The effect of globalization on the organization of knowledge

Proceedings of: 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2005, july 10 - 13, 2005, Orlando, Florida, USAThe globalization of electronic information does not seek out a more democratic and egalitarian society. Information is articulated within a set of gears that entail the social exclusion of those who lack electronic information. Different ways of accessing electronic information also create specific and different forms of development among different countries. There are established and implanted historical ways of organizing, and now technology can be used as a way to subjugate or emancipate. The technological present restricts thought, whereas the dominant ideology imposes a certain form of organization. This is why it is necessary to subvert this trend through different logical-semantic and ethical-political tools. The complex network of knowledge, symbolic representations, cultural networks of knowledge and symbolism make up the backbone of this integrated instrumentalization of our knowledge. Traditional classifications of knowledge are limited like Western epistemology, given that the demarcationism which makes them up exacerbates difference, because demarcating is a form of recognition and representation of classifying structures, which wall off, delimit and fortify. However, as with any form of power, there are no discourses without counter-discourses, so a deconstruction of this demarcationism is indispensable. Classification is performed by creating always invented borders with separating objectives, and the scientific policy of memory and the organization of knowledge is based on dominant ideas. Knowledge is reduced to a structured, hierarchical wisdom which, however, takes on the appearance of including others. Coherence of meaning is sought out. All cultures are organized around a closed discourse constructed using explicative fragments. Power sets up the symbolic order, and symbols are established as self-defense mechanisms for meaning. Labeling the real is carried out from a perspective of coherence. Naming and conceptualizing means classifying. Reality is a reproduction of meaning, and there is no reality outside of the conscience, which is why the reality which has not been named is intact. As for the Organization of knowledge, reality is equivalent to representation, or in other words, there is no other reality than the one which is represented. In this way, everything that has not fit into the electronic context is gradually left out of reality. The idea is to reduce the plurality of the real to the unit, by way of concepts or ideas, and the process is completed in the opposite direction when attempting to re-construct or recover reality. The nullification of plurality is thereby made complete. Moreover, identitybased multi-culturalism attempts to construct otherness on the basis of self. Culture lies in how things are ordered. Demarcating means building imaginary barriers, but there may also be transversal languages for communication, all within the context of the community of meaning. The human mind processes things using programmed mechanisms, in a programming which may be referred to as Theory, Culture or Religion. Meaning is shared within a delimited conceptual framework. Within one specific community, it need not be inter-culturally shared, and therefore it lacks shared trans-cultural categories. However, subverting this order would be an act of rebellion against meaning and its mindset. The Revolution of Lights, otherwise known as the Enlightenment or Modernity, made a commitment to reason as the most powerful tool for facing the darkness of the Middle Ages, and it also proposed alphabetical organization to create order for knowledge in the Encyclopedia. For the construction of electronic knowledge, it will be necessary to crate a more humane rationale and ethics, which must include many other perspectives and even that which they forget. Therefore, a new way of organizing knowledge is necessary. Within the methodology that sets up the Organization and representation of knowledge, classification is the most perishable, even more so that interpretation. Deconstruction implies thinking about de-classification, or in other words, the search for other organizational orders in the universe of knowledge. The tree as an organizational structure conveys power structures, and conveys an order of a chaos, like the claim that says the chaos that order imposes upon us. In the origin of language lies an externalization of power. On the basis of this pathos of distance is built the right to create values and establish rules. In all, the theory of classifying knowledge implies that all classification is based on an ethics or set of values. And the very gestation of language, of the hierarchy and classification, may lie within the struggle for primitive forms of control or imposition. It is within these parameters that knowledge organization Systems have been created.Publicad