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John Fraim, GreatHouse Company

John Willinsky (Beacon Press, 1999)

There seems to be more and more information about smaller and smaller things. This is especially true in the social sciences - that vast, sprawling landscape comprised of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology as well as professional schools of education, social work, business and health sciences. A good example of information overload is a 50 percent increase in the number of academic journals between 1970 and 1990. In biology, English and psychology, journal space nearly doubled between 1972 and 1988 while faculty numbers demonstrated only slight increases. In the area of history alone, scholars now have over 5,000 journals.

Given this information explosion in the social sciences the path to getting ahead (or just keeping up) is through increased specialization - reading, researching and writing more about less. In Technologies of Knowing, Canadian professor John Willinsky explores this information epidemic in the social sciences and suggests an internet based system as a possible solution.

Willinsky, Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology at the University of British Columbia, argues social sciences have failed to offer knowledge with public value. The information explosion and electronic networks have spawned volumes of undigested knowledge yet inspired few solutions for the productive use of this information. Information production has not been matched by "an equal application of talent and energy to rendering the resulting knowledge intelligible and accessible to a broader public." The result is information that has often led to greater confusion rather than greater wisdom.

The same argument could of information overload can be made for many academic areas but Willinsky suggests the social sciences have the greatest public appeal and relevance. He argues that the social sciences need to play a crucial role in democratic debate in a free marketplace of ideas. But so far, this marketplace has more resembled "an endless and overloaded flea market, full of wondrous goods" with "few apparent organizing principles governing what turns up."

Certainly Willinsky is not the first to make these observations. However, what sets Technologies of Knowing apart from many others is its movement from cultural criticism to an ambitious internet-based social engineering plan with the rather audacious goal of putting social sciences to work for the public interest. The plan involves the creation of a fictitious entity called Automata Data Corporation (ADC), a type of mega-virtual community Web site utilizing internet technology such as relational databases, data mining and collaborative filtering technologies to accomplish its goals. The entity would "assume responsibility for bringing greater coherence and coordination, intelligibility and access, to the research and scholarship traditionally associated with the social sciences."

Willinsky finds a number of historical and contemporary models for ADC. For example, England's famous Royal Society was based around Francis Bacon's New Atlantis idea in the 1600s. And, American universities were originally created around the idea of chartered corporations and social contracts for the public good. Some contemporary models for ADC are the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, Educational Testing Service, the Rand Corporation and the "Valley of the Shadow" web site created by University of Virginia history professor Edward Ayers.

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On the surface, Technologies of Knowing is a criticism of the shattered state of knowledge in the social sciences. But constantly lurking throughout in the books subtext is the internet and the information paradox associated with it. On the one hand it has become history's greatest producer of information growing each day by roughly a million electronic pages and many more millions of email messages held together by more than a billion annotated hyper link connections. Yet on the other hand, it also holds the promise to become the greatest reducer and connector of information in history. In a sense, the internet is both social science and Willinsky's main "villain" as well as a "knight in shining armor."

So far, the production side of this paradox has dominated the reduction and connection side of the paradox. In a segmented economic culture like our current one (as opposed to a mass economy like our old one) the profit paradigm centers around growth and differentiation rather than reduction and connection. But one wonders what would happen if profit incentive was based on the number of connections made rather than the degree of differentiation arrived at? What if research in the social sciences was based on incentives to reduce redundancy and write less about more?

It is becoming clear that internet technology can power the engine of information reduction. There is the growing emergence of "smart" agents and infomediaries which serve to filter and reduce information. And there is the promising new search engine technology which attempts to eliminate information redundancy by classifying the internet into "hub" links and "authority" links.

Emerging applications of this new search engine technology is IBM's Clever Project and Stanford's Google system (www.google.com). As members of the Clever Project note, the internet's rapid, chaotic growth, has resulted in a network of information that lacks organization and structure, a "global mess of previously unimagined proportions." Technology such as Clever and Google make initial attempts to clean up the "mess" primarily through information connection and reduction.

* * *

More than offering a final prescription, Willinsky's real goal is to stir up debate. As such, Technologies of Knowing offers a starting point from which to rethink our understanding of information overload. With this in mind, he has began to practice what he preaches by establishing a web site which may ultimately develop into a type of Automata Data Corporation.

While his immediate message is directed at colleagues in the academic world those who really have the power to make his ideas a reality are the young entrepreneurs who toil in the "garages" of Silicon Valley. Yes, they can continue to cash out in "gold rush" of IPOs and dot.com business plans, or, they just might be motivated to create non-fictional Automata Data Corporations that work to reduce and connect information.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Hypersearching the Web" in June 1999 Scientific American.

(http://www.sciam.com/1999/0699issue/0699raghavan.html)

Technologies of Knowing. John Willinsky (Beacon Press, 1999)

"Valley of the Shadow" web site. Created by Edward Ayers.

<http://www.jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2>

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