TRANSFORMATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE INFORMATION AGE

- Avinash Jha When we see something desirable or imagine a desirable situation, we want to have the thing or attain the situation. We use knowledge and create knowledge in the process of reaching the desirable and avoiding the undesirable. As we grow up, we come to understand there is knowledge about what is desirable and what is not. There are deep-rooted traditions and bold dreams about what is desirable, rooted in our attempts to survive and to make our journey through life warm and meaningful. But the world is a cruel place. Just as the humankind was emerging into an awareness of its own capacities to posit goals and achieve them, the society split into those who would organise and the rest who would perform tasks as envisaged by the organisers. Writing was invented and civilizations were born. Organisers created powerful knowledge-systems in the form of religions with their central categories decidedly non-human - like gods and demons and `absolute reality'. These were concrete dams to channel human activity and creativity, and quite successful too. There were widespread traditions, no doubt, which explored the terrain underneath organised knowledge. There were multiple sufisms for every Islam. `Information Age' is the arrangement of world by the organisers of today to channel our creativity and plan our activities for us. The powerful entities - states, corporations, institutes - are acquiring a new infrastructure. Life has to be reorganised a bit. New skills have to be learnt. After all, the organisers are trying their hand at global integration for the first time, thanks largely to information technologies. New dreams have to be woven. Inescapably, organisers need the rest. The central category here is the dark indifferent matter out of which the world happens to be made; matter interacting through blind brute forces. Built on matter, and guided by it, human life is interplay of power and desire, blind and brute again - it is all there in the TV serials and movies. We use information and energy to play this game. This is where our creativity must lie according to this gospel.

Science We are running ahead though. Before information, there was science. Hummankind is terribly dependent on nature, for food, medicines, and just about everything. Knowledge of nature was developing in human societies in diverse ways all through the history, and even through what is called the pre-history, the time before the rise of civilisations. This knowledge remained outside the central scheme of the organisers, as they were more interested in social organisation. Through a complex alchemy of traditions of knowledge, socio-economic forces and human capacity of imagination, an astounding reduction was performed in the early modern era. The whole of nature was reduced to matter and motion. Combined with the mathematical philosophy the Greeks had developed and robust artisanal skills, a view of nature arose which could be used in emerging practical situations. The early humankind saw life everywhere it looked. The earth was of course full of it. And by extrapolation, the whole universe was alive. But if everything was alive and life was the basic principle of universe, what was death? Death was explained away as a pause in life and elaborate burial customs arose to make the transition to other lives painless. When death was recognised eventually, it was associated with the body, which `passeth away'. The soul is immortal, belonging to gods or spirits. The body is the tomb, as one saying expressed it. This metaphysical dualism characterised all the older civilisations. Science, and materialism which grounded it, took one end of this dualism to come up with a world explained only by matter and its motions. It became the flagship of the new class which wanted to overthrow those who derived legitimacy from divine sources. But life became unexplainable now, a puzzle to be explained away. Twentieth century biology explains life in terms of gene which is made of complex molecules. Genes are only interested in selfperpetuation and multiplication just like business enterprises and they carry `information' from one generation of organisms to another, thus reproducing the organism. Science was more that its materialism. It exemplified the spirit of free and cooperative enquiry with endless possibilities. The quest for knowledge was no longer an individual search to find ultimate knowledge. Science became an institutionalised enquiry where pieces of knowledge gained by various researchers built upon each other to advance knowledge. Traditions of organised research came into existence. The intellectuals in France, and

