Nepôsts - Rascunhos Compartilhados &#187; Nepôsts in English!

Translated by Jones de Freitas. Edited by Phil Stuart Cournoyer.

The show must go on

Carlos Nepomuceno — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:49:35 +0000

A really revolutionary truth is not an illusion; we have to see things as they are – Ferreira Gullar – from my phrase collection in Portuguese.

(In this podcast text translation, reflections on population, new demands, and the need for innovation, as ways of understanding the emergence of the Internet.)

We are seven billion people on the planet who consume, believe me, 21 billion meals a day – from breakfast to dinner.¹ They are 21 billion data processed in the logistics of food, without mentioning the volume of information involving health, education, housing, transportation, and leisure.

Questions: Was it possible to make progress in this planetary journey, barricaded within a field lacking interaction between newspapers, radio, and TV? With our computers isolated and their data bases blocked to public visits?

The Internet brought this adjustment, in the same way the printed book oxygenated the closed castles of the Church and monarchy, which hampered the development of civilization. Thus, the web creates an information, communication, and knowledge environment that facilitates the logistical progress needed to sustain seven billion souls who are not ceasing to multiply. The web also enables a resolution of the dichotomy between the potential speed of demand and the slowness of supply. That’s why it has propagated so fast and brought so many changes.

Actually, the show must go on.

That’s it. Thank you.

¹ North Americans have up to six meals a day, while Africans have just one. Their combined average? Three meals a day.

Translated by Jones de Freitas. Edited by Phil Stuart Cournoyer.

The Internet is a social oxygenation media

Carlos Nepomuceno — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:17:31 +0000

Fate only provokes the incident; it’s up to us to determine the quality of its effects – Montaigne – from my phrase collection in Portuguese.

Continuing the reflection I started here, I developed and provided more details for last week’s podcast.

See, below, the discussion on the concept of the Internet as a social oxygenation media.

We see the media Internet in different ways, depending on age, temperament, and interest. The more conservative insist on comparing the web with the radio and television. They say: “It’s another normal and traditional change of media.” On the other hand, the most daring assure us that we are dealing with something, let’s say, sui generis, something close to a Martian phenomenon.

Actually, the Internet, like the radio and television, introduced a new media – this is a fact. However, it’s worth noting that both radio and TV, which had historical importance in shaping society’s course, were media that reinforced and expanded practically the same voices that expressed themselves in the large-circulation newspapers. They were media – and still are – that are tightly controlled because of their high cost and easy monitoring. Thus, we can call them media which reinforce prevailing power structures.

However, the web doesn’t fit this model. It enables society to have a multiplication of voices at low cost and in ways difficult to monitor. No, we are not dealing with something from Mars, as we had the same phenomenon (something similar) with the arrival of the printed book, in the face of the monopoly of manuscript book – one of the pillars of the Church and monarchical domination in the Middle Ages.

Thus, we can refer to the web as a social oxygenation media, which opens spaces for new voices. This fact – not the technology per se – marks (and will continue to mark) the changes we will witness and are already witnessing.

Social oxygenation medias open fertile ground for the exchange of ideas and, therefore, for broad changes.

The printed book, let’s recall, greatly facilitated abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Print media “introduced” a soul into Blacks and native peoples, and thereby brought about the possibility of bringing that oppression to an end. We are still witnessing this process in society. In addition, print communication introduced the concepts of democracy and of the economy of capitalism itself. It helped to create and to consolidate the prevailing ideology of its time.

The coming civilization that emerges with the possibility of exchanging ideas on the Internet will settle accounts with this past, deeply revising concepts already called into question but still in force. This revision will include, for example, the ecology, companies’ profits, and social differences.

We are on the verge of a civilizational upgrade, which will establish a new elite on a new level of civilization. This elite will control the media until a new media comes along to oxygenate society, in a civilizational flux that comes in and out, from one media to the other.

That’s it. Thank you.

We see the media Internet in different ways, depending on age, temperament, and interest. The more conservative insist on comparing the web with the radio and television. They say: “It’s another normal and traditional change of media.” On the other hand, the most daring assure us that we are dealing with something, let’s say, sui generis, something close to a Martian phenomenon.

