APAN Workshop on E-Culture, Bangkok, 26 January 2005

www.monash.edu.au

APAN Workshop on E-Culture, Bangkok, 26 January 2005

The Information Continuum and the Making of E-Culture

Don Schauder

Professor of Information Management and Chair, Centre for Community Networking Research, Monash University

Centre for Community Networking Researchwww.ccnr.net 2/15

To begin with an example: Australian Indigenous Oral Knowledge

• Until recently, State and Federal governments in Australia decided what would be officially archived about Aboriginal people. They created the public records.

• At the level of individuals and families, this could cause great distress. For example the archive might record that person X had been assessed by authorities as an unfit mother, and her children had been removed – a version of events seen as false by her descendents.

• At the level of Aboriginal peoples (such as the Yorta Yorta), for example regarding land-rights, disputes have been aggravated because Aboriginal ‘common law’ is not systematically reflected in the official archives.


To begin with an example: Australian Indigenous Oral Knowledge (contd)

• The problem of reflecting alternate realities is perhaps most extreme in repositories of public records, but it extends across all the cultural institutions.

• According to Bourdieu, cultural institutions have ‘fields of power’, which shape relations and practices in society. This power largely derives from inclusion or exclusion of information and knowledge from ‘authorised’ memory.

• Australian Indigenous people have been greatly disadvantaged by this problem. To a lesser extent, so have many other groups in Australian society.

• The view of key stakeholders involved in the current ‘Trust and Technology’ research project in Australia is that E-Culture can help: that ICTs can enable archival systems to integrate alternate individual and group memories, and also be made far more accessible to many more people.


The ‘Trust and Technology’ Project

• The example described is drawn from a three-year research project, entitled ‘Trust and Technology’, being undertaken jointly by the Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV), the Koori Heritage Trust, Monash University (including its Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies), and the Australian Society of Archivists. The project is funded by the PROV and the Australian Research Council.

• In stage 1, almost 100 Indigenous people from South-Eastern Australia have been interviewed about what needs to be done to ‘enfranchise’ Indigenous knowledge in Australia’s archival institutions, both government and non-government.

• The next two stages will deal with how such changes can be achieved, both through archival praxis and technology.

• The ‘Trust and Technology’ project is thus deeply concerned with issues of E-Culture.


The five typologies of the Information Continuum Model (ICM)

• The ICM is a diagnostic and teaching tool developed by the Information and Knowledge Management (IKM) team at Monash University since 1997.

• It assists with situational analysis and problem identification, so that remedial action can ensue. It applies to action by individuals, and by collaborative, corporate and societal-level groups.

• It owes much to Giddens’ Structuration Theory, and is – in a sense – an IKM reading of structuration, which comes from the French for ‘structuring’.

• Structuration theory, and the ICM, use an action-structure viewpoint, in which all actions – large or small – influence the patternings that we call social structure. Structure, in turn, constrains or supports all actions.


The five typologies of the ICM (contd)

• The ICM is constituted of five interdependent typologies (analytical spectrums bounded by contrasting ideal constructs):1. Agency: human action plus memory, metadata and technology as

possessing ‘agency attributes’2. Levels of action: individual, collaborative, corporate and societal3. Dimensions of information and knowledge: creation, capture,

organisation and pluralisation of information4. Purposes of information and knowledge: pleasure, awareness,

and accountability5. Modalities which structure scope of action: interpretative (via

meanings, symbols), facilitative (via political and economic resources) and normative (via sanctions, laws).

• The whole of the ICM is represented in the following three-dimensional ‘static’ diagram. Two other views show the ICM as a co-mutating dynamic system.


Purposes

•Enjoyment

•To enhance living

•Awareness

•To maximize opportunity

•Accountability

•To minimize risk

Modalities

structuring scope of

action

•Interpretative

•Via signs and meaning

•Facilitative

•Via resources and

power allocation

•Normative

• via norms & sanctions

Creation Capture

Organisation Pluralisation

IndividualCollaborativeCorporateSocietal

Time-Space

Agents

Human Action Stored Memory

Metadata Technology

Dimensions

STRUCTURING

LEVELS OF ACTION

AGENCYICM -view 1


Information Continuum Model (ICM) - view 1

Purposes

Agency

Modalities

Dimensions

INDIVIDUAL

COLLABORATIVE

CORPORATE

SOCIETAL

Levels:


Diagram by Larry Stillman 2004

ICM -view 3


E-Culture and empowerment

• Modernity, as conceived by Giddens, is characterised by on-going reflexive action (iterated learning and action) in which structural patternings are constantly changed.