subsequently elsewhere, saw in science a weapon against the religious authorities and superstitions, in a movement known as the Enlightenment. This movement was an invitation to society to rely on scientific method which worked by simple steps every mind is capable of performing. Reading, contemplation or performance of certain central texts played important role in the earlier knowledge systems. Science claimed to read the book of nature directly. And the language of nature was mathematics. The world that we see, or perceive, with its colours, textures, smells and sounds came to be understood as subjective, whereas world of equations, theorems and theories that science constructs became the objective world. The position of authority that the church had reluctantly relinquished, became occupied by science. It became the most authoritative system of knowledge, and there were a host of other bodies of knowledge which were deemed primitive and superstitious. Science marched with the colonisers into the colonised countries where it encountered other people and their traditions of knowledge. The traditional organisers in the colonised countries, like India, eventually found a framework of truce, where science ruled the realm of the material and traditional knowledge like vedas, upnishads etc were given the authority in the spiritual realm. The current Indian government policy of advanced nuclear research along with religious education in schools is in keeping with this marriage of convenience between science and religion. Thus did science set itself up as the authority to decide what was valid knowledge, especially as concerned nature. All necessities of life which we derive from nature came to be mediated by the scientifically produced technology and the business enterprises which used them to produce the goods. This happened in the first place in the technologically advanced countries. Globalisation has resulted in a concerted effort to do the same for the whole world. The ability of people to produce and use food, medicine, houses and other items of use or enjoyment are being eroded or appropriated. Unlike earlier civilisations, knowledge of nature has a central place in the organisation of knowledge as well as society. People's relationship with nature becomes one of naturelover who admires it from the comfort and security of technologically built enviromment.

Information Age The metaphor of `information explosion' was first used in the context of growing volume of scientific papers, preprints, reprints, reports etc circulating among scientists and administrators. Information itself, in the modern sense of the term, owes its origin to the social organisation of the centralised state as it emerged in Europe a few centuries ago. The state apparatus needed knowledge of its realm in order to marshal resources to wage trade-wars and conventional wars too. It collected huge amounts of information about the population, resources. Later, in the heyday of welfare capitalism, complex business systems required to handle a lot of information efficiently. Information is a form of knowledge which can be separated from the knower and circulated. Data and information are forms of knowledge. Data is knowledge which has been admitted to be valid and is sitting somewhere. When it circulates in different circuits it is information. When the information is assimilated into a body of knowledge, it becomes knowledge. An individual's accumulated experience and knowledge is a body of knowledge, so are disciplines like physics and shared knowledge of a community. Amitabh Bachhan does not tire of presenting the act of answering multiple choice questions about bits of historical, mythological or contemporary information as great feats of knowledge in his game show. But these are distractions in the serious business of winning money. The serious action of the information age is where the money is - in corporate boardrooms, stock exchanges, and national policy-making bodies. Information and the networks through which it so reliably and speedily flows are tools of organising global society and economy. Corporations can organise their world-wide operations and public relations. States can organise the nations. Media can organise the consumers. These technologies are capable of transmitting and reproducing texts, sounds, images - in short, information - at great distances in no time. Sometimes, information is attributed mythical powers of reproducing reality itself (like genes!) which is proudly referred to as virtual reality (what great things technology can achieve!). Virtual reality has the advantage over real reality in that you can choose your reality. If we look closely, we find that this is precisely what the information age is offering to the majority of us - we can choose our reality. Especially, when we are not working, regarding which we have little choice. We have to work hard if we want to attain that degree of security,

comfort and isolation - cars, homes, suites, resorts - which will permit us to choose our reality without the incalcitrant world making its presence felt. Then too, only the lucky ones will get all this. But reality looses its charm when it can be selected, work looses its charm when it can't be chosen.

