Grasping for identity and the challenge of integrative knowledge

From Information Highways to Songlines of the Noosphere: Global configuration of hypertext pathways (Part #7)

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Property: Globalization is drawing attention to other necessary tensions in the information society, namely those associated with intellectual property rights as opposed to the need to disseminate knowledge to those in desperate need of it. Aside from any natural incompatibility between disciplines, concern about property rights is also fragmenting systems of knowledge through commercial secrecy and systems of restricting access to "classified" knowledge "in the national interest". National intelligence networks are being redeployed to ensure national competitive advantage in trade. The future may see the current zero cost access to the libraries of the world via the Internet as a naive honeymoon period.

Competition: Globalization, through the tremendous pressures it creates to compete, is highlighting the pressures towards articulating collective identity. The effort by countries to grasp market share is intimately related to their effort to grasp, maintain and develop collective identity. As presently configured, this is a desperate race with few possible "winners" and a multitude of "losers" for whom any sympathy is at best tokenistic. The explosive question of whether there will be enough "market share" to share amongst those who aspire to participate in this race to sustainability is carefully not addressed. Countries, like people, may become unemployed and unemployable.

Monopolization: Globalization processes have to date been closely associated with "consolidation" of economic interests into monopolies and cartels, however carefully disguised by creative labelling. The impact on knowledge is seen in the tendency to lock users into particular products, notably in the case of software and other proprietary knowledge-ware (as marketed by consultants). Basically if it can be commercialized then it has already lost its integrative function -- it has become a product rather than a "contextulizer". But analogous efforts are made to lock people into particular ideologies and belief systems -- a practice long-cultivated by the religions of the world. Academic schools of thought are also assiduous in deliberately training students to carry on a particular tradition and to oppose, even by dubious means, the explorations of alternative schools. It is in this environment that the frenzied global competition for Nobel Prizes in various domains of knowledge takes place. Clearly it is not within this framework that there can be any hope for a meaningful global competition for Noble Prizes in Wisdom.

Conflated understanding of "universal": The challenge seems to lie in disentangling conflated levels of understanding. Dealing with daily reality seems to demand increasingly specialized and fragmented domains of knowledge -- and increasingly engenders dependence on those with the necessary expertise. At the same time, the crises resulting from inability to coordinate and integrate such fragmented knowledge in response to complex crises provokes anguished calls for both "universal" theories and languages, as well as "global" strategies, programmes, and ethical systems.

Such universal frameworks are then promoted as relatively simple without recognizing the challenges to understanding that they represent -- even if they could be meaningfully articulated amongst the best and the brightest. For they would have to be more complex than the behaviours they are expected to regulate (in the light of the cybernetic Law of Requisite Variety) and as such are a major challenge to both individual and collective comprehension. The need for a different order of understanding is not recognized. Its nature is confused with simplistic understandings of universal and global.

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