Sorting Knowledge out of the Virtual World

Researcher´s Point of View

Anita RubinFinland Futures Research Centre, University of Turku

www.tse.fi/tutu

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Rob Gonsalves New Moon Eclipsed

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Both several Western scientific theories of change and traditional world views and philosophies recognize two different forms of change:

1) the slow, stable way of evolution towards greater adaptation, and

2) the rapid, sudden and surprising way of evolutionary jumps (mutations)

Society develops either through consensus or through conflict.

The forms of change

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Consensus:• Sharing;• Avoidance of open fights and violence.• Wellbeing

Emphasis on understanding, communality, shared values through compromise and (unspoken) agreements. Culture

Conflict:• Power relations;• Contradictions between different interest groups.

Emphasis on the legitimation and stability of society through control and normative means. Different institutional models and tools to solve them.

Consensus and conflict

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Consensus and conflict in Futures Studies

1. Forecasting aims at control of the future;

2. Critical research aims at change and emansipation;

3. Hermeneutical approach aim at visionary futures studies and through that to new thiking and reconstuction of old models and ways of action;

4. Participatory futures studies aims at human wellbeing and commitment to proactivity (through the construction of own futures)

Conflict

Consensus

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Rob Gonsalves:

Deluged

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1. Empirical tradition: forecasting, scenario working, foresight, trend analysis, etc. Emphasis on what we think about the future; many possible futures.

2. Cultural tradition: participatory methods, futures workshops etc. Emphasis on who makes the future; alternative futures and proactivity.

3. Critical tradition (eg. CLA): social construction, emphasis on why we think of the future the way we do; language, worldviews, values, myths, etc.

4. Intergral tradition: concerned both on the ”inside” (individual) and ”outside” (collective, social) domains: 1) the self and consicousness, 2) cultural world views, 3) biology (behaviour, brains, organisms), and 4) social, technological, geo-political environment, evolution of social systems.

Four traditions in futures inquiry

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Integral futures studies

Incorporation of different scientific paradigms (scientific thinking based on physical-material understanding of reality) to other ways of knowing (eg. intuitive knowing, sprituality, subjective experience, art, etc.) Sees reality as manifold, multi-level, subjective and constantly

changing Recognized cultural interdependence; Is highly systemic in its basci understanding of the world and its

phenomena.

From participatory paradigm: proactivityFrom hermeneutical paradigm: humane point of view, need to

understandFrom constructivism: authenticity, enthusiasmFrom critical paradigm: need to change

…/…

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• What we see as happening in the world is in large part conditioned on what is going on in our own minds.

• We cannot understand images of the future if we know nothing of the structure and functioning of consciousness.

• Therefore futures inquiry is, by its very nature, a broadly inter-, trans-, multi-, meta-, counter-, and even anti-disciplinary activity.

• The viewpoint is dependent on actor’s perceptions and perceptions are dependent on his/her consciousness, values, abiloity to see, choose what he/she sees, understand and, finally, choose the way of action.

Integral futures studies is a meta-paradigmatic point of view is composed of a plurality of perpectives, and recognizes multiple ways of knowing (epistemological pluralism)

…/…

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Theories of social change

Deterministic and non-deterministic theories

Deterministic theories: there is a full causal explanation for each social change

Eg. Spengler´s theory of causal cycles: Civilizations can be compared to biological organisms and therefore societies all go through the same four phases, birth, development, decline and degeneration, and destruction.

Critique:

1) Do not consider sudden evolutionary jumps;

2) Assume human behaviour as predictable;

3) Do not see causality itself as changing;

4) Lead to behavioristic fatalism

No need for futures studies

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time

Evolutionary development

phase of stable development

new information

/ energy

new phase of stable development

development becomes

unpredictable

predicted development

actual developmenteg. wild card

development

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There is no simple and unchanging rational explanation to social phenomena

grades of freedom in choice increase

Many possible futures

Proactivity, possibility to affect the future by intervening the course of events

Giddens: there is reciprocal effect between human intentionality and adaptability

human action is purposeful and intentional and aims at control

no ”blind” mutation in social change.

Futures studies (eg. Malaska): unexpected outcomes, complexity, intervening unrecognized factors

social turbulence and evolutionary jumps, transitionary periods

systemic way of looking ant change

Non-deterministic social theories

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• People aim at rational behaviour (= rationally-oriented action towards one or several goals).

• However, what is regarded as rational is culture-specific and becomes re-defined by the needs and conditions given by culture.

There is a constant, systemic interaction guiding cultural development: individuals search rational explanation to their behaviour from their society and culture, while their choices and decisions then reinforce and also gradually change the culture.

The dialogue of rationality and culture

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René MagritteLe Plagiat1940

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“Change is the other name of time.” (Aristotle)

As a phenomenon, contemporary change• cannot be analyzed as following a fixed, unidirectional path;• cannot be explained by a mere reference to social, political,

economic or even natural laws or some inner logic, and• can only be explained by reference to systemic processes with a

number of controversies, non-linear development, antagonisms which may en up as unintended and non-foreseeable consequences.

The changing nature of change

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The world in which we live is charged with meanings which are partly conscious, partly unconcious.

We understand it with the help of symbols (eg. language) with which we create models of it (representations).

We can act in it with the help of culturally-herited tools and models.

Ability to understand ourseles as a part of the world and act in it in a logical and rational way.

Everyday understanding of what the world is all about.