Knowledge in the Globalised World Since there are a lot more people now whose work consists of handling information instead of performing physical operations, some theorists have seen the rise of a more enlightened class of workers, the so-called information workers, or even knowledge workers. The meaning of information or knowledge handled by the workers is extremely circumscribed. The worker relates to this knowledge only through the needs of survival or career advancement. The entrepreneur relates to it only as a seller of information-product. The buyer uses it to perform some functions. Knowledge or information has been transformed into a commodity. Knowledge about the world comes to us through the media, which is organised on the principle of profit maximisation. Scientific knowledge is also a commodity now in games of power and profit. Today science is a multi-national institution spanning the globe with its headquarters in the technologically advanced countries. It has always been tied up with national, military and civilian interests, now it is increasingly coming under the tutelage of business corporations. Scientists are unable to put their publications on the internet because of proprietary and security considerations of corporations and states. Science has cultivated a philosophy of knowledge for its own sake. This allows them to be indifferent to the uses of knowledge that are made by their masters. Science today is characterised by intense competition for positions, publications and rewards. Cooperative enquiry is largely visible in those cases where it is enforced by corporate or national interests. On the whole there is very little independent research being conducted today in the academy and elsewhere. The agendas of research are formulated by governments, corporations and international agencies who fund the researh. With the researchers being forced to seek funds independently by their parent institutions, they are left with little choice but to comply. In such an environment few individuals and institutins are able to ask fundamental questions and seek independent answers.

We have recently witnessed a reappraisal of the value of traditional forms of knowledge. Traditional knowledge of nature has become an arena of struggle between multinational organisations and the communities. Traditional knowledge of the excluded other of matter, namely mind and soul and living body, is spreading globally. There is a huge market for traditional wisdom of this kind. The revolution in information technology may have multiplied the amount of data flowing through global networks manifold, but we are not moving towards an informed society by any standards. Internet access is highest in the US, where more than 34 percent of people use it. But the US is not a well-informed or knowledgeable society. Ignorance of US citizens about the rest of the world is legendary. Even if we ignore this anecdotal evidence, there are several studies done to test the scientific literacy of US population and results are depressing. Informed and Knowledgeable Societies There are three cultural categories under which knowledge appears to us in the globalised world - science, information and tradition - with their own methodologies, markets and pathologies. This inheritance of knowledge is organised for purposes not close to the heart and life of the majority of Earthbound creatures. I have painted a grim and unitary picture of this inheritance. My attempt was to outline the dominant trend so that we can begin to imagine what a real information revolution will look like. Information and getting informed has much more to it than mere technology, though the technology can be extremely useful if we can create different systems and institutions of information. Technology is embedded in information systems, which are ways of selecting, organising and retrieving information. Information can be organised to reveal or conceal. Information systems reside within institutions which are ways of organising people and their work in different ways for different purposes. The way governtments, corporrations, libraries organise and institutionalise information systems are very different from each other. Over and above these, there is a social organisation of knowledge and circulation of information. One kind of information circulates among scientists, another among policy-makers, and a whole lot of different kinds of information among people, mediated through a myriad of institutions and technologies.

There is a growing recognition now of the fact that knowledge is not created only at technical sites like scientific and research institutions. Individuals, organisations and movements are creating knowledge all the time, the significance of which go beyond their specific contexts. But the norms of validation, the authority, lies with these same institutions now. When we do the work of knowledge in the current culture, we keep the knowledge at a distance from ourselves. Knowledge becomes an acquisition and the work of knowledge merely a competitive search for novelty. We do not let the knowledge work at us. So we remain untouched and untransformed by it. We have not even begun to imagine what a real information revolution will look like. My hope is that we will start evolving a wholesome vision of what constitutes a knowledgeable society once we have seen through the social, institutional and philosophical structures that underlie the creation and communication of knowledge in today's world. Can knowledge embody within itself - in its practices, teaching, uses - respect for life, for other forms of knowledge and a respect for its own limitations? Can there be a change in the culture of knowledge, so that we know how to use and enhance the gift of knowledge that human beings possess? Can we understand the purpose of knowledge? [A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the special issue on Rethinking Globalisation of the popular magazine Gentleman in June 2001 under the title Knowledge in the Age of Globalisation. At two places in the article I have used arguments from specific works. Right in the beginning, the division of humanity into the organized and organizers is from Sunil Sahashrabuddhes doctoral thesis submitted to IIT Kanpur in 1980. Later, when I write about the puzzle that death presented to early humans, it is taken from Hans Jonas book The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology.]