Infoglut Management: Essential Change for the Global MegaCrisis

Meadows Donella H. Meadows Dennis L. Randers Jorgen William W. Behrens III The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind (Universe Books, 1972), p 192 on the “complex world problematique.” Also see Jorgen Randers 2052: A Report to the Club of Rome Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of The Limits to Growth (Chelsea Green, June 1, 2012). The “confluence of crises” is described by WAAS Fellow Jim Dator as “The Unholy Trinity, Plus One” (Journal of Futures Studies, 13:3, February 2009, 33–38), referring to three “tsunamis” (the end of cheap and abundant oil, multiple environmental challenges, global economic/financial collapse), aggravated by the lack of government that can help us solve these challenges. A special “Symposium on the Global MegaCrisis” (Journal of Futures Studies, 16:2, December 2011, 95–168) presents 13 responses to four MegaCrisis scenarios prepared by William Halal and Michael Marien. I speculate 20% likelihood of Disaster, 60% Muddling Down, 20% Muddling Up, and <1% Rise to Maturity. Halal has a more optimistic tech-based view (10%, 25%, 60%, 5%).

Ian Johnson “The Perfect Storm” (CADMUS, 1:2, April 2011, 19–24), by the Secretary-General of the Club of Rome, who emphasizes the need of an “urgent overhaul” in our economics and the importance of “enlightened public policy.”.

Aurelio Peccei , One Hundred Pages for the Future: Reflections of the President of the Club of Rome (Pergamon Press, 1981, 191 pages) lists “ten factors of decline,” most or all of which are still with us to some degree. The quotation is on p. 58. Two years earlier, No Limits to Learning: Bridging the Human Gap (Pergamon Press, 1979, 159 pages), a report to the Club of Rome by James W. Botkin, Mahdi Elmandjra, and Mircea Malitza, noted the “profound irony” of the widening distance between growing complexity and our capacity to cope with it.

Various indicators present a mixed picture, and thus, to me, favor “muddling down” or slow decline as most probable in the next decade or so, but by no means certain. See Vital Signs 2012 from the Worldwatch Institute (Island Press, April 2012; GlobalForesightBooks.org Book of the Month, April 2012); How's Life? Measuring Well-Being (OECD, Oct 2011, 284 pages) on the overall increase of well-being on average over the past 15 years; Society at a Glance 2011-OECD Social Indicators (OECD, sixth edition, April 2011, 103 pages) summarizing a wide variety of indicators from many countries; and Green Transition Scoreboard 2012 by Hazel Henderson (St. Augustine, FL: Ethical Markets Media, Spring 2012, 44 pages), on the growing amount of global investment in renewable energy, green construction, cleantech, etc.—now more than $3.3 trillion since 2007.

Glenn Jerome C. Gordon Theodore J. Florescu Elizabeth 2011 State of the Future (Washington: The Millennium Project, 15th edition, July 2011, 117 pages) provides “a distillation of information” on 15 Global Challenges and a World Score Card of indicators showing where we are winning, where we are losing, and where there is uncertainty. Although one may question the indicators that are included and their weighting, we can readily agree with the overall comment that “the world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems” (p. 2).

WAAS Fellow Sesh Velamoor of the Foundation For the Future has mentioned the provocative notion of a “master paradigm” above all others.

Michael Marien “Infoglut and Competing Problems: Key Barriers Suggesting a New Strategy for Sustainability” in Pirages Dennis C. (ed.), Building Sustainable Societies: A Blueprint for a Post-Industrial World (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), pages 299–311. Introduces the I=POT formula to describe the accelerating IT revolution and proposes ideas for improved social marketing of sustainability (e.g., a syndicated green columnist, an annual Top Ten list of best green books, green Nobel prizes, university programs in sustainability and world futures).

