understand it if you think of projective geometry—as depicting a complex object in terms of a collection of suitably chosen projection planes; each of which presents a simple image; so that together they show us the object from all sides.
• The vertical abstraction is represented by the point; you'll comprehend it if you think of going up a mountain and to the mountain top—from where the picture of the whole terrain is visible.
• The structural abstraction is represented by the mountain; you'll understand it if you think of the mountain as consisting of viewpoints; and of inspecting a hand-held object to see if it's broken or whole — by choosing several distinct ways to look.

The Information ideogram shows how to respond to the creative challenge the Modernity ideogram points to.

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.”

In Chapter Two of the Liberation book I introduce this new accountability through the analogy with computer programming: When in the early days of computing ambitious software projects resulted in chaos—composed of 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 in a new order.

The Information ideogram shows how information needs to be structured.

By depicting the information holon; which is designed to serve as a document template; as a new 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 be used to compose a higher-order holon; so that holons can be combined into a holarchy—which is what the mountain stands for.

Holotopia ideogram

The Holotopia ideogram depicts the new societal and cultural order of things or paradigm that is ready to emerge and will emerge—when proper 'light' has been turned on.

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.

Holotopia ideogram

The Holotopia ideogram comprises five pillars, each of which has a pivotal category at its base and an insight—which resulted by applying knowledge federation to that category—at its capital. The ten themes—represented by the edges joining the five insights—point to the fact that when other themes (including creativity, religion, education, happiness and politics) are considered in the context of five insights—their comprehension and handling too ends up revised and reversed.

This overarching insight resulted from this experiment; which I propose for consideration in our dialog:

We are not informed.

Regarding the elementary know-what, when it comes to the themes that determine our society's evolutionary course—we do not have knowledge; all we have to work with is belief. Our comprehension and handling of the core themes of our lives and times are at the level where our comprehension of natural phenomena was in pre-scientific times.

The stars in Holotopia ideogram represent prototypes; and point to the informed course of action the holotopia initiative will orchestrate.