What is clearly emerging from the continuing development of Lewis Works as a systems based framework is a sense in which and how digital electronic literacy is transforming how we see, relate to and communicate in the world. This transformation of information is vital to the organization, storage and articulation of knowledge in the world and will fundamentally alter our worldview and how we go about dealing with the world.

Cybernetically integrated web-systems are rapidly emerging in many areas of knowledge in the world, and this integration has important implications, I believe, for the manner and form in which we symbolically represent and mediate reality. The very symbolic structure of our knowledge is being thus transformed, and this process has created new possibilities for knowledge and informational organization hitherto unimagined. In short, we may say that human knowledge itself is being rapidly and permanently transformed.

Though language barriers still exist, the Internet is providing a common forum and framework that is truly trans-cultural in scope and global in scale, and this has a consequence of transcending traditional linguistic and related knowledge barriers and providing a common communication platform for all people who are attached to the web.

We may say and look at this in another way, and this is that knowledge, by becoming almost completely virtual and virtually without effective limits in terms of storage capacity, informational carrying capacity or accessibility, will no longer a completely material form of embodiment, and that the symbol structure of this knowledge will become increasingly "scripted" and controlled by programming languages and hence will become increasingly dynamic in its developmental articulation.

In considering this proposition, it is important 1) to invoke a duality of structure model in symbol systems and to recognize 2) that symbol systems themselves are nothing unless human beings enact and make these systems happen. They are entirely relative therefore to the people who are engaged in their construction, articulation and reproduction.

In understanding the first point, it is important to recognize that symbol systems are usually divided between the sign as an external marker, and the meaning that is carried by the sign, or signification. The cybernetics of human symbolic meaning comes in the reading of these sign systems and their construction and utilization in everyday life. The principle function of a symbol is to represent something, to stand for something, that is not physically identical and that is remote in reference from the sign. It is the interaction between the sign and the signification, and the productive play between them, that symbol systems may be referred to as cybernetic--but they are so only from the standpoint of the human symbolizer who is capable of reading the signs and understanding the significations.

To understand the first part of this problem, the duality of structure of symbol systems, it is interesting to look briefly at the human history of the writing and literacy in human information systems and the changing symbolic units and functions these basic units took as a consequence of the progressive development of new writing systems.

If we examine the earliest icon-graphic and pictographic forms of writing, we see that the content of the sign was not necessarily independent of the form of the sign itself, and that both content and sign were relatively context dependent to the period, place and people of its articulation. One could not read a set of signs in a coherent or meaningful manner, if one were not privy to the particular contexts of its production and origination. Thus, petrified texts today that are largely pictographic, mainly as petroglyphs, are, the world over, largely mute as to their true meaning and significance, and their interpretation is largely conjectural and itself contextually relative to the point of view of the observer.

At some point, associated with the rise of early pre-state societies, recording systems that were largely rebus and memory devices arose that served to count things and to record basic events and things in the world, largely in a pictographic manner.

Eventually we have the rise of primitive syllabaries, still pictographic, in which each sign becomes associated with a particular phonemic consonant-vowel sound pattern, or alternatively, large pictographic libraries in which each pictograph is associated with a morpheme, or a sound carrying meaning.

Of course, at some point in the rise of western civilization we have the invention of true alphabets, in which the sign carries a particular phonetic sound entirely independent of meaning, and which can be arranged in an almost infinite number of possible combinations to which meaning is arbitrary and mostly independent of sound pattern.

The printing press and printing techniques was the next major revolution to occur, and the consequence of this was widespread literacy and the rise of mass communications in which information for the first time could be transmitted in a completely horizontal manner across a broad base of population.

It is my opinion at least that with each stage in the development of human writing systems, signs and their significations became increasingly detached and independent of one another, and the symbolic association between sign and signification became increasingly arbitrary and dualistic in structural patterning. Meaning at this stage became increasingly manipulatable in a manner for purposes of remote communication and transmission of information. The remote representation of meaning by unrelated and independent signs is the basis of the definition of true human symbolic systems. With the advent of print technology and alphabetic writing systems in particular, as long as we knew the structure of a language and code decode a foreign script in familiar terms, we could translate any language and text into any other language available to us, certain considerations of contextual parallax and relativity of cultural semantics notwithstanding.

We are at an interesting state now, as we have cybernetic systems in which information can be stored digitally in terms of an infinite number of sequences of ones and zeroes, and these sequences can be arranged and organized into an infinite number of alternative combinations or "strings" that can be assigned meaning in a completely arbitrary manner. In a sense, by such a system we have a universal language that can transcend the boundaries of different linguistic codes. At the same time, it will be observed that in the history of writing, larger and larger quantities of information could be collected and stored in a single location, and this information became increasingly independent of the context of its production and original articulation. Essentially, now, we can store an infinite amount of information remotely, and we have virtual access to unlimited quantities of information almost instantaneously. At the same time, we are able to access contexts for information within the system itself--information has come to completely incorporate its own context on the web.

I think perhaps that domain names have come to take on a particular significance in the modern global information economy, like "Google" or "Amazon" or "Microsoft" because symbolically they stand for something more than just successful e-commerce ventures. It is likely today that more people in the US when they casually hear "Amazon" are more likely to associate it with the ".com" than with the gigantic river in South America. These represent significant new entities in the organization of human knowledge in the world, for they are almost purely and completely symbolic in the cybernetic sense of an arbitrary sign standing for something else that is remote and otherwise physically unrelated.

What seem to be some of the significant features of the new global information ecology? I would include the following points:

1. The ability to store and retrieve digital information is virtually unlimited.
2. This information carries with it a virtually unlimited context, making it nearly completely context independent.
3. For the first time, information and symbolic knowledge is mediated by 'scripts' or by programs that translate instructions and content into binary code.
4. As symbolic systems, digital knowledge systems are becoming increasing automated in the sense of self-organization of such systems, self-initiation, self-modification and self-managing. Human control of such systems are becoming increasingly telescoped out and increasingly remote as a source.

When we talk about artificial intelligence, I think we are talking really about cybernetic symbolization of human knowledge. As with all symbolic systems, we bring to the computer program our intentionality structures, our sense of meaning and contextual relevance. We construct the code and run it and ultimately turn it off or on. I am not sure if automation can ever completely eliminate the ultimate human factor of control, or the basic constraint of the anthropological relativity of knowledge. In a sense, with the digital information revolution, we are coming to realize what might be called a perfect and scale-free cybernetic system of human symbolization. As with all symbolic systems, the requirement of the human cultural component, to construct and to bring meaning to such systems, remains, but his component itself is becoming rapidly transformed. As a consequence, I see knowledge systems becoming on one hand increasingly more complex, and on the other, increasingly more powerful and facile in manipulation and meaning.

General Systems Essays, Vol. II