But what happens when the world changes and our everyday understanding can no more comprehend it and our logic does not tell about it in a coherent way?

Changing everyday reality

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Rob Gonsalves:

Tributaries

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• Human choice derives from both the knowledge base and from the value base – from instrumental and intrinsic values.

Values play a role first in the selection of the idealised outcome, and then the selection of the means to achieve that goal.

• However, we are in trouble every time when we face a situation where routine methods and the traditional way of conduct do not work (= bring about the expected outcome) anymore.

The social endorsement on which we could lean for so long and thus know that our choices and decisions were acceptable and good, is not self-evident anymore. Instead, there are various different social groups, cultures, ways of actions, traditions, practices etc. which we have to take into consideration, evaluate and perhaps choose from.

Decision-making in changing social reality

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Technologies do not take a linear path from theory to application to introduction in society, because they are influenced by social choices at every point. Consequently, technologies bear the imprint of the social processes that have brought them forth.

a spiral-shape effect: social factors shape technology

the properties and effects of technology can in large be seen as social properties and social effects.

when we talk about “information society”, we cannot separate neither information nor the means of its transmission from that society where information is being used and utilised. In the end they are the same.

In the form of technology, change

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Arrestred Expansion

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Communication is just one of the aspects in the experience of meaning: Differentiation, emergence of lines and borders, the formation of reality through that, immediate experience and feedback.

When more and more information is received on a real-time basis, the understanding the logic of cause and effect tends to blur. new situations new challenges

need for the creation of new tools, means, and even language and concepts for coping, empowerment, creativity, and active participation

…/…

Challenges

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• The limits of “the plausible” are continuously redrawn at an accelerating pace and then, after a while, overridden afresh, when new information are gained or created.

• This gradually affects commonly-shared social rationality, starting thus to change the processes of choice making both on the personal and social level.

challenges for totally new models and institutions for choice-making both from the social, economic, cultural and educational point-of-view.

…and more challenges

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Spiral development

In many courses and things, development follows a ”hegelian” thesis – anti-thesis – synthesis –model and instead of a cyclica or linear model, creates a spiral.Spiral is both linear and cyclical development, and something else, something little more than that.

Thesis: individualization & privatization

Antithesis: European heritage of communality and sense of social togetherness; s.c. neo-communality

Synthesis: new forms of doing things together participation, empowerment, eg. recruiting and activism through and with the help of social media.

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Rob Gonsalves:

Time pieces

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When more and more information is available on a real-time basis, the understanding of the logic of cause and effect tends to blur. rapid and unexpected movements in the global

market economy; constant new innovations in information

technology; the growth of information on an exponential

speed.

Need for the creation of new tools, means, and even language and concepts for coping, empowerment, creativity, and active participation.

Need for new tools…

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• The limits of “the plausible” are continuously redrawn at an accelerating pace and then, after a while, overridden afresh, when new information are gained or created.

• This gradually affects socially-shared rationality, starting thus to change the processes of choice making both on the personal and social level.

Need for totally new models and institutions for choice-making both from the social, economic, cultural and educational point-of-view.

the culture of self-actualisation

…and new institutions

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Where industrial society emphasises ”the middle of the road” thinking and aims at balance, convergence and stability, ubiquous society tears apart, divides, exacerbates, emphasizes diversity and develops through controversy Social, cultural and technological schizophrenia

1. New sense of community which is highly sensitive – emotionality of culture;

2. common emotions through the media/social media create an iterative phenomenon (actor’s experience and feeling strengthen just because he/she knows that there are thousands of others feeling the same at the very same moment.)

From industrial to ubiquous society

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CJ. gautampandey:

The importance of togetherness

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Discontent on the already existing is the starting point, nature and grounds of development. On the other hand, the urge for security creates a need to keep things as they are, unchanged. Human need to develop vs. resistance to change

The revolution of humanhood: very soon we´ll be able to charge our minds and consciousnesses to machines/computers/net eternal life, or

ultra intelligent conscious / self-conscious machine which destroys the humankind?

What does it actually mean to be conscious? Thinking is more than the ability to be logical, to combine things and to make conclusions: it is also the ability to feel and connect emotions to decision-making.

New challenges to consciousness

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More and more often the Internet and social media also enable shared experience which is multiversal and real-time by nature (eg. the earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami, 9-11, Princess Diana’s funeral, etc.)

awareness of millions of people simultaneously sharing the same experience;

The first steps of true shared consciousness?

The evolution of consciousness

Would eg. Human 2.0 become possible through multiversal experience faster than as a human-made cyborg? (Ray Kurzweil)

…/…

New and better human beings?

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Global, local, glocal / indepenence of time and place

discourse of overcoming time

The facilitation of everyday life by developing technology more machines more time to – what?

Human urge to overcome death and to live forever

eg. research on the aging of cells

Overcoming aging (eg. Plasma cells made of plastic; the use of stem cells in the construction of new tissue, etc.)

New and better human beings (cont.)

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Stance to the futureFrom merely floating in the river…

To adaptation……

…and from avoiding the problems…

…to innovativity

Sam Taylor:

wood-escape-artist

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What a futurist mostly needs is

1. Ability to find the correct source of information;

2. Ability to critically combine information coming from very different channels into a logic and meaningful whole (from the points of view of good and reliable science, human empowerment and participation);

3. Ability to combine this information and utilize it in concrete actions and choices.

– in futures studies, we speak about proactivity.

And the most important:

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