A World Information Strategy for the Future ^†

Abstract

The conception of ‘world information strategy for the future’ that is proposed in this paper assumes the ascendancy of the non-Western world in the context of an information infrastructure that has so far been Western oriented. The strategy advanced here is neither to imitate nor to criticize that infrastructure; rather, it is to repurpose it for non-Western ends. This paper divides the strategy into three parts: (1) the globalization of English (i.e., the dominance of non-native over native speakers); (2) undiscovered public knowledge (i.e., the vast number of academic publications that are underutilized); and (3) precipitatory governance (i.e., innovation for a world where current default settings of information flows are bound to change).

1. Introduction

The world’s modern information infrastructure is predominantly of Western origin, but its contributors and users are increasingly non-Western in origin. This fact, while trivial on its face, has many potentially interesting consequences for information research and policy that have yet to be adequately explored. Much effort has been spent critiquing the Western origins, both in terms of the various cognitive and linguistic biases embedded in them and the ‘imperialist’ means by which they were implemented. However, these self-styled ‘postcolonial’ critiques often seem aimed more at making Westerners feel guilty about their past dealings with non-Westerners than benefiting non-Westerners now. In contrast, my strategy is to show how the Western information infrastructure can potentially be repurposed to a non-Western advantage. I will outline this strategy in terms of three themes: (1) the globalization of English, (2) undiscovered public knowledge, and (3) precipitatory governance.

(1) 

The globalization of English. There is a 5-to-1 ratio of non-native-to-native speakers of English around the world, and this is a uniquely high proportion that is likely to rise in the future [1]. China is now the country that produces the most academic publications in English. This high non-native-to-native ratio has already begun to affect the standards of ‘correct usage’ in English, a trend that is likely to be accelerated with the advent of social media, whose modus operandi does not conform to the syntactic structures of Indo-European languages, which privilege the arrangement of words over that of visual and audio images.

(2) 

Undiscovered public knowledge. University of Chicago information scientist Don Swanson introduced the phrase to highlight that most academic publications go uncited and even unread for various reasons, but mainly because academics are trained to read narrowly in their fields, e.g., to follow the ‘hot’ topics and ignore everything else [2]. There is very little incentive to read across academic disciplines to see novel connections between facts and ideas that might solve existing problems without the need to commission massive additional research. Swanson was effectively challenging academics and policymakers to make more efficient use of the information already available to reduce the tendency to ‘reinvent the wheel’ [3].

(3) 

Precipitatory governance. I coined this phrase to refer to the capacity to access and utilize information in case of a major catastrophe (e.g., nuclear war and climate change) that destroys the mainstream information channels [3]. This mentality led the US agency DARPA (‘Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’) to develop the Internet in the 1960s—just in case a US-USSR nuclear confrontation took down the existing communication infrastructure. Although the nuclear war never happened, that created capacity subsequently laid the foundation for the post–Cold War ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.