• Fundamental creativity both in science and the arts is the extreme manifestation of such reflexive action. However the innumerable ways in which people express their individuality is part of the same picture. The creation of self involves pushing against ‘the rules’. The rules may change if there is enough pressure from enough people (one person may be enough, if s/he is a creative genius).

• The resultant condition of society is its culture, and a core proposition of e-culture is that the effective deployment and use of ICTs can change the extent and speed at which cultural patterning can change.


The ICM and empowerment through knowledge

• The core concern of IKM as taught at Monash and as expounded through the ICM is to maximise knowledge-based empowerment for individuals.

• This is also the message of the mainstream E-Culture movement, as represented, for example, in a Letter on E-Culture by the Netherlands State Secretary for Education Culture and Science in 2002.

• However the ICM framework also identifies the choke-points by which a societal order can assert a restrictive official hegemony over knowledge and minimise scope of action for individuals.

• The key typology working for or against individual empowerment is the Modalities.


The Modalities and E-Culture

• In the ICM, all typologies are in a state of continuous interaction, all affecting all. However in the creative re-patterning that is the special focus of the E-Culture movement, the Modalities exercise special potency. The three Modalities are like a three-legged stool: all the legs are needed or the stool will fall.

• Going back to the case of Indigenous Australians and ‘official’ knowledge, change had to occur in the Normative Modality which concerns sanctions and laws. The legal status of Indigenous Australians become that of citizens rather than wards of the state. Equal opportunity and other human rights enactments set the conditions in which Indigenous knowledge could be valorized within the fields of power of cultural institutions.

• However change in the Normative Modality is only the beginning.


The Modalities and E-Culture (contd)

• The Facilitative Modality concerns the resources which underpin power. Authoritative Resources mandate political power and Allocative Resources mandate economic power. The Normative Modality makes action permissible – the Facilitative makes action possible. For re-patterning to occur cultural institutions must be resourced to change. In order to ‘enfranchise’ Indigenous knowledge the Public Records Office may need changes to its official objectives, and its internally authorised policies and practices. It may need increased budget.

• The third leg of the stool is the Interpretative Modality which concerns meanings, especially the meanings that change holds for those involved or affected. If those meanings are of low priority, pattern-change may fail through indifference leading to inaction. On the other hand if the meanings are of high priority, a virtuous cycle of pattern change can occur resulting in fundamental transformation across time and place.


Role of the other ICM typologies

• There is insufficient time to address each of the other ICM typologies in relation to e-culture.

• Suffice to say that the agency attributes of technology and categorisation, in conjunction with memory, allow information objects to be aggregated or disaggregated, and to carry a multiplicity of metadata tags.

• Metadata tagging, or complementary strategies using agent technology, can engage the same information objects in actions that serve to preserve, modify or fundamentally change existing patternings, whether in the cause of accountability, awareness, or pleasure.

• It is such capacities that potentially enable Indigenous knowledge perspectives to integrate with those of mainstream post-colonial Australia in official collective memory, while safeguarding aspects such as privacy and intellectual property.


E-Culture and Civil Society

• A valuable and related perspective on E-Culture and the ICM analysis is provided by the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

• The WSIS process identifies three key stakeholder (or actor) categories namely government, business and civil society.

• The flourishing of E-Culture depends on all three, but arguably provides an essential ingredient for the well-being of civil society.

Government*NORMATIVE

POWER:

LAW

Civil Society*INTERPRETIVE

POWER:

MEANING

Business*FACILITATIVE

POWER:

WEALTH


Conclusion: How the ICM can support the development of definition of E-Culture

• The definition of E-Culture that emerges from this presentation is:

– The societal condition in which ICTs are used to expand capacity for creative action by individuals and groups, potentially enhancing the experience of living for all people.

• This presentation sought to demonstrate how the inter-linked typologies within the Information Continuum model can help to monitor key factors in the development of E-Culture from an IKM perspective.

• As in the case of the ‘Trust and Technology’ project and Indigenous knowledge, it is contended that analysis using the ICM can help to optimise conditions for the flourishing of e-culture both locally and globally.

APAN Workshop on E-Culture, Bangkok, 26 January 2005

Documents

Transcript of APAN Workshop on E-Culture, Bangkok, 26 January 2005