Actually, the Internet, like the radio and television, introduced a new media – this is a fact.

However, it’s worth noting that both radio and TV, which had historical importance in shaping society’s course, were media that reinforced and expanded practically the same voices that expressed themselves in the large-circulation newspapers. They were media – and still are – that are tightly controlled because of their high cost and easy monitoring.

Thus, we can call them media which reinforce prevailing power structures.

However, the web doesn’t fit this model.

It enables society to have a multiplication of voices at low cost and in ways difficult to monitor. No, we are not dealing with something from Mars, as we had the same phenomenon (something similar) with the arrival of the printed book, in the face of the monopoly of manuscript book – one of the pillars of the Church and monarchical domination in the Middle Ages.

Thus, we can refer to the web as a social oxygenation media, which opens spaces for new voices. This fact – not the technology per se – marks (and will continue to mark) the changes we will witness and are already witnessing.

Social oxygenation medias open fertile ground for the exchange of ideas and, therefore, for broad changes.

The printed book, let’s recall, greatly facilitated abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Print media “introduced” a soul into Blacks and native peoples, and thereby brought about the possibility of bringing that oppression to an end. We are still witnessing this process in society. In addition, print communication introduced the concepts of democracy and of the economy of capitalism itself. It helped to create and to consolidate the prevailing ideology of its time.

The coming civilization that emerges with the possibility of exchanging ideas on the Internet will settle accounts with this past, deeply revising concepts already called into question but still in force. This revision will include, for example, the ecology, companies’ profits, and social differences.

We are on the verge of a civilizational upgrade, which will establish a new elite on a new level of civilization. This elite will control the media until a new media comes along to oxygenate society, in a civilizational flux that comes in and out, from one media to the other.

That’s it.

Thank you.

Translated by Jones de Freitas. Edited by Phil Stuart Cournoyer.

Capitalism 2.0: revising the profit ethic

Carlos Nepomuceno — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:07:22 +0000

Companies should respond to online attacks with the truth - Barry Libert and Rick Faulk – from my phrase collection in Portuguese

As we know them today, companies are the result of a long process initiated with the Industrial Revolution, after the arrival of the printed book, which created an environment for information exchange highly favorable to centralized powers.

Basically, companies emerged and developed to offer products and services to help us in solving social problems.

We all need to dress, eat, drink, and entertain ourselves….

And corporations are here to respond to these demands.

Something is offered to the market and a given remuneration is obtained for the service/product.

Thus, the logic of profit was established as a need to stimulate someone to provide society with solutions for the problems. A stimulus to solve problems and get everybody happy with the relationships cost/benefit, client/supplier.

So, it should be clearly stated:

Companies originally arrived to solve society’s problems and, THEREAFTER, to be remunerated for this, to generate profit.

With capitalist advances, after the French Revolution, company owners began to strongly influence the central power. They also felt free to make profit into the heart, the driving force of the process, pushing problem solving into the background.

Stimulating a market law in which the client would have several choices and the strongest would prevail.

A good company is a profitable company!

Solving society’s problems becomes secondary, or at least just necessary to continue having profits – in a dialectical relationship.

Anyway, this approach managed to keep consumers content, in a framework of only partially available information.

In fact, consumer satisfaction was based on little information and no participation.

Often, the marketing and advertizing used were based on disinformation and manipulation to hide the fact that the final objective was not the shareholder but a consumer deceived by illusions.

Despite going against common sense, this was maintained as the basic motto of capitalism.

Clients are always right, after the shareholders, of course!

On one side, companies with their greedy shareholders and their public authorities to ensure a certain degree of control, reinforced by the media. On the other, the passive and manipulated consumer.

The popular singer who drinks X but advertises Y.

All this was grounded in an information environment controlled to give the illusion that the consumer was king, while in truth the shareholder was the majesty.

Smoke, smoke, smoke.

Moreover: the product arrived ready for consumption at the baby’s table.

Look at the plane…open the mouth

Now, things have changed.

