Many futurists, technologists, and democratic theorists have asserted the Internet and modern information technology are enabling the realization of an authentic direct democracy, or at least a more participatory democracy. Conversely, critics contend advances in technology are only automating the existing democracy. This article explores the potential of modern information technology to enable the emergence of a more participatory democratic system. In particular, the key foundations of modern direct democracy are analyzed with respect to promising technological developments.

In what follows, I appeal to Charles Babbage’s discussion of the division of mental labor to provide evidence that—at least with respect to the social acquisition, storage, retrieval, and transmission of knowledge—epistemologists have, for a broad range of phenomena of crucial importance to actual knowers in their epistemic practices in everyday life, failed adequately to appreciate the significance of socially distributed cognition. If the discussion here is successful, I will have demonstrated that a particular presumption widely held within the contemporary (...) discussion of the epistemology of testimony—a presumption that I will term the personalist requirement—fails to account for those very practices of knowers that I detail here. I will then conclude by suggesting that an alternate account of testimonial warrant, one that has heretofore been underappreciated, ought to be given more serious consideration—in particular because it is well suited to account for those actual practices of knowers that the personalist requirement leaves unrecognized. (shrink)

This paper outlines and reviews three forms and associated discourses of the 'knowledge economy': the 'learning economy', based on the work of Bengt-Åke Lundvall; the 'creative economy' based on the work of Charles Landry, John Howkins and Richard Florida; and the 'open knowledge economy' based on the work of Yochai Benkler and others. Arguably, these three forms and discourses represent three recent related but different conceptions of the knowledge economy, each with clear significance and implications for education and education policy. (...) The last provides a model of radically non-propertarian form that incorporates both 'open education' and 'open science' economies. (shrink)

Concern about the commercialization of research is rising, notably in testing new drugs. The problem involves oversimplified, polarizing assumptions about research and development (R&D) and intellectual property (IP). To address this problem this paper sets forth a more complex three phase RT&D process, involving Scientific Research (R), Technological Innovation (T), and Commercial Product Development (D) or the RT&D process. Scientific research and innovation testing involve costly intellectual work and do not produce free goods, but rather require IP regulation. RT&D processes (...) involve an unrecognized IP shift from a common IP right in public goods like information and knowledge to private IP in products and other hard assets. The question then is, what kind of IP right: private or common? Since scientific research and innovation testing require openness about adverse findings, and wide, low cost diffusion of results, they require a common, inclusive IP right. Common IP is appropriate to both sharing knowledge goods and recovering the cost of production. Research is furthermore compatible with commercialization and support by other social interests. On the other hand it is incompatible with the exclusionary private IP rights that permit restrictive publication or total suppression of information. Private IP rather than commercialization conflicts with the openness requirements of scientific research and innovation testing. Commercial funding, however, is in principle compatible with research and testing, especially when regulated by a common IP right. This reflects a pragmatic view of the fundamental interconnections of knowledge and other social interests. (shrink)

The nineteenth-century strategist Carl von Clausewitz describes “fog” and “friction” as fundamental features of war. Military leverage of sophisticated information technology in the twenty-first century has improved some tactical operations but has not lifted the fog of war, in part, because the means for reducing uncertainty create new forms of it. Drawing on active duty experience with an American special operations task force in Western Iraq from 2007 to 2008, this article traces the targeting processes used to “find, fix, and (...) finish” alleged insurgents. In this case they did not clarify the political reality of Anbar province but rather reinforced a parochial worldview informed by the Naval Special Warfare community. The unit focused on the performance of “direct action” raids during a period in which “indirect action” engagement with the local population was arguably more appropriate for the strategic circumstances. The concept of “data friction”, therefore, can be understood not simply as a form of resistance within a sociotechnical system but also as a form of traction that enables practitioners to construct representations of the world that amplify their own biases. (shrink)

This article examines the social, technological, and energy limits to growth from a historical perspective. Various suggestions to surmount these limits are evaluated and found to be wanting, especially in the face of a rapidly evolving energy crisis as the era of oil comes to an end. It concludes that there are genuine reasons to be concerned about the human prospect.