2. The Globalization of English

English became the main global language when the US became the dominant commercial and military power, as well as the favored destination for scientific and cultural migrants from Europe—all in the wake of the devastation of Europe in the First World War, the conclusion to which US President Wilson brokered. Since that time, English has increased its lead over its main European rivals, French and German. Before that time, English had been in rough parity with them, and there was a general expectation that educated Europe-oriented people would have working knowledge of all three languages [4]. Nevertheless, there remains an economic puzzle to the ascendancy of English because the US already had more people than the UK by 1860, and the US’s GDP per capita surpassed the UK’s by 1890. However, it took another generation for English to prevail on the global stage. Arguably, a more important long-term driver has been the use of English as the coding language for new information and communication technologies, which started in the mid-nineteenth century with the telegraph and the typewriter, both invented in the US and then quickly promoted in the UK and its dominion [5]. These developments created a subtle bias that continues to this day, especially given the extent to which new technologies tend to incorporate the default settings of the older ones on which they build (e.g., computer keyboard)—or, as Marshall McLuhan said, ‘Old media is the content of new media’.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the linguistic hegemony of English will persist indefinitely. In the West, we always remember Latin, now used only by the Roman Catholic Church. In my youth, there was great hope that Swahili might become a ‘world language’, merging Arab and African cultures, both in ferment at the time. In my university years, ‘smart’ members in my cohort studied Russian, since 20% of the world’s published scientific literature was already appearing in that language, only a generation after the start of the Cold War. Moreover, if we go further into the past, Genghis Khan promoted Uyghur in the thirteenth century as the lingua franca for the largest contiguous empire in history, roughly corresponding to what is now called ‘Eurasia’, but today, Uyghur exists as a minority language. However, what makes English distinctive, perhaps unprecedented, is the 5:1 ratio of non-native to native speakers. Here are the ratios for what are today regarded intuitively as ‘world languages’: Mandarin Chinese, 1:40; Spanish, 1:5; and Arabic and Russian, each 1:2. This predominance of non-native speakers of English is most obviously the legacy of British Imperialism and US-style consumer capitalism, complementing and sometimes blending into each other, as symbolized in the ‘special relationship’ that Winston Churchill forged with Franklin Roosevelt in the Second World War.

The ultimate advantages of English relative to other European languages that plays to non-Western cultures is its general grammatical tolerance and enthusiasm for incorporating and translating other languages, not least those of its direct cultural competitors (French and German). Unlike French, English has not been subject to periodic attempts to control language change from the ‘mother country’. Moreover, while Goethe had already promoted the idea of ‘world literature’ through translation in the early nineteenth century, the practice truly came into its own only after the First World War, when the US (helped by the UK) began to engage in massive academic and publishing campaigns to preserve the ‘classics’ and ‘legacy’ of ‘Western Civilization’ in English, in the case of further world wars. Thus, English has become the gateway language for accessing Western culture in general and the most effective vehicle for non-Westerners to influence Western culture through emerging social media.

3. Undiscovered Public Knowledge

As the person who founded the journal and wrote the first book on ‘social epistemology’, it might be expected that I would talk about Jesse Shera and/or Margaret Egan as the relevant information science pioneer. However, I see them primarily as key transitional figures in the evolution of library science into information science in the twentieth century [6]. They were trying to realize something like Paul Otlet’s original ‘Mundaneum’ project in the emerging computer era [7]. However, they did not focus on the maximum exploitation of the information made possible by the translation from print to digital, from the locally situated to the globally distributed. In this sense, Don Swanson was the real pioneer of a truly dynamic social epistemology with worldwide implications. In the 1980s, Swanson coined the phrase ‘undiscovered public knowledge’ to describe the character of most published research, which is never fully utilized due to the path-dependent reading habits of academic disciplines, whereby most citations accrue to the trendsetters in particular fields whose frontiers shift like fashion. For example, so-called ‘literature reviews’ in grant proposals aim mainly to justify the funding request, while placating potential peer reviewers. There is little incentive for grant applicants to be surprised, let alone deflected, by what they read. Add the fact that the academic trendsetters tend to be affiliated with the same set of universities, typically concentrated in the West, even though the West’s share of the global academic literature has been in a long, slow decline.

Enter Swanson, a physicist by training who removed himself from the grant culture by relocating to the library. This shift enabled him to arrive at testable hypotheses for what became a cure for Raynaud’s Syndrome, simply by reading across bodies of literature in the biosciences in a way that a ‘professional’ in any of them would not have been motivated to do. To be sure, Swanson’s information search and retrieval tools were relatively primitive by today’s standards, yet he was able to combine insights from already published work in new ways. In the quarter century that he actively contributed to information science, he developed principles for still more adventurous ‘against the grain’ readings of the academic literature, which allow for, as he put it, ‘intervening in the life cycles of scientific knowledge’ [8,9]. In one of his later contributions, Swanson anticipated a version of what the Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm Palantir calls ‘data surfacing’, whereby the various bodies of academic literature are treated as alternative data streams (channeled through jargons and journals) that can be related on a common digital platform to reveal hidden patterns that might elude a ‘data mining’ approach that uses algorithms biased towards the intended user’s preconceptions. Interestingly, Swanson’s example here was how the concept of ‘virus’ crosses different bodies of literature [10].

