by Hugh M. Lewis

The digital information revolution has engendered what we can call a new kind of knowledge revolution--this knowledge revolution is altering our collective worldview and shared symbol systems, and is a revolution of transformation of our collective conscious. Eventually it is leading to dramatic changes in our shared cultural and social patterns as well, and most remarkably, to the rise of a new global e-culture that has its own unique and historically unprecedented patterns.

At the outset, I would be the first and the last man on earth to claim that both these revolutions, the information revolution and the knowledge revolution, are based upon, and leading us toward, a systems-based way of thinking and behaving in the world, and we may without equivocation assert the claim that the larger trends of transformation of human reality are part of a general systems revolution, or a general revolution of human systems as these are patterned, articulated and developed on earth.

The main object of this article is to suggest that there is no clear dividing line between human knowledge, as defined phenomenologically in terms of human consciousness and shared awareness, and the digital information systems that modulate and store signals in meaningful patterns and transmit these signals over multiple networks. These different forms of knowledge constitute parts of a large system, a human articulated knowledge system, that depends increasingly upon the digitization of information in external forms. Digital information has come to largely replace the primary functions of print media as the vehicle/medium for the storage and transmission of information. Larger institutional structures and infra-structural systems have come to depend critically upon computer-based informational systems, in a manner that they cannot function properly without them. Increasingly as well, the individual human being is enmeshed in a web of electronically generated and controlled patterns that carry significance for them on many different levels, given rise to a new form of global literacy, e-literacy, that entails the capacity to effectively "read" and manipulate these signal patterns.

E-Culture can be defined as that cultural patterning of human adaptation that is based upon digital information patterning and processes in communication and transmission of information, and in the articulation of behavioral adaptation by human beings. We can say certain things now about E-culture: first, it is global in scope, by definition. It can therefore be said to transcend effectively traditional or ethno-national cultural boundaries and patterns of adaptation that characterized humankind before the rise of widespread e-literacy, and its consequence will be to continuously erode and eliminate, or at least to further "embed" these kinds of constraints in our common, shared adaptation in the world. Secondly, we can say that it is leading to a common equi-final "streamlining" of human civilization in a manner that serves to relativize many differences. Thirdly, it provides a common framework for the sharing of information and adaptive patterning on a global basis, which patterns of sharing will tend in the long run to alter the structural patterns of the distribution of resources on the earth.

Conventional AI practice and theory is based upon a fundamental philosophical dichotomy of the mind-body problem, and separates clearly the problem of natural intelligence from that of artificial intelligence. AI is founded upon a framework of inter-disciplinary science that triangulates between Psychology, Philosophy and Computer Science. Left out of this formula has been the important role played by the knowledge context and the social and cultural construction of knowledge systems, and their modes of articulation in typical behavioral settings. 

At the heart of this issue lies a fundamental interdependency between human learning, cognitive adaptation, and the primarily social environment in which this naturally occurs and becomes normally reinforced. More to the point, human intelligence, by virtue of its complexity and long learning requirements, is intrinsically dependent upon the behavioral/adaptive settings upon which it must be articulated. Piaget recognized this in a fundamental way in terms of his theory of child cognitive development and the requirement of "cognitive/adaptive equilibriation" with the environment that this development depends upon.

The cognitive dependence of humankind upon externalized reference coordinate systems goes back a long time before the advent of computing and digital information technologies. The hyper-development of certain regions of the human brain, as a consequence of extended hominid evolution, in coordination with the development of nerve & muscular structures in the facial-nasal-pharyngeal region and the hands especially, was based upon a certain generalist pattern of cultural-behavioral adaptation that served interests of human survival and reproductive success and that permitted wide-spread adaptive radiation across many different eco-systemic niches.

With the advent of the Age of Computers, the fact and necessity of this interdependency of Human knowledge upon the world in which it is voiced, through which it articulates and functions, and upon which it is referenced, becomes so central and so vital to our everyday patterns of adaptation, that it is no longer so easy to ignore or overlook.

I would make a further claim that in the articulation of knowledge this interdependency cannot be ignored, and that it is increasingly affecting what and how we do things, even on a very personal and individual level of articulation. It is predictable that the information revolution will tend to have greatest effect, and consequence, among younger age sets than upon older generations, and that there will therefore be a very flat pyramid of distribution of e-literacy/e-culture distributed mostly at a very broad base of younger individuals, and narrowed to a short and shallow peak at the other end of the age-developmental continuum. As a further consequence, we can expect a kind of built-in pattern of delayed effect from this process of e-globalization, because of the delay in child development and maturation that is normal to the human societies and increasingly postponed in more developed societies.

In our rising digital, electronic culture, our E-Culture, there is no further strong dichotomization to be had between the medium or the message, between the subject and the thing, between the word and its reference. The way we symbolize the world, how we see it, parse it up, and respond to it, is changing structurally in fundamental ways. Dialectics will increasingly serve the purposes of a more comprehensive and relativistic framework of interaction that does not ignore complexity in problem solving, but embraces it. 

There is therefore a sense of convergence between what may be called by some hermeneuticists the "term" and the "thing" that the symbol represents, where the difference between the two is no longer as clear cut, and much, much more convoluted, than it has been at any previous time in our human cultural development. This is both a good and a potentially very dangerous thing--because on one hand as we develop powerful knowledge tools by which to effectively liberate us from the ages-old constraints of our own ignorance, often culturally constrained, we are also prone to develop, at the same time, new techniques for knowledge manipulation and misinformation, with potentially far more destructive consequences.

What this process of informational development betokens for us is a transformation of our shared consciousness, of our collective worldviews, the symbolisms used to articulate and reinforce our worldview and our sense of order, and the behavioral patterning of response that we will adopt and adapt to in relation to one another. We are discovering new ways of thinking about the world, and in the process the forms of knowledge itself that we value are thereby becoming transformed in turn. I think we are moving away from a mind-set and worldview that implicitly regarded knowledge as a collection of facts, a library of books, a set of recorded archives or records, and more toward a working model of a dynamic, self-maintaining, automated data-base structure--more of a flow-process over a network of alternative pathways. In short, we are taking knowledge and breaking up its traditional paradigmatic structure, and reassigning values and references in a more dynamic way, both from a functional standpoint of increased utility and efficiency value, but also in a symbolic way to apprehend more relevant meaning to our world. Knowledge becomes not so much a collection of data or facts, but a process of knowing and manipulating patterns of information into various assemblages, a "fact" or "bit" of information taking on value and significance depending on what current position and context it occupies. We see this when we update and "defragment" the hard-drives on our computers--we shuffle around the file-systems and references in a way that organizes them, from the computers point of view, rather than from our own. 

We would like to think somewhat hopefully and naively that all this will be for the better, in the long run, and we know it could be, but we also must maintain our reservations that we must always accept the good with the bad.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I