The logic of putting profit first, and ahead of problem solving will be revised because the new information technology changes the environment for sharing of ideas, in which control is no longer the same.

There is no longer the vital silence among consumers to support the previous ethic.

There are dissenting voices that can be recovered through Google.

And now, what?

As in a magic trick, the environment controlled by the media in which corporations had total control over what circulated, as they sponsored the advertisements that supported their functioning, was ruptured.

Of course, there have always been some small gaps, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed by a talk between the company president and the newspaper owner in moments of crisis.

As there was no space to clarify positions that privileged profits to the detriment of problem solving, the space for manipulations was quite big.

On television, the company talks about your bank, your real estate company, your home appliance manufacturer, but behind the scene there were a thousand maneuvers so what you bought had a Trojan horse: first the profit, then you.

This was the lie maintained by a system based on the information control of the Media Ages.

Today, with information sharing between consumers, via electronic networks, the space for this kind of manipulation is increasingly narrower.

It might change the face of the very concept of capitalism.

It will be increasingly easier for consumers – and this includes citizens in the face of the state – to monitor and find out how much a company/government is focused on the problems of the consumer/citizen or on the shareholders/government friends.

In addition:

Now, even the problem to be resolved at the market end, which justifies the product and the service, is rapidly changing!!!

Thus, a partnership with the consumer for cooperative production becomes necessary to develop products.

This leads the company to bring the former manipulated consumer into its decision-making process, at higher and higher levels. Hence, consumers acquire a status formerly reserved only to shareholders.

This has been taking place slowly, but it’s a strong trend.

Consumers want to see their problems solved and they accept the profit, provided there is a logic that protects their interests.

The space for the Trojan horse is much narrower!!!

This process is not imposed but it advances through convincing people. This changes the basic DNA of the profit versus problem concept.

It is increasingly disseminated the idea that creating partnership networks with suppliers, employees and consumers is key for accelerating innovation.

However, those networks can’t be based on manipulation, but on a commitment from all to solve the problem at the origin which, by the way, is now increasingly mutant.

Of course, it is expected that someone delivering a service be remunerated, but not for placing profit before problem solution activities.

This is the deepest change capitalism will undergo in this information environment we are now entering.

To create social networks is to revise old concepts.

That means again placing consumers and their problems into the foreground, and shareholders in second place, because if consumers migrate to the competitor, who is going to adopt the same network, its shareholders will be the ones to benefit.

It’s an environment that revises everything.

So, take note:

The creation of social networks involving consumers – a discourse now prevailing in the market – presupposes revision of the concept of profit versus problem solving.

How many are actually ready for this new stage?

A new ethic is being established in which the consumer’s problem is above everything, as there is an effort to ensure not only loyalty, but his/her involvement in thinking through together the solution.

This alliance can’t be based on the past ethic.

Shareholders should be the first to awaken to this, as profits will go to those who first understand the new ethic.

No, it’s not the Internet that is changing capitalism.

The Internet only brought along a new technology that enabled a new environment for sharing and articulating human actions at a distance. In this environment corporate kings and popes no longer can demand that everybody pray in Latin or kneel on maize grains in he same way.

Today, the faithful is no longer the same.

They share amongst themselves on a global scale.

And, they are much quicker at catching lying priests.

They want another church to consume, in which they will be proactive participants. Above all, they need to believe the priests are on their side, keeping within reach their powerful weapons to find out when they lie.

What do you say?

Translated by Jones de Freitas. Edited by Phil Stuart Cournoyer.

(This article in Portuguese.)

http://nepo.com.br/2009/12/01/capitalismo-2-0-a-revisao-da-etica-do-lucro/

Five needed truths about the Internet

Carlos Nepomuceno — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:35:23 +0000

We shouldn’t have illusions – the Internet didn’t come to save the world. José Saramago, from my phrase collection in Portuguese.

(Well, I’ll continue to talk a bit more about ideas going through my mind after the RioInfo debate.)

Here are some theoretical premises for reflection on the role of the Internet in the world.

1- We always lived with knowledge networks. We had the speech network, the print network (industrial book), audio network (radio), and image network (television). The Internet is an evolution of those previous ones, even more horizontal, fast, and with more alternatives. It’s the most complex network so far created.

