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Unravelling the DNA of knowlege:
Building regional future memory in the Pacific through
deconstructing the past
'Alopi Sione Latukefu
Department of Sociology
University of New South Wales
Sydney, New South Wales Australia
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
In order to conceptualise our understanding of knowledge within the
conceptual construct of the global knowledge-economy, we must try and break
free of the restrictions, perceptions and social attitudes endowed by Social
Darwinism and dialectical traditions. At the same time, to understand our
current knowledge base and the system within which it exists it is important
to look for 'metaphors' which appropriately describe it in a 'current context'
- thus the correlation to DNA. This paper attempts to put forward an alternative
view of knowledge for the Pacific, where knowledge is no longer restricted
to a linear progression to enlightenment or dominated by European intellectual
traditions - but rather, exists as a complex system of integrated historic
and sychronic understanding (including European traditions), linked into
a knowledge base which accommodates the greater systems of knowledge that
exist in both tacit and codified form and the environment within which
such systems have emerged. Adopting such understanding will hopefully allow
for the future build-out of strong and sustainable knowledge-based economies
in the Pacific alongside the technological infrastructure.
Key words: Pacific, knowledge, history, DNA, systems.
Having been involved in the first of a series of studies undertaken by the World Bank into knowledge assessment and the emergence of knowledge based economies in the Pacific - I am struck by the interpretation of the World Bank and other organisations - as to what essentially defines a knowledge economy. The catalyst to these discussions has been the ubiquitous uptake of TCP/IP 1 internetworking protocols as the default platform to sharing information and knowledge through the internet and other communications mediums. The main thrust of this emerging paradigm, being to base the future development of nations in the Pacific on an 'information' based economy as opposed to industrialised one. Is this a shortsighted perspective of what the convergence of technology and society actually means to people in the Pacific? What is the real impact of the convergence of history and technology within a 'knowledge based economy'? What does the emergence of information intranational and international systems of government, business and community (at least in cyberspace) mean to the Pacific? How does the emergence of more open systems of knowledge undermine the historic colonial hegemons of both knowledge and identity that have dominated Pacific Island thinking over the past two centuries? What lessons can be learnt (or as the case may be re-learnt) to secure the sustainability of not only our environments but also the societies we live in?
Today I would like to address three major themes:
Lessons from the Past, Messages for the Future
What do we mean by ‘knowledge’? Sir Francis Bacon was famous for his maxim that knowledge is power . Historians are well aware of this relationship - and are often key participants in establishing and in many cases consolidating the relationship into the knowledge base of their subject. In the Pacific as in most other parts of the world subject to colonisation - this statement has a powerful resonance. Knowledge, has been monopolised by those in power, and remains today - dominated by the historic, deterministic elements of the past few centuries. In the Pacific's most recent history, unless synthesised or assimilated into the knowledge power base of the hegemonic power in the region - traditional knowledge and tacit understanding of the social, economic, physical and political environment was deemed ‘primitive’ or ‘empirically unsubstantiable’ when judged by the traditions of empirical science and codified knowledge. This is a dangerous mindset for the Pacific and in fact any group to take into the next millennium. One only has to look to the environmental, political, and economic challenges many of the current Pacific states face - in the words of one writer 'a nightmare scenario' - to gain a feeling for the system of knowledge which is pervasive. The same principles apply to traditional societies and their own knowledge base. In order to cope effectively with the challenges thrown up by interactions with other economic, social, political, biological and technological systems through migration and integration into the world economy - traditional societies must be open in their own approach to knowledge. From a social policy perspective - a good example of this is how traditional systems are coping with the rise of youth suicide, crime and brain drain - all of which are attributable in some ways to the opening up of relatively closed systems of knowledge in these societies.
TCP/IP protocols have had a huge effect on the way in which the Pacific and the world as a whole, communicates information and develops its knowledge base. The Internet protocols have created a space in which all information can be held in the same medium and at the same time allows populations the benefit of interactive feedback mechanisms to that knowledge. These throw up enormous challenges and at the same time opportunities for Pacific communities to reconcile their knowledge base and at the same time create a robust system of knowledge management in the technology enabled information economies that are emerging in the region. The convergence of informational organisations and individuals onto a single platform has considerable implications for the way in which populations of the Pacific interact with themselves and with other societies around the world. Governments in the region as with all countries making the shift to an information based economy/society, are in a position to converge the services offered by government, with those of business and community groups. At the same time there is an opportunity to build information architecture that allows feedback loops with the populations to whom information is disseminated - which in the past was very difficult to achieve with the existing technologies and forms of communications. The Internet offers access to an ecology of information previously inaccessible to most groups without enormous expense - while at the same allowing for the preservation and dissemination of previously fragile knowledge bases which had been under threat of disappearing (particularly oral histories and traditions).
One of the key lessons from the past is the way in which the Pacific as a region exists as small populations living on such fragile ecologies, whose survival for thousands of years was determined by:
Future Memory
'Future memory' was a term coined by Swedish neurobiologist David Ingvar. Pierre Wack, Peter Schwartz and other researchers in the Royal Dutch Shell Company further developed it as a concept in their research into scenario planning. A quote from Peter Schwartz's book 'The Art of Long View' (1995) gives an indication to what is behind the process:
The DNA of Knowledge
To explain the meaning of a DNA of knowledge, I must first refer to the synchronic and diachronic approaches to knowledge in western science, which have been built on two major dynamics:
Western science has adopted a linear perception of knowledge in both synchronic and diachronic terms. The influence of this can be seen in the development of the information value progression or chain .
The Alpha to Omega group in the UK presents a useful analysis of the information value chain. Within the value progression of information, lie five major forms of what could loosely be classified as a 'knowledge economy'.
These five progressions are classified as:
Human knowledge, from the still influential perspective of 19th century social Darwinism follows a definitive linear progression usually from a series of stages ranging from Hunting and gathering through agricultural and industrial periods up to the present knowledge period.
Yet is this analysis appropriate for the Pacific at this time? In order to gain an understanding of knowledge, it is perhaps helpful to think in terms of metaphors which are linked to our conceptual understanding of the world at this time. As with nominalism, knowledge in the twentieth century only exists once it has become accepted within the contextual and conceptual frameworks of human thinking. Given the ideas which have emerged over the last fifty years in biological and systems analysis, the metaphor of DNA for knowledge 2 may be more appropriate than the linear model previously outlined
While I cannot claim any expert knowledge of DNA and it's complexity - as a structure it provides a powerful analogy to knowledge. If we take the concept of the 'value chain', and think of each of the elements as nucleotides, and the chain as a whole as a polynucleotide - this seems a more applicable metaphor for knowledge, than the simple idea of value chains. If we accept that 'wisdom' in each of the value chains is 'wisdom of the age' - each strand of 'information value chains' is a continuous spiral of knowledge, which links, from one to another over time.
Each of these strands are also not limited to their own 'value chains' but can split and create new ideas at each intersection, and at the same time have fed into them 'knowledge' from other strands of the knowledge DNA. However, these 'information value chains' are linked intrinsically to each other through time and space - without necessarily being linear, or having historic or binary distinctions between each of the spirals. The knowledge DNA is also inclusive of traditional and tacit knowledge chains, which in the past would not have been considered as part of the 'linearly-progressing' knowledge economy. In thinking of a 'knowledge' economy - the construct of the DNA also allows us to have a more open approach to knowledge and at the same time opportunities to develop sustainable approaches to managing (which I would argue differs from controlling) the knowledge economies of the Pacific as well as the world in general.
The DNA analogy opens the system of knowledge in the Pacific - to allow
for the greater integration and at the same time differentiation, that
is possible in technology enabled knowledge based economies. While perhaps
not as politically powerful as historic linear systems, the DNA approach
allows us insight into the workings of knowledge. At the same time it provides
a model which we can use to 'pick apart' and study (as in genetics) each
of the 'bits' that make it up, with an awareness of their place in the
greater information ecology within which they exist. Understanding the
knowledge DNA will allow the Pacific to build information architecture,
which is appropriate to the needs of its populations. At the same time
creating links both within and outside of the region to capture the tacit
knowledge, which exists within the region, would help in many ways to avoid
the 'informational' problems of the past. Learning from this model will
allow the Pacific as with all knowledge economies to take full advantage
of mechanisms such as future memory - to find applications for the greater
knowledge economy which the internet and TCP/IP protocols have created.
References
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind; collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. San Francisco, Chandler Pub. Co.
Bertalanffy, L. v. (1971). General system theory : foundations, development, applications. London, Allen Lane.
Blattberg, R. C., R. Glazer, et al. (1994). The Marketing information revolution. Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press.
Davenport, T. H. and L. Prusak (1997). Information ecology : mastering the information and knowledge environment. New York, Oxford University Press.
Horton, A. H. (1997). 'Understanding the Information Economy: The Information Value Progression' Alpha to Omega Ltd. http://www.alphaomega.demon.co.uk/paper2.html
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1972). The savage mind. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Partington, A. (1996). The Oxford dictionary of quotations. Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press.
Savage, C. M. (1996). Fifth generation management : co-creating through virtual enterprising, dynamic teaming, and knowledge networking. Boston, Butterworth-Heinemann.
Schwartz, P. (1995). The art of the long view : planning for the future in an uncertain world. New York, Currency Doubleday.
Wiener, N. (1950). Human use of human beings. New York, Macmillan Company.
Notes
1 TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): -
The Internet is the result of networking thousands of computers around
the world. In order to make this possible it was important to have a standard
way to transmit data from one computer to another, and one which would
be accepted by all operating systems and hardware as a standard. Many different
'standards' were put forward, but ultimately it was the simple and robust
packet switching protocols developed by the Advanced Research Project Agency
(ARPA) for their own proprietary network (ARPANET) which was eventually
accepted as the standard - and is referred to as the Internet. TCP/IP
is a two tiered protocol (as it names suggests), with one protocol used
to transmit data in a standard manner and defining where to send it (IP),
with the other acting as a monitor, keeping track of the data's integrity
as it is passed from one computer to another through telephone lines or
other communications infrastructure and if need be sending packets (of
data) again if corrupted by the means of transmission (TCP). (Hunt C.,
1998, TCP/IP Network Administration, O'Reilly& Associates, Cambridge.)
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2 Knowledge as with all 'systems' can be viewed as 'closed' or
'open'. Systems of knowledge are not 'concrete', but rather constructs
which we develop to make sense of the environment in which we exist.
In constructing these systems we can therefore choose to take a closed
system approach which restricts and binds the system we construct through
the establishment of 'parameters'. These parameters are generally accepted
as legitimate means to building understanding of phenomena. Closed systems
tend to therefore establish binary oppositions between what are internal
versus external factors to the system. These parameters can include time
and spatial factors as well as physical ones. Alternatively we can choose
to take a more open approach to systems - which is sometimes referred to
as an ecological approach. I would argue that a DNA metaphor is on this
tract.
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