Information systems: Internet

Transdisciplinarity-3 as the Emergence of Patterned Experience (Part II) (Part #8)

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As implied above, it is within the context of electronic information systems that opportunities to explore knowledge frameworks of different configurations can most easily be explored --especially if they are to be related to creative and transformative work associated with conferencing.

Steps in this direction include the many attempts at workgroup software (groupware) and situation rooms. However their functions are usually limited in such a way as to reinforce traditional category boundaries. The exception is in the case of task forces that resolve the traditional challenges of transdisciplinarity in the name of project constraints and deadlines.

The challenges of transdisciplinarity have been avoided within Internet by using 'knowbots' (gophers, veronica, archie, etc) to organize information in the light of user queries. The fact that many of these are deliberately based on rodent or ferret-type metaphors is an indication of the quality of organization expected. It is fair to say, at this early point in its evolution, that the conceptual organization of Internet is a mess reflecting the crudest approaches of traditional librarianship.

Much more interesting possibilities are suggested by the current work of Stafford Beer (President of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics) which has led to the development of a set of electronic protocols governing workgroup communication (Beer,1994). This is based on the structure of an icosahedron and is named 'syntegrity'. A world-wide testing programme was launched in 1994. Just how such principles of organization might be used to order communication within Internet remains to be explored.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the challenges of knowledge organization can be at least partly defined in terms of choice of metaphor. This is fundamental to the design of many software systems. New spatial metaphors are being sought which could increase the ability to handle complexity (Benking and Judge, 1994). A key issue is whether these will facilitate Transdisciplinarity-3 understanding. It is perhaps ironic that it could be argued that the huge video-game market is a crude response to experiential needs more closely associated with Transdisciplinarity-2, and that little effort has been made to respond to the needs of Transdisciplinarity-1 -- possibly with the exception of certain forms of mind-mapping (Buzan, 1994) and hypertext mapping (Horn, 1989).