2- Networks are core elements in our survival and their topology defines social power structures (Castells’s recently released book talks a lot about this. ) The topology is changed. Management of institutions is changed in the middle and long term, from a more hierarchical network model to a more decentralized one – which I even refer to as a new approach to the issue: Management by network (in Portuguese).

3- This phenomenon, although apparently spontaneous, natural, and charming, is indeed systemic. It’s not the first time networks have changed topology, and it won’t be the last. In my opinion, this happens every time the number of inhabitants and their informational demand exceed the current network capacity to enable the timely exchange of ideas. The more numerous we are, more demands we will have and more complex channels will be needed to generate innovation and new products. For this, the network needs to be more horizontal, gradually eliminating intermediaries, in order to open new exchange points and reduce the pressure of informational demands.

4- Thus, topological changes in the network don’t alter human patterns in the relations with other human beings; cognitions change, but not the way of relating to ourselves. If we put all our bets on social revolution, based on technology, we will have renewed power structures, with new injustices in the place of old ones. Is it worth fighting for those new structures? Of course, it is, but knowing their limitations if we think in broader terms. We will end up with a new king (Google and its allied powers in this case – see China) sitting on the same throne – with our new old problems.

5- Social networks are the talk of the town lately. However, they are not the first example of worldwide horizontal collaboration. The social network of writings, of the printed book, starting in 1500 enabled us to “invent” the universities, among other things. It also had its links, the sum total of experiences, a great paper Facebook, which changed the world first with ideas and later with products.

See what Burke had to say about the industrial book, which MacLuhan considered to be the first mass media, as all others that followed it:

As many as three or four million copies of almanacs were printed in seventeenth-century England, as well as in Venice, with almost two million copies, through the work of 500 publishers, this resulted in general in the production of over 16,000 titles with 18 million copies in Europe. As proof of this “explosion,” it should be noted that approximately 400 universities had been founded only in Italy around 1600, and they were spread all over Europe, from Portugal to Poland (retranslated from Uma história social do Conhecimento/ A Social History of Knowledge, Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed., 2003.)

(Prior to the Internet, there was nothing more collaborative than academic work.)

Do not believe that collaboration is a novelty.

It’s only one more necessary motion, as in the past, to advance as a species. (Don’t fool yourselves!). Thus, collaboration on the Internet (as in the universities) has not and will not lead us to another civilization.

It’s more a process of change, out of necessity, not generosity, within a new support system – the network of our time.

Collaboration is – and will always be – used to solve survival problems of information and in no way can be viewed as a philosophical change of human condition, which requires a deeper and more general discussion of our nature. Unfortunately, the Internet, as the book prior to it, doesn’t bring answers to this.

People collaborate out of necessity!

So, it’s urgent to continue deepening the historical study of similar network ruptures in the past, or else we will never have the precise dimension of what we are currently going through, in what we should believe, and what changes will actually make a great difference for future generations. This includes a philosophical vision more geared to wisdom in broader terms than the reductionism of utilitarian knowledge, as we see today.

Otherwise, we will take an updated old for a completely new phenomenon.

And the new in this movement might get confused with something old.

That’s it for now!

Do you agree?

Translated by Jones de Freitas. Edited by Phil Stuart Cournoyer.

The three stages of Intranet 2.0

Carlos Nepomuceno — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:53:02 +0000

I understand projects 2.0 as looking at the ground without letting the sky out of sight – Rômulo Rocha, an employee who participated in the Wikishop to discuss the project 2.0 in Dataprev – from my phrase collection in Portuguese.

Building the corporate bridge, from 1.0 to 2.0.

As I wrote in this blog, there are two collaborative trends underway in current society:

Technological – the maturity of a technology (Internet) which allows collaboration at a distance (many to many), through tools 2.0, after centuries of unidirectional tools also used also at a distance.

