General Systems Theory and the Information Revolution

by Hugh M. Lewis

These are strange and trying times for many people, not just in the United States, but around the world. Traditional symbolic structures, worldviews, and organizational systems are failing to keep pace with the development of the flow and storage of information in an emergent global system. New possibilities for organization and adaptation are emerging with new practical solutions, almost on a daily basis, and yet the entire earth seems in critical disrepair, politically and socially dysfunctional.

The US government, in collusion with big business, at local, regional, state and federal levels, is bankrupt not just economically, but morally and structurally as well. It has become by and large its own worst enemy, and embedded conflict of interest, corruption, double standards, public unaccountability and administrative authoritarianism has increased, even to the point of systematically obfuscating and undermining fundamental constitutional principles. Political equality has been jeopardized by affirmative action policies that have created racial and ethno-political quota systems and have permitted a communal based political orientation to be legitimized and to compete with a contract-based style of government "of the people, for the people and by the people." And an administrative culture of denial has developed that systematically sets itself beyond the possibility of true reform. 

Class polarization has increased dramatically, and social institutions, always under pressure for lack of resources, are inundated by masses of poor people. In short, there are more rich people, and more poorer people, than American society has ever known in its entire history as a nation, and upward mobility between the classes, the traditional motor of the middle class, has been effectively undercut and bottlenecked to almost nothing. The United States has a medical system, and an educational system, and a range of other social service systems, that are not only ailing but failing miserably to meet the growing human needs. "Deregulation" of governmental controls and restrictions over industry and business, as well as over traditionally governmental areas of involvement, can be re-read as a general abnegation of responsibility by the government for the role it is supposed to play in protecting and promoting the public interests of the common people.

We may summarize that the United States has set itself on the brink of becoming an underdeveloped "Third World" society, not for want of development, but as a consequence of its over development in the wrong directions and its failure to protect itself or its people from its own contradictions. Its central problems are:

1. Over population as a consequence of unmitigated and uncontrolled immigration, and with the consequence of increasing degradative socio-environmental circumscription.

2. Pervasive, multi-level Administrative Authoritarianism & Corruption.

3. Embedded Conflict of Interest between Government & Big Business, and the reneging of responsibility of the government to protect and promote the interests of the American people.

It is an expectable outcome that, under the guise of the threat of terrorism, basic freedoms that Americans have traditionally enjoyed will be increasingly curtailed and circumscribed. In short, the domestic problems that the US is currently experiencing are increasingly isomorphic with the problems of global stratification that the entire world has been undergoing and, as a colleague used to tell me, the American economic empire, the capitalist world system, has come back home.

Denis Gabor, the Nobel prize winning scientist for his invention of holography, wrote early on about the discrepancy and lag between progress in scientific inventions and social innovations. In spite of the work of many social scientists, myself included, social institutions around the world remain largely intransigent and resistant to serious developmental efforts and positive reforms promoting democracy and the more even and open flow of resources between more people.

I would like to suggest that the information revolution has been upon our heels for some time now, really beginning with World War II, and it has resulted in a fundamental transformation in our knowledge, our way of understanding and relating to the world, and hence in how we accomplish our basic human goals. Underlying all the issues stated above are the dynamic consequences of our failure to come to terms in a meaningful and adaptive manner with the transformational changes caused by the Information revolution. It therefore behooves us to go back to the basics of how we look at and think about the world, and to develop new habits and ways of doing things in the world to advance what in the final analysis amount to our common human interests, needs and goals.

While it is arguable how much and what way the "noetic transformation" of a digital based electronic literacy has occurred, to borrow the concept from the orality/literacy debate by Jack Good, Marshal McLuhan, and Walter Ong et. al., it is nevertheless clear that in terms of information storage and information transmission, we have not only gone from traditional print to digital technologies, but we have created what I would call a holothetic network system (distributed integration) in which virtually any information can be instantaneously accessed from any remote location at any time, limited only by the channel capacity of the carrier and the storage capacity of the server/client devices. And these capacities are exponentially increasing with each passing year, while, at the same time, the networking capabilities of the entire "meta-system" are growing more complexly integrated and convoluted with each passing day.

This "meta-system" is largely self-organizing in the sense that up to this point, no single, centralized entity or agency controls or is capable of monitoring the entire system, though systematic attempts are made, especially by some totalitarian, and even some democratic governments, to implement as much timely over-control as possible. 

