Use of information

Computer-aided Visualization of Psycho-social Structures (Part #11)

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The implication to this point has been that what is required is more powerful research insight into the different types of organized complexity. This is in fact totally insufficient. Research information systems are used by research workers and tend to be of little significance, directly or indirectly, to non-research areas -- particularly in the social sciences. How exclusive should an information system be?

A means needs to be found of making the type of information discussed here directly accessible to the following information users:

• research workers
• education of students, briefing of diplomats, etc. policy-making
• program management. [30]

Non-research needs tend to be viewed with a certain contempt by research workers, but this is merely the counterpart to the contempt in which research conclusions are held by those involved in day-by-day decision-making. [31] This antipathy arises from the tendency of researchworkers to focus on problems which decision-makers consider irrelevant and to publish their results in an incomprehensible form, and the tendency of decision-makers to use techniques and models which research workers consider antiquated and to focus on symptoms rather than causes of problems.

But even a sophisticated alliance between research and decision-making is totally insufficient. Students must be educated about the psycho- social system -- and this education should be based on the same data used for research and decision-making and not on antiquated simplifications .

Educating students is educating the (relatively) powerless. Even this complex of users is inadequate to break the dangerous situation now predicted for the very near Future (if not in many ways already a reality), namely that the politician, working in tandem with his technological advisors and program designers, is increasingly in a position to put forward interpretations of urban or world "reality", programs to deal with it and evaluations of those programs as implemented, based on knowledge either unavailable to those who might challenge him or unavailable at the time that a challenge might be most effective. [32]

In other words, it would be extremely irresponsible to create a sophisticated tool for a system which will use it to strengthen its own position at the expense of its environment. As Herman Kahn points out, we now face the sinister situation in which the world is becoming so complex and changing so rapidly and dangerously and the need for anticipating problems is so great, that we may be tempted to sacrifice (or may not be able to afford) democratic political processes. [33] Faced with this threat, it might be better to suppress initiatives to produce such a weapon against the powerless and to bank on the protective advantages of complexity. This is the dilemma: either one opts for inaction in the belief that the misuse of science and technology will breed its own compensating mechanisms and possibly the decay of the system -- or else one banks on the advantages which would accrue from a wider availability of such a tool.

In terms of the second option, there are three other necessary sets of users:

• public information on system modifications
• public monitoring of system modifications including privacy protection and participative action
• use by the individual to de-fragment himself.

The first two deal with means of updating weak links in the democratic process. The third concerns private use by the individual to straights out or order his own mental models of his environment. There may be others.

These seven uses should, ideally, be interrelated (see Figure 4) via 2 common data base and the much discussed data networks. Each requires different techniques of data presentation, filtering and manipulation for which the visual display unit is ideally suited. Insights and problems detected in one use should affect the priorities of other uses The current tendency is however to build separate information systemsof different levels of sophistication for each use, so that they are quickly out of phase, incompatible and in many cases inadequate and useless.

Figure 4: Interrelationship between different uses of information, which should ideally be based on a common data-base to avoid spastic change in society

In such circumstances, developments in each area do not reinforce and counter-balance one another, rather the psycho-social system evolves in leaps and starts. Information systems constitute the nervous system of planetary society. The fragmented approach to their design and use would seem to lead directly to social crises analoqous to those found in the case of certain disorders of the nervous system, as though the psycho-social system was some organizational dinosaur suffering from spastic paralysis and aphasia.34 Integrated and harmonious development can only be achieved if the information system is designed for multipurpose use -- and especially by those with resource problems, as in the developing countries and in the decayed areas of developed countries.

If the different systems cannot be interrelated, it mould be preferable as a strategy to make the visual display technique available only as an idea clarification and concept integration aid, and block its systematic use for the penetration of organized complexity. (This may be easy since most organizations have a natural horror of having their detailed structure exposed to others -- despite their own interest in that of others.)

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