Ideological – the practice of collaborative group work, which has emerged since the caves, and doesn’t rely on technology. Collaborative work may or may not utilize tools to expand the limits of a given physical space. The use of collaborative technologies doesn’t necessarily lead to voluntary collaboration, but it opens up a broad array of involuntary actions which paves the way for voluntary ones, as we will see later on.

It is also necessary to understand that in implementing 2.0 technologies we can achieve two types of collaboration:

Involuntary collaboration – clicks, actions such as online purchases and download of software are acts you perform out of need or purpose. Without your knowledge, they help the system to record your actions and draw up a personal profile as well as a group profile. This is a novelty in the networked digital world, as everything we do leaves a digital track. This was not possible in the Middle Ages or in the time of books, newspapers, radio, and television. In this type of collaboration, based on the use of suitable tools, you do not spend any of your time to collaborate with the whole network. It’s a natural outcome, it’s part of the action itself, of the process.

Voluntary collaboration – actions in which you deliberately express an opinion, commentary, rating, evaluation, or blogging, wikiing, tagging, answering online surveys and polls. In all these actions, the collaboration basically relies on your will, voluntary action and motivation. You need to dedicate some time to make it happen.

This conceptual perception of the process will help us to think through projects 2.0 for corporate intranets.

Thus, there are three different stages during the implementation of intranets 2.0 – which may or may not develop in parallel.

Let’s see.

Stage 1 – changing the way we think about work. It’s basically a cognitive shift to accept the introduction of involuntary collaborative tools into the current process, with a new form of control over data and work files. This change no longer entails saving the results of my work on my hard disk, at my department, or in a restricted area, and touches the following ingrained feelings of the generation currently in the job market: fear of losing power, shame of exposure, narrow departmental corporatism, among others.

Stage 2- beginning to work in a different form, through the gradual implementation of 2.0 tools, which enable users to derive benefits from involuntary collaboration, originating in the collaborative internet, directly through day-to-day work , through publication in open areas, and overcoming the idea that such projects will require people to work harder. This won’t happen, as we saw earlier that involuntary collaboration is automatic. What does change is the routine for saving data. Before they were closed and now they are open to general access. This allows data to be complemented by the person accessing them (comments, notes, tags, etc.), combined with searches, relevance by number of clicks (as Google does), etc. will make activities less repetitive. Knowing what others did, I’ll do better in less time, building on the work already done and increasingly eliminating the current involuntary collective stupidity by replacing it with involuntary collective intelligence.

Stage 3 – achieving full collaboration, both voluntary and involuntary, through the collaboration of all, with a change in approach. Over time, it is expected that the new practices of involuntary collaboration will lead to less repetitive tasks. It is also expected that with involuntary collaboration time spent on searches will be reduced, allowing more time to enhance routines, improve ways of doing things, with more effort dedicated to innovation and less to repetition and duplication. Based on this, there is a stimulus to commenting, tagging, blogging, discussing, enhancing. This process will be facilitated if companies start to value and promote employees who voluntarily collaborate with the whole enterprise. This attitude begins to be stimulated and recognized as an important element by the community. Monitoring the data is necessary to execute this activity. Usually, corporations resisting these changes fear loss of control, and have doubts about how to differentiate initiative from indiscipline. These are current issues in companies that want innovation and agility, increasingly decentralizing power.

These three stages summarize the goal of projects 2.0. Companies abroad are following this route. See the work by Jakob Nielsen, with comments in Portuguese and Spanish.

In the projects I’m involved with in this area I could perceive that the first thing people resist is accepting that the implementation of projects 2.0 will change the current way of working.

In other words, they want to implement collaboration in digital networks without changing the current corporation.

This is a myth!

This would be a burden on people, who would have to work more, and after hours!

In this case, something is out of focus!

Careful with the focus!

What is done, right off the bat, is to change the form of work to avoid repetition, by modifying the repository of digital data, resulting from the intellectual effort of each employee/collaborator.

Thus, we will have a repository 2.0 – antiredundancy and antirepetition, participatory and automatically saved.

For lack of precise information about what is coming next because it’s new, people are quite resistant to change, trying to introduce activities that won’t modify work operations. This is an escape to keep the company unchanged, without collaborative tools, creating fake actions, fantasies, to avoid the process of change.