In the context of technology development and systems engineering, knowledge is typically treated as a complex information structure. In this view, knowledge can be stored in highly sophisticated data systems and processed by explicitly intelligent, software-based technologies. This paper argues that the current emphasis upon knowledge as information (or even data) is based upon a form of rationalism which is inappropriate for any comprehensive treatment of knowledge in the context of human-centred systems thinking. A human-centred perspective requires us to treat (...) knowledge in human terms. The paper sets out the particular importance of tacit knowledge in this regard. It sets out two case studies which reveal the critical importance of a careful treatment of tacit knowledge for success in two complex, technology-driven projects. (shrink)

In this paper, we view creativity through the lens of innovation, a concept familiar to archaeologists across a range of contexts and theoretical perspectives. Most attempts to understand ancient innovation thus far, we argue, have been limited by their lack of capacity to cope with the multiple scales of innovation: Those that track widespread changes, like the beginnings of metallurgy, fail to account for the changes experiences by individual craftspeople; those that do justice to the details of the micro-scale, with (...) ‘thick’ description, cannot well explain the regional adoption of new practices. Here we develop an intermediary position, at the meso-scale, which we hope can serve to integrate these different scales. It is based on the notions that all innovation entails learning and that learning is very often supported at this meso-scale, through ‘communities of practice’. Drawing on the ethno-archaeological literature in particular, we emphasise how learning is a process of embodied cognition. Our archaeological case study is then drawn from the Bronze Age east Mediterranean, where a striking innovation in pottery making — the use of rotative kinetic energy via the potter’s wheel — sees a very uneven uptake from region to region over the course of many centuries. We propose certain differences in community organization from one region to another that might account for such variation in the adoption of an innovation, with the island of Crete in particular seeing a much more stable trajectory of adoption than many of its neighbouring areas. (shrink)

In this article, we extend the concept of technology beyond the conventional understanding of systems and artifacts as embodiments of particular functionalities that are variously enacted in local settings. Technological artifacts or systems epitomize operational couplings that extend beyond the human-technology interface. Such couplings entail multiple, unobtrusive, back-staged links that evade human interpretation yet are critically involved in the reproduction and control of social relations. Cast in this light, technologies emerge as complex rationalized embodiments for structuring social relationships and, in (...) this quality, complement and occasionally compete with institutional modes of governance. We explore these ideas in the empirical context of cultural memory organizations (e.g., libraries, archives, museums). As the outcome of the technological developments that have marked the field over the last two decades, the operations of memory institutions increasingly mingle with those of information aggregators and search engines. These developments reframe longstanding professional practices of memory organizations and, in this process, challenge their institutional mandate. (shrink)

This essay suggests that the 21st century knowledge economy represents a moderate form of moral community. To show this I first clarify the ideas of moral community and a knowledge economy. The latter reflects the emergence of high volume, high speed, high precision (or +VSP) electronic communications and exchange networks, both of which embody the ethical value of reciprocity. One result has been the emergence of commercially oriented knowledge communities. In conclusion, the +VSP communications knowledge economy raises several problems, about (...) truth, social turbulence, and democratic community. (shrink)

Climate change, while potentially impacting many industries, appears to have considerable significance to the wine industry. Yet little is known about how firms acquire knowledge and gain an understanding of climate change and its impacts. This study, exploratory in nature and studying firms from the wine-producing region of Tasmania, is one of the first in the management literature to use cluster theory to examine the climate change issue. Firms are predicted to exchange knowledge about climate change more readily with other (...) firms internal to the sub-cluster than with those external to the sub-cluster. The hypothesis does not find support. The study also proposes that the different characteristics of knowledge can either increase or decrease their flows in and around clusters. Specifically, “public” knowledge about climate change is predicted to flow more freely than “private” knowledge about climate change. The hypothesis does not find support. Finally, firms are expected to acquire knowledge about climate change from sources other than cluster-entrenched firms, and in particular peak national industry bodies. The hypothesis finds partial support. A discussion of the findings is presented along with future research directions. (shrink)