The non-Western world is ideally situated to take advantage of Swanson’s approach, as it increasingly has access to the full range of information search and retrieval tools needed to repurpose academic knowledge to its own advantage. It would also help reverse the default non-Western tendency to try to match or beat the Westerners at their own knowledge game, which just ends up reproducing the sorts of reading habits that Swanson decried. In many cases, non-Westerners can take advantage of the somewhat different and often weaker pattern of institutionalization of academic specialties, especially in the social and biological sciences. Here, more culturally specific ‘traditional’ forms of knowledge are capable of reorienting reading habits in the ways that Swanson originally suggested—say, in matters related to diet, environment, heredity, and medicine.

4. Precipitatory Governance

Precipitatory governance exists in opposition to two policy approaches to risk management. One is ‘anticipatory governance’, which aims to prepare the way for social changes that are likely to result from forthcoming innovations. In practice, much anticipatory governance research is about easing the assimilation of such innovations by spotting potential problems in their acceptance and then dealing with them before they happen [11]. It is reasonably seen as an extended public relations operation. The other policy approach is ‘precautionary governance’, which goes further and evaluates prospective innovations with an eye to minimize their potential to cause substantive harm, which may result in the prohibition of such innovations. The European Union generally adheres to this approach, which also informs the logic behind today’s preoccupation with ‘existential risks’ (e.g., climate change, super-AI, pandemics, nuclear war, etc.), where the aim is to prevent global catastrophes. In contrast to both approaches, precipitatory governance envisages a world where the projected harm will happen at some point, and the policy question now is how to prepare for the ‘Day after Doomsday’. This was the spirit in which DARPA invented the Internet in the 1960s—namely, as a replacement for the post-nuclear war meltdown of the telephone system. Even though that prospect never materialized, the Internet quickly became the infrastructure of today’s world, once it was commercially deployed at the end of the Cold War.

The non-Western world potentially has an advantage in precipitatory governance akin to its potential advantage vis-à-vis Swanson’s undiscovered public knowledge strategy. To a large extent, the non-Western world is not so heavily invested in the West’s technological path dependence that has eventuated in the social-media-based world that we all now inhabit. For example, smartphones were adopted relatively quickly and pervasively in countries that never had installed a proper telephone infrastructure. This is not so different from the ‘Day after Doomsday’ scenario envisaged by DARPA when it invented the Internet—except that, in the non-Western case, instead of replacing an existing technology that had been eliminated in war, the new technology entered a market where there had been no competitors, due to underdevelopment. However, the advantage gained was similar in both cases. The Harvard economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron first identified this phenomenon in the 1950s as the ‘relative advantage of backwardness’ [12]. His point was that later industrialized countries have tended to make efficiency savings on their predecessors by coming up with innovations better suited to both local environments and emerging global markets without having to retrace the predecessors’ path to industrialization and all the legal, cultural, and material infrastructure that had been involved.

The aftermath of ‘Doomsday’ would render us all ‘backward’ in Gerschenkron’s sense, though, of course, the exact nature of the ‘backwardness’ would depend on the catastrophe envisaged. However, the more strategic point is that even if the envisaged catastrophe does not come to pass, such an apocalyptic approach to innovation is likely to be mentally liberating by forcing people to return to first principles to ‘build back better’, but now in a different way. In this respect, non-Western technology policies—especially in matters relating to information and communication infrastructure—might be especially well-placed to think in DARPA-like terms in ways that aim to bring into existence the world that is imagined following from a collapse of Western-based technologies, which may, in turn, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.