Contemporary Society - Evolving Global Information Infrastructure and Information Transfer - page 16

The old paradigm's mechanistic value system championed order, domination,
and control. What emerges is a new view of reality where relationships are weblike,
dynamic, and nonlinear. Complexity, diversity, interaction, and open systems are
the new reality. The question then arises, how do we navigate in a world of open
systems, dynamically linked where change occurs unpredictably, as exemplified
every nanosecond on the Internet?
While physics destroyed the Newtonian worldview, biology since Darwin gave
us a biological systems perspective in which systems evolve through complex,
mutual causal processes. Open subsystems, like the information transfer subsys-
tems in the digital age, are capable of sudden evolution into new relationships.
For example, incapable of maintaining a stable equilibrium as a closed system, the
former Soviet regime, when faced with an external or internal challenge, such as
Western economic productivity and growth or the citizens' resistance to the com-
munist system, collapsed rather suddenly.
As Capra (1996) points out, evolutionary thinking is the science of complex-
ity—of change, growth, and development. From this point of view, knowledge is not
linear but instead “mutually causal,” not a planned assembly of data and facts built
on previous knowledge, but rather shaped by positive feedback and feedforward
(Schwartz and Ogilvy). Science is actually an interconnected network of relation-
ships with no firm grounding.
This biological/ecological thinking of systems dynamically interacting, forever
changing, and in a constant “emergent” state is how we view Information Transfer
3.0. In the Kuhnian sense, the digital age has created revolutionary conditions in
how knowledge is created, produced, organized, used, preserved, and destroyed.
Therefore, the systems perspective is the best lens and framework for understand-
ing the information technology revolution.
Characteristics of the Emergent Paradigm
A lens into understanding the networked digital world is the work of Peter
Schwartz and James Ogilvy (1979) and their analysis of theory building in different
disciplines and the “emergent” characteristics of the new paradigm. What they de-
scribe is the collapse of certainty in society, as evident in the intellectual revolutions
taking place in the sciences, in the paradigms of fields such as physics, chemistry,
and biology but also in the humanities and social sciences. An analysis of the shift
between dominant and emergent paradigms is displayed in Table 2.1. Each of the
elements of the table is then described.
Table 2.1 Characteristics of a Paradigm Shift