This article examines the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage. It accepts the general case made by UNESCO, but urges greater attention to the ‘real-world’ knowledge of ordinary people. The paper rejects taxonomies of knowledge based on metaphysical discussions of knowing. Instead, it argues for an approach to knowledge based on the social production of ‘knowledge acts’. It concludes by asserting that support for the diversity of social enactment of knowledge could have valuable outcomes in the form of new ways (...) of understanding new and emerging technologies. (shrink)

This article relates the emergence of a group of faculty researchers utilizing complexity science approaches. The narrative emerges from three projects combining research into complexity, communities, and technologies. Details of how the research was initiated, and the nature and quality of the conversational method, are provided. In addition, theoretical concepts that were consciously applied and others that arose through insights from the data as it was collected are discussed. Although this is like most real narratives, a never-ending story, it concludes (...) with a presentation of some of the ideas that separate complexity-informed research from other paradigms. (shrink)

This chapter explores the personal and professional obstacles faced by Humanities and Social Science scholars contemplating pre-publication of their scholarly work in an on-line network. Borrowing a theoretical framework from the radical educational theorist Ivan Illich, it also develops the idea that pre-publication networks offer higher education a bottom-up, decentralized alternative to business-modeled e-learning. If learners would only embrace this more anarchical medium, appreciating writing for pre-publication as a process of open-ended discovery rather than product delivery, then the prospect of (...) deinstitutionalizing e-learning could become an exciting new reality. The chapter’s methodology is a combination of normative-theoretical analysis and small sample (n=2) case study based on the author’s personal and professional experiences. While the generalizability (or external validity) of the conclusions is limited, the author hopes to motivate further inquiry into the connection between on-line pre-publication and e-learning. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the number of bots online, varying from Web crawlers for search engines, to chatbots for online customer service, spambots on social media, and content-editing bots in online collaboration communities. The online world has turned into an ecosystem of bots. However, our knowledge of how these automated agents are interacting with each other is rather poor. Bots are predictable automatons that do not have the capacity for emotions, meaning-making, creativity, and sociality (...) and it is hence natural to expect interactions between bots to be relatively predictable and uneventful. In this article, we analyze the interactions between bots that edit articles on Wikipedia. We track the extent to which bots undid each other’s edits over the period 2001–2010, model how pairs of bots interact over time, and identify different types of interaction trajectories. We find that, although Wikipedia bots are intended to support the encyclopedia, they often undo each other’s edits and these sterile “fights” may sometimes continue for years. Unlike humans on Wikipedia, bots’ interactions tend to occur over longer periods of time and to be more reciprocated. Yet, just like humans, bots in different cultural environments may behave differently. Our research suggests that even relatively “dumb” bots may give rise to complex interactions, and this carries important implications for Artificial Intelligence research. Understanding what affects bot-bot interactions is crucial for managing social media well, providing adequate cyber-security, and designing well functioning autonomous vehicles. (shrink)

This article traces the roots of the author’s doctoral work to his pre-doctoral experiences in varied realms of professional practice. The research choices made are thus inevitably influenced by these experiences. These include the selection of an interdisciplinary domain to locate his doctoral work, the choice of a “boundary object” as the unit of analysis and the formulation of a methodological mix that reflected the multidimensionality of the research topic. These choices also reflect the researcher’s quest for personal meaningfulness and (...) consequently, a certain degree of irrationality that is characteristic of any human endeavor. The idea of creative research as negotiating the boundary of acceptability is explored and the importance of freedom and tolerance for experimentation to aid this enterprise is highlighted. (shrink)