Keeping the grid up

From Information Highways to Songlines of the Noosphere: Global configuration of hypertext pathways (Part #6)

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In the light of the earlier points concerning the value of understanding in terms of a spherical grid, this simple model can be used as a means of discussing the challenge for practitioners obliged to draw on knowledge from different disciplinary domains around the Web. The insights of any one discipline provide an essentially "flat earth" understanding of knowledge as a whole -- whose essential globality may be for the user to discover. Beyond any such discipline's horizon, all is irrelevant, if not effectively "beneath" comprehension.

Tents and domes: A practioner has to function a bit like someone putting up a tent. Each support or anchor must be held in a kind of grid pattern of contervailing supports or anchors. By getting the balance right, the tent can be gotten up and stabilized to define and encompass a new cognitive space. So it is with the countervailing insights offered by different disciplines.

More ambitious than a humble tent, are the space-enclosing domes used for major exhibitions. Again there is a logistic challenge in getting the grid of a multitude of elements in place so that the whole can be got up and kept up under adverse environmental conditions. Getting a continent-wide power grid up and running presents similar challenges, as does an inter-continental telephone grid or the Internet itself. But although these metaphors are suggestive, the implications for a knowledge grid remain elusive -- and perhaps necessarily so.

Further insights can be obtained by exploring the implications of tensegrity structures as progressive spherical approximations (Judge, ****), notably in the recent initiative of Stafford Beer (1994) in the design of communication structures with associated electronic protocols.

Requisite variety and necessary differences: In the domain of knowledge, what might be understood as effectively "keeping a grid up"? The tent metaphor suggests that it would involve some kind of balance between those forms of knowledge that pull together -- reinforcing each other --- and those forms which oppose each other as incompatible -- being somehow mutually exclusive. In this sense both forms are necessary to sustain a diverse pattern of knowledge. Efforts to focus only on the first kind, and to systematically exclude the second, lead to naive forms of universalism which are unsustainable in practice -- however attractive they may appear as an ideal in which everything is positively complementary.

This approach draws attention to the value of differences and notably those which appear intractable and irreconcilable. Society is currently tortured by various forms of polarization which many hope to avoid by emphasizing one pole and denying the other. Policy-making is inhibitied and undermined by value dilemmas. And there are calls from realists to manage differences between parties rather than to strive to eliminate them. This suggests that, as in the tent metaphor, opposition could, and should, be used to "keep the grid up", namely to sustain the whole pattern of knowledge.

Collapsing distinctions: It is strange how differences have become an anathema in society. Valuable distinctions are avoided in the hopes that somehow knowledge can be "collapsed" into universal harmony and synthesis. Unesco, as the mandated intergovernmental guardian of science, culture and education (and transdisciplinarity), has as one of its key principles "the elimination of discrimination in all its forms". Although conceived to address racial and similar forms of discrimination, by emphasizing "in all its forms" (therefore including those synonymous with discernment), this principle effectively precludes any meaningful discrimination between different forms of knowledge, methodology or belief. And yet it is precisely by distinguishing such differences that requisite variety (in cybernetic terms) is ensured in any global pattern of knowledge. Failure to discriminate collapses the grid.

Competing forces: It is vital to recognize the many competing tendencies in the emerging information society. The much publicized push towards globalization, with all it implies in terms of homogenization and impersonal generalities, is matched or opposed by a pull towards localization in the form of regional, national and sub-national cultural expressions. Asia is resisting imposition of western understandings of human rights (curiously indistinguishable from universal rights). Individuals in all cultures are resisting top-down imposition of ethical and other patterns of knowledge which could be seen as a new form of totalitarianism.

Inability to discriminate makes it impossible to articulate universal patterns which are distinct from totalitarian patterns. But this said, it is also useful to recognize the contribution of globalization in opposing the fragmentation and balkanization of society, knowledge and understanding. In this case, as in other examples of polarization, both tendencies are vital to a healthy society -- and to "keeping the grid up".

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