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The Digitisation of Knowledge: The Wholesale Transfer of Conventional Knowledge Media to Online Sources |
| Paper ID: |
77 |
Last updated: 10/05/2011 15:15:45
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Criteria:  |
Impact:  |
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Controversy: |
Where: Global |
When: 3-10yrs |
How Fast: Years |
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people thought this paper expanded their thinking
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| Keywords: |
Internet, information, business, trade, security, education, knowledge, property, ownership, rights, language |
Summary  |
| Forms of knowledge and the means of sustaining them for public good are moving online at an exponential rate. The continuation of this online trend may herald radical changes in learning and work. It may or may not imply radically different patterns of knowledge use. |
Discussion |
Forms of knowledge and the means of sustaining them for the public good are moving online at an exponential rate. Degree courses for major universities can now be taken online. Books, articles, papers and academic works can be almost entirely accessed through the internet. It has been estimated that in 2001 over two million students sought degrees online, with a wide variety of universities offering such courses, from the US to China [1] and in 2004 online enrolment stood at 2.35 million [2].
A range of public and consultative services are also available for areas such as health, finance and a range of bureaucratic procedures. Telephone and contact directories as well as local information services, regionalised internet resources and advertisements are in place and widely used. The internet search engine provider Google announced an agreement in 2004 with four of the world's top universities with the aim of scanning and uploading 15 million volumes online by 2015. This is however being disputed, with reference to copyright concerns, by Association of American University Presses [3], [4] and Google is currently in court with regards to this project [5] . Google and Microsoft have launched 'MSN Virtual Earth’/’Live Local’ and 'Google Earth', both developments of the established internet search engine combining searches with maps, satellite images and localised services [6], [7] , [8] .
A US scheme called E-Rate has ensured 95% of state schools, and 63% of all classrooms have internet access [1]. Services engaging with customer specialist queries are wide spread and very common, but increasingly public service providers have been seeking to provide direct information to users via the internet (e.g. through websites such as that for NHS direct) [9] .
The continuation of this trend could herald radical change in processes of learning and work (see below). However, the transfer of such information does not necessarily in itself directly lead to radically different patterns of knowledge use [10]. This relies on the ease with which knowledge can be accessed and the form it takes. These are determined by the availability of technology, political control over access and what gets disseminated, as well as the filters through which people interpret information.
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Implications |
With qualifications available through the internet, academic centres could become less centralised, in terms of student populations, teaching staff and administration. This could reduce overheads at major educational institutions. However, in the short term major costs could be incurred as Universities try to digitise their libraries, resulting in expensive knowledge transfer projects.
It could also become much harder to design and maintain the syllabus and structure within which students learn at school as the latter demand wider consideration of different kinds of knowledge. The problems of plagiarism could grow exponentially, as it becomes extremely difficult (new tracking software notwithstanding) to establish where and how much it is happening, and to respond accordingly.
The management of access to, and violation of intellectual property could also become more vexed, with the possibility of increased legal action prompted by the spread of information through a more efficient medium [3], [4], [5] . Intellectual property law could well become the biggest growth area in the legal profession. Utopian commentators (e.g. Bill Gates) can envisage a revolution in access to resources which could make intellectual concepts and information potentially available to everyone in the world, moving towards a flatter global intellectual society with a general enrichment of knowledge and an enlightenment driven by increasingly shared ideas and values.
Whilst it has been suggested that greater recourse to the Internet for information could result in the decline of book consumption and other print media, this has yet to be demonstrated conclusively as an emerging trend [10]. However we can imagine that a reduced reliance on paper as an information store could greatly save space and change the way offices, libraries, archives and bookshops are designed and used.
A process of cultural selection and standardisation may occur, at least in limited forms. Governments might be drawn into closer inspection of online services as a guarantor of the public good and to oversee skills improvement. Costs of finding and producing information could drop significantly, as could distribution.
Although employers may not necessarily come to employ less staff, the nature and type of employees' work could change significantly. New types of work in knowledge assimilation and processing may become important to the success and productivity of companies increasingly in competition in the knowledge economy.
Education may need to change to reflect the need to rapidly assimilate and prioritise the value of disparate information sources and make use of them in practical commercial situations.
Lateral thinking techniques for interrogating and seeking new kinds of knowledge of stimulus may also come to be central in education and workplace training.
Reading online is likely to be more fragmented than reading a book, which may be more suited to certain types of material (encyclopaedias rather than novels) [11], [12]. Reading online is different from reading offline (as is reading a manuscript scroll compared to a book, for example), and the form affects the sense made of the text [11] , [12]. If more and more texts are read online this may lead to confusion and lower quality of reading through information overload [12] or through choppy keyword reading [11] , but it may also lead to further knowledge collaboration being possible and better quality produced through more information being available [12].
As information becomes truly globalised, the language in which this knowledge is disseminated may become increasingly important as a means of extending 'soft power' [4], [13] . We could see employers paying an increased premium for those with knowledge of multiple languages - e.g. HTML as well as Spanish - but in the long term we may see the emergence of a lingua franca for the sharing of online knowledge. English is already very well placed to be that language. However we will increasingly see competition from other cultures (e.g. continental Europe, China, India, Latin America) for this knowledge space [13] .
To overcome these problems, could we see the emergence of a common internet language as a way of communicating across different cultures? (e.g. as Latin and French operated as languages of court at different stages in European history, or as did Swahili among disparate African groupings)
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Early indicators |
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Drivers & Inhibitors |
Drivers:
Government schemes to promote awareness and make available incentives for greater resources availability online.
Resolution of legal copyright disputes.
Consumer, academic and business confidence in this trend.
Inhibitors:
The strength of opposition to the new technology [3], [4].
The ability of providers to guard against misuse and hacker interference.
Linguistic competition between businesses and countries.
Access and translation issues [4].
Censorship and political control of public access to knowledge and information.
Costs of transferring information from paper to electronic.
Security fears and protectionism of culturally/commercially/politically advantageous knowledge
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Parallels & Precedents |
The development and maintenance of the great library of Alexandria in the ancient world.
The Vatican library as a repository for knowledge in the Middle Ages.
Mathematics as the universal language of science