Nicholas Carr The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W.W. Norton, June 2010, 276 pages; GlobalForesightBooks.org Book of the Month, July 2010). Also see John Brockman (ed.), Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? (Harper Perennial, January 2011; GFB.org Book of the Month, March 2011), with 150 brief contributions, pro and con, including a lead-off essay by Carr. The GFB Update newsletter for February 2011 and March 2011 assembles more than two dozen books that are critical of infotech and the Internet. Remarkably, no one has attempted to integrate these worrisome critiques of the unfolding IT revolution.

James Gleick The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (NY: Pantheon, March 2011). Reviewers of this well-received book emphasized the interesting “History” of IT progress, while ignoring today's “Flood” that makes future progress problematic. Also see Robert Hassan, The Age of Distraction: Reading, Writing, and Politics in a High-Speed Networked Economy (Transaction Publishers, October 2011), on the building of a different world where the certainties of previous eras are being displaced by a chronic and pervasive mode of cognitive distraction, and a faster world where we know less about more.

Michael Donald N. “Leadership's Shadow: The Dilemma of Denial” (Futures, 23:1, 1991, 69–79), reprinted in In Search of the Missing Elephant: Selected Essays by Donald N. Michael (Devon, UK: Triarchy Press, 2010; GlobalForesightBooks.org Book of the Month, December 2011), on the “increasing uncomprehended complexity” of the information revolution as a “taboo topic” that cannot be acknowledged by leaders. “Leadership's Shadow” was first given as an address to the Club of Rome on its twentieth anniversary.

Dail DeWitt Doucette “Establishing a New Information Paradigm,” World Future Review (World Future Society; 3:4, Winter 2011, 18–24) proposes a new “meta-science” that would be “contributive to—and complementary with—every other science and academic discipline.” It would be “a driving force in actively moving our old materially focused cultures toward a newer, more responsive, and enlightened information culture … (taking) a leadership role in helping science reintegrate its views via multi- and trans-disciplinary approaches toward a more integrated and holistic perspective.” Numerous individuals and organizations, however, seek to be “integrated and holistic” (e.g., see many of the above), and there is a further task of integrating the integrators!

Michael Marien “The Future of Human Benefit Knowledge: Notes on a World Brain for the 21st Century” in Walter Truett Anderson (ed.), Knowledge Futures (Futures Special Issue, 39:8, Oct 2007, 955–962) comments on the 1936–1937 proposal by H.G. Wells for an “adequate knowledge organization” or “World Brain” (where ideas would be received, sorted, summarized, clarified, and compared) and the 1938 complaint by sociologist Robert Lynd about ever more “bricks of data” on the growing pile of social science, highlighting the need for more synthesis. This essay, adapted from a presentation at the 1995 WAAS meeting in Zagreb, points to ever more infoglut and fragmentation, and calls for more abstracts and overviews of issues and sectors. Two examples of such “frontier frame” overviews outline recent literature on global governance (CADMUS, 1:3, Oct 2011, 142–155; also in World Future Review, 3:3, Fall 2011, 39–56) and on law in transition (CADMUS, 1:4, April 2012, 147–157).

Gross Bertram M. “Operation BASIC: The Retrieval of Wasted Knowledge” (Journal of Communication, 12:2, June 1962, 67–83) proposed new institutions to organize knowledge, involving bibliographies, abstracts, surveys, indexes, and copies. The problem of “copies” has been largely solved, but the first four tasks are needed more than ever. Also see brief version in Gross Bertram M. The Managing of Organizations (Free Press, 1964), pages 858–860.

Boyer Ernest L. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Special Report, 1990) on the need for better balance among the four overlapping functions of scholarship: the traditional “scholarship of discovery,” the scholarship of teaching, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of integration. Although integration of knowledge is widely advocated, the book has yet to be written on the many varieties of integration, and academia has yet to encourage this horizontal activity in any meaningful way.

Yehezkel Dror The Capacity to Govern: A Report to the Club of Rome (London & Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001, 264 pages), on our age of radical transformations and the need to revitalize politics, refocus democracy, and racially improve capacities to govern. High-quality governance should be knowledge-intense, future-committed, deep-thinking, learning, and holistic.