From the Fringe

by Tonie Putter

A THREE-LEGGED stool is a useful analogical device: it graphically reveals the need for balance between all three legs before the stool can be useful, comfortable and reliable.  Applied to this Acacia Conference, this analogy could, and should, inform the dialectic between information, connectivity and content.

It is reasonable to measure intentions by actions; to infer the relative importance accorded to issues, from the amount of time they explicitly receive in agenda and the naming of events. Thus, the simple act of putting information first in acronyms such as ‘ICT’ gives the ‘i’ a comparative advantage that no marketing publicist would either miss or devalue.  And, it is a cognitive dominance that remains no matter how magnanimously information junkies toss a bone to the necessity of understanding the difference between information and knowledge, and then getting on with the process of framing all subsequent discussions and decisions as if the i:k difference has no predicating standing or consequences.

Don’t be surprised if a person who is genetically privileged and “enabled” to write computer programs and then talks of the need for “open standards in communication”, also uses the word “communication” in a very specific and confined way.  When a computer person talks of “communication” the subject is data and information transfer, and this is a universe apart from the way a critical social theorist such as Jurgen Habermass discusses epistemology in his acclaimed Theory of Communicative Action.  (By the way, the ability to build a mental model of the world is not a genetically hardwired privilege confined to computer programmers. As Piaget and the South-African born Seymour Papert have so eloquently revealed, children do it when they engage in “pretend play” - when they play with a leaf as if it were a bird; when they play with a stick as if it were a snake - and when they build naïve models to explain to themselves where rain comes from.)

Here’s a cynical view of http:

H = Hierarchical: as in “I write you read”;

T = Tope-down: as in “I am the (web)master you are the slave”;

T = Transfer: as in the widely discredited notion of “technology transfer”; and,

P = Protocol: from proto as in first - something fixed, a rule to be obeyed.

Communication without content and connectivity without explicit dialectic purpose is like trying to play Hamlet without the Prince; but, who knows, perhaps it can be done.  For my part, I marvel at Diderot’s insight that “there is no information outside interactions” and in Gerald Edelman’s axiom that “there is no information outside the brain”.

Remember: he who controls the tools controls the workers (slaves?); he who writes decides what our children read.  Therefore, Africa’s critical concern should also be about writing relevant content and not only or predominantly about publishing, unless, of course, as the imbalance in IT agenda imply, we feel comfortable with the idea that we only need connectivity to gain access to existing information.

It takes years to write a book and days to run it through the technology of the printing press. Certainly we need a better balance between information, connectivity and content, because how else could we, holistically, (i) address cognitive issues critical to learning as a human process, and (ii) debate concerns such as those dealing with intellectual property rights to indigenous knowledge?  As improved, but dialectically uninformed ‘connectivity’ has amply revealed, it also, in the absence of provisions for ‘protective disclosure’, provides a quick, exploitative way to suck information from a distant source into an undeserving patent claim.

So, going beyond “whose information society is it anyway”, we also need, explicitly, to ask “what is the nature of knowledge and who owns it”?

 ·        Tonie Putter is EcoPort Global Programme Manager -  cellphone: 072 722 207 8855. E-mail: t.putter@ecoport.org. URL: http://www.ecoport.org