Knowledge
platforms: decipher me or I’ll devour you!
We are living through an unprecedented event in human history: in just one generation
we have passed through three knowledge platforms: from a digital platform (1950-1990) to networks
(1995-2004), and, from the latter, to collaborative networks (2004-?).
If a man does not know
to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him
(Seneca).
Why did we invent grunts,
speech, writing, books? Why did human beings invent the computer? Why,
afterwards, did we conceive networks and why are we now
already disseminating collaborative networks?
What reasons lead us to
create knowledge systems based on increasingly more dynamic information and
communication technologies?
These are
questions I have raised in my doctoral research for the Postgraduate Program in
Information Science, UFF-IBICT
agreement, funded by the CNPq,
and under the guidance of professor Aldo Barreto.
This is a
continuation of the study I initiated with Marcos Cavalcanti, when we published Conhecimento em Rede (Networked Knowledge),
released by Campus Publishing House last year.
This work
has now developed into my first academic paper “Knowledge Platforms”, published
in December 2007 by the online magazine DataGramaZero.
A summary is presented here.
We start from the
principle that humankind – unlike other living beings
on the planet – self organizes through knowledge systems in order to survive. Their
central core is communication
and information technologies – in historical order: grunts, speech, writing, the
book, the computer, mass media, networks, and
now collaborative networks (whose central core consists
of collaborative tools).
Knowledge systems
have always had the mission of disseminating and confronting ideas, extracting
from information relevant meanings to generate development and allow the human
species to survive and evolve throughout centuries, in order to eat, dress,
find shelter, create…
Up to now, knowledge
systems have not gained their due historical importance because it used to take
centuries for them to change. Presently, this has shifted in the ongoing
innovative environment. They started to be altered every decade (with a trend for this
interval to diminish), thus gaining the status of a key
concept to understand our future.
We conceptualized
these systems as Knowledge Platforms that, throughout history, have helped in
the struggle for human survival.
Here are, in a
preliminary presentation, the basic rules of these platforms that I have so far
determined in my research:
1. Knowledge
platforms are not linear. On the
contrary, they show breaks and ruptures.
They are exhausted by
incapacity to sustain their efficiency in an evolving society (consider, for
example, oral discourse, the book,
the computer, and the internet itself without
collaboration). When the cycle is completed, the platform starts to decline and
a new one arrives, incorporating and transforming the information flow of the
previous platform with new dynamism.
2. Hence, a new
platform arises to solve impasses
(entropies) created and left over by the previous one, and to bring in a new
space for society’s innovation and development. Printed books and newspapers
were used by Martin Luther to end the Catholic
Church monopoly over knowledge, and networks brought us the MP3. Collaborative
networks, still incipient, brought about the Linux. Both break with current
knowledge production monopolies.
3. However, at the
same time it unties knots, the
new platform itself already entails new entropies by increasing information
speed and flow in a more dynamic way. From its very inception, it generates new
problems of meaning in so far as it does not allow for transforming the
scattered volume of information into
knowledge, thus creating the need for a new platform at the same time as it
solves a problem.
4. The new platform
that arises is always contained in the previous one, as were the different
collaborative environments on networks, from chats to Yahoo
Groups, prior to the mass
dissemination of collaborative networks.
5. Therefore, each
platform has a mother technology, a central core that
drives everything else
forward. Yesterday there were grunts, speech, writing, the book, the
computer, electronic networks. Today we enter the platform of collaborative
networks – in which collaborative tools propel the new dynamics, as we already
mentioned above.
6. Thus far,
platforms have always been created in a non-planned, spontaneous way, through
core technologies. Their initial conception lacked the dimension of their true
potential. Gutenberg did not plan movable type to make the European revolutions
that followed his invention viable; nor did US
scientists imagine that their long-distance network (much later dubbed the
internet) would
have billions of users in less than 20 years, and that it would change how
society is configured.
7. When appropriated
and disseminated by those who want to change and innovate, new platforms
undergo a rapid expansion cycle with the adherence of the planet’s inhabitants
who intuitively perceive their advantages over a previous platform. Thus, what
defines the dissemination of a platform is not only the will to spread it but
also its real capacity to
accelerate information flow and, through this, ensure people’s adherence. Hence, no platform without massification.
8. However, platform
diffusion is not homogeneous. There are still
indigenous tribes who have no writing; communities of adults who cannot read;
others who never saw a computer, and many people who already use it but had never
connected to any network, let alone participated in online communities.
9. Although they are not
homogeneous, these platforms tend to lead the pack
when it comes to value generation.
They attract the most dynamic sectors that need them to survive. In the course
of time, they impose the
new pattern on the rest of society. The fact is that wherever it exists and
creates wealth, the new platform will be adopted and widely used! The opposite
happens where it is not adopted: it will leave behind a wake of poverty – those
who knew how to read got the best lands!
10. Each platform that arises opens up a new
cycle of social, political, and economic changes.
It outlines the environment so human beings can come up with new ideas and thus
move the wheel of history in their struggle for power (to possess, to be, to
dominate, to do). There would not have been the French Revolution without books
and newspapers; nor Linux without the internet. One change feeds the other in a
dialectical process.
Therefore, we are living through an unprecedented event in
human history: in just one generation we have passed through three knowledge
platforms: from a digital platform (1950-1990) to networks (1995-2004), and from the latter to
collaborative networks (2004-?).
This creates a new
contemporary paradox: each new platform entails more speed, more solutions,
more problems, and more entropy, in an increasingly shorter cycle.
As a sphinx, it asks
us, so far with no answer in Google or Wikipedia: Decipher me or I’ll devour you!