If the company directors are not firm in their purpose, forget it!

Someone well respected in the company has to buy into the idea and sell it to the group!

It’s very easy to emphatically defend the view that collaboration and work are two different things.

This must be denounced and fought against during the implementation of projects 2.0, as there is a tendency to remain as 1.5 companies – with some concepts or even one with a few 2.0 tools, but with an old attitude towards work.

Beware of fake projects 2.0!

We are talking about changing the way of doing work (from keeping data in closed areas to placing them in open ones). Ultimately, it’s a shift in corporate management, from a model of vertical information (from top down) to a more loose and horizontal model (from bottom up), new forms of control based on the web experience.

Thus, it’s not anarchy, but a new kind of operational management, more consistent with current market speed, extracting all the good things the internet has brought us, generating in the end more innovation and value.

(Everything will be easier to accept when your competitor starts to implement this idea. The problem is that by then you will be lagging behind!)

Projects 2.0 are a frontal attack to the our present-day neurosis of viewing work and collaboration as antagonistic terms.

Thus, I suggest that we all go to the blackboard every morning and write down:

There is no difference between collaborating and working!
There is no difference between collaborating and working!
There is no difference between collaborating and working!
There is no difference between collaborating and working!

It’s necessary to rethink, redefine, and review the term co-llaboration (work together).

Write on the blackboard:

There is no difference between collaborating and working!
There is no difference between collaborating and working!
There is no difference between collaborating and working!
There is no difference between collaborating and working!

Thus, step one is to view in a different way the act of working itself.

Today, we work alone

In sum, let’s put it in other words to avoid any doubts.

We are paid to produce cognitive data and the result of this work is not available to the organization as a whole. Even when it’s available, it doesn’t allow people accessing those data to collaborate in an involuntary fashion, through 2.0 collaborative tools, by just clicking and adding relevance.

Or else in a voluntary way, making comments and rating so each result of the actual work becomes more relevant, innovating, and accurate.

Only this would prevent throwing money (resulting from intellectual capital) out the window!

Finally, introducing collaborative tools into the work process changes where we save our work, without in any way increasing the time spent doing it.

As Sara, from Dataprev, put it:

“It can’t create a problem; it must be a solution!”

Working and saving the results in public corporate spaces doesn’t imply more work, but just a different way of storing our work, without increasing the time spent in the operation.

Write on the blackboard:

If a project 2.0 increases people’s workload, it’s got the wrong focus!
If a project 2.0 increases people’s workload, it’s got the wrong focus!
If a project 2.0 increases people’s workload, it’s got the wrong focus!
If a project 2.0 increases people’s workload, it’s got the wrong focus!

It’s a model similar to the one that has been used in sites distributing and selling software for years. See the figure below:

In a fast and efficient way, a simple and intelligent drop down menu can offer information on what type of data are useful, as each visitor aggregates value to the database.

Thus, instead of doing double work, the organization 2.0 will increasingly avoid repetitions.

The time spared with the elimination of repetitive work will be dedicated to innovation, readying people for the second stage: voluntary collaboration.

People will be more motivated and use their minds more creatively.

Will we make it?

What do you think?

Translated by Jones de Freitas. Edited by Phil Stuart Cournoyer.

Human needs and complexities of knowledge environments

Carlos Nepomuceno — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:26:23 +0000

According to Google Scholar, “Motivation and Personality,” by AH Maslow, 1970, Harper & Row, is a book often quoted by researchers working in many areas.

The author created a simple pyramid to describe human needs.

A good translation and definition of this pyramid can be found in the paper “FATORES MOTIVACIONAIS DA COMUNIDADE CIENTÍFICA PARA PUBLICAÇÃO E DIVULGAÇÃO DE SUA PRODUÇÃO EM …” (Scientific community’s motivational factors for publishing and disseminating their production in scientific journals), by several authors, which I took the liberty to reproduce below:

We should note that human needs, starting with survival, go on to well-being, recognition, and self-actualization. These latter needs require increasingly sophisticated knowledge environments to be fulfilled.