We may speak of the digital transformation not only of the organization and topography of the knowledge landscape, but the instantaneous creation of what is termed the "common stock of knowledge"--the principle knowledge resource that any society and ethnocultural grouping has for achieving productive and reproductive adaptation and success in the world, and for secondary symbolic integration of worldview. 

We can say furthermore that knowledge itself is being transformed by becoming virtual in its digitized, textual form, and by its acquiring a new topography on the worldwide web. This transformation is similar to the change from the Dionysian to the Apollonian, from oral based to literate societies, accompanied by the emergence of alphabetic scripts and text-based religions, administrative bureaucracies in state organized societies, and by the advent of scientific knowledge and technology in the development of applied systems. But the contemporary revolution is not just a continuation of this traditional shift, but an entirely new revolution of collective consciousness that is now occurring with much greater consequences for our world than anything previously possible.

Many traditional knowledge boundaries and conceptual categories, formulated first in a classical era, and defined largely within Academically circumscribed departments, no longer apply in a strict way, and new cross-disciplinary interests, applications and programs are emerging to fill in the growing gaps. Newly emergent fields of interest and contemporary problem sets tend to crosscut these formal knowledge boundaries, demanding new kinds of approaches and broader-based training in a number of areas of expertise.

We may say that knowledge itself is taking a new form, and this is not just digital as a text, but electronic, and perhaps more importantly, virtual in form, and hence the knowledge landscape is achieving a new kind of landscape represented largely by the worldwide web and all the websites and information contained within this vast and growing global network.

We are looking at a fundamental paradigm shift of global worldview, away from a classical Platonic/Aristotelian view of the world, and of our place and role within it, toward a new way of seeing and relating to the world that is based upon the possibilities created by the information and resulting knowledge revolutions. If institutions have been slow to keep pace with these significant transformations, and remain mired in the mud of a routine-operational, business as usual past, this is only because they are generally controlled by people who collectively lack imagination to see constructive, long-term change or the initiative to make change happen when it comes. They are stuck in an old symbolic framework, and old worldview, that is becoming increasingly anachronistic and maladaptive.

What does General Systems Theory have to do with this process? In no uncertain terms I can say that General Systems Theory and the applied methodologies arising from it are the new paradigm, the new set of symbolic terms and relations, that is necessary for humankind to deal with and adapt to the revolutionary transformations that are afoot in the world. No other paradigm is suitable or sufficient to meet these kinds of needs and to mediate a new set of adaptive relationships with the world.

But General Systems Theory is not just about computing and computer networking. It is about human knowledge and social organization and behavioral interaction. It is about natural systems and our scientific knowledge of these systems; it is about philosophy and mathematics and the quest for truth and greater understanding of the world. It is about problem solving and planning and the strategies we take to achieving success in the world, whether this is in business, government, science, education, religion, the arts or any other field of endeavor.

In this general consideration we may apply the following points:

1. All natural phenomena, of which humanly created phenomena are a subset, are patterned and partially determined phenomena by rules that may be said to be implicit to the recursive and dynamic structure of the pattern.

2. All natural phenomena are stratified upon numerous levels that are analytically and synthetically describable in terms of part-whole processes and in terms of emergent properties associated with the dynamic patterning of entire systems at each level.

3. All natural phenomena are interrelated at these numerous levels, and articulate within a larger meta-systemic framework that encompasses every other possible system, and the patterning of these interrelationships may be said to be inherently or intrinsically complex.

In conclusion to this brief essay, we can suggest that there is inevitably occurring a general convergence of modern systems towards the resolution of central problem sets. Solutions to these complex kinds of problems will be always and only partial and incomplete, but we can see the disappearing skyline of the future as the direct consequence of the streamlining and the developmental optimization of modern systems towards common solution sets. This is especially so if we are to achieve a more reasonable, collective adaptation to the future global landscape. But we can also emphatically state that there is nothing inevitable about this process, especially if the drag of our obsolete modes of thinking and behaving in the world is too great and prevents this kind of integration from proceeding when and where it could in a timely fashion. 

One final point about natural systems of all kinds, including human systems: their developmental trajectories always have a beginning, a middle and an end and are subject to dynamic influences of complex changing variables.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I