For example, to meet the needs at the pyramid base – the physiological needs – one has to know how to acquire food, clothing, and water. The person also needs to know where he or she will find shelter. Once this is settled, the following stages come into play.

Let’s imagine a catastrophe like hurricane Katrina, in which homeless people have gone through different stages, from searching for safe drinking water to finding the next meal, a place to sleep, until they began to think about how to restart their lives.

To make this possible, information has to be increasingly articulated to meet those needs, which are becoming more sophisticated with human evolution in society.

a) the number of people living on the planet, which in turn;

b) expands the amount of needs, which in turn;

c) require an increasingly sophisticated communication and information apparatus to meet those needs within the timeframe demanded by the situation.

Thus, there is an increase of the planet’s population and expansion of human needs. These can be quantified in products and services.

Thus, based on Maslow’s pyramid, it’s possible to establish a relation between the number of people on the planet and requirements for increasingly complex information and communication environments, i.e., knowledge environments.

K= population

Y=human needs

Z= knowledge environment sophistication

The more people on the planet, the more demand for information. Therefore, knowledge systems must be more sophisticated.

In the formula:

K x Y =Z

From this perspective, for each stage of human history, knowledge environments became more sophisticated to meet the needs of an increased population.

So, knowledge is not a new factor, nor can we say we live in the first knowledge society. All we can assert is that we live in a knowledge society that heads toward a level of sophistication required by the current population on the planet.

So, a kind of theory of proportionality between human needs and the complexities of knowledge environments emerges.

This discussion is part of my doctoral dissertation.

(A versão em português pode ser vista aqui.)

Translated by Jones de Freitas. Edited by Phil Stuart Cournoyer.

This post in Portuguese.

Exclusive interview: Pierre Lévy

Carlos Nepomuceno — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:37:09 +0000

I’ve been exchanging Tweets with Pierre Lévy.

He mentioned that he would come to Brazil in August.

I asked him for an interview by e-mail, because I was curious about his current work.

Generously, he sent me his e-mail address and the interview was done.

Here is the result:

Nepô – You have published many books in the past and achieved an important role worldwide as a philosopher focused on understanding technology issues. I’d like to know if you have been working on a new book these days? If yes, what is it about?

Lévy - For the last seven years, I have been working full time on the design of an artificial language, called IEML (www.ieml.org) that has the expressive capacity of a natural language and the computability of a programming language. My first goal is to solve the semantic interoperability problem by using IEML as pivotal language for semantic tagging.

My second goal is to solve the problem of the self-reference of online collective intelligence since it becomes possible to track the semantic content of the flows of information in cyberspace when the semantic metadata is in IEML. The IEML research program is complementary of the “semantic web” research program but goes far beyond and has much more ambitious objectives. There will be a book in one or two years but the language itself is more important than the book that will explain it.

Nepô – Why don’t you have an active blog?

Lévy - Because, as a philosopher, I’m not interested in investing my time and efforts into ephemeral texts. I enjoy reading blogs (or reading newspapers), but I don’t enjoy writing a blog (or writing for daily papers). I am more interested in deep and long meditations that explore unknown subjects about which nobody is speaking and that very few understand or are interested in. The result of these kind of meditations can be a book (of course the book can be in digital form) or another sustainable object (like IEML).

Nepô – In one of your books, you wrote from a historical point of view about three cognitive ecologies: oral, written and digital. What kind of changes do you believe determine the rupture from one to another? Do you believe that there is some kind of rule in these ruptures? And, if you could predict, what will the next ecology be? And when?

Lévy - The technical basis of the media ecology of digital culture is already there. We are witnessing the very beginning of the new era. But we still have not invented the new concepts, institutions and, above all, the new*symbolic systems* that will fit the digital cognitive ecology. The design of IEML is an attempt to fill this gap. The rupture between cognitive ecologies is marked by a change in the mindset, in the workings of the collective cognition: this will happen very soon, maybe even in one generation.

Nepô – You told me that you were coming to Brazil in August, I’d like to know what for?

Lévy - In Porto Alegre: http://www.internetcorporativa.com.br/forum2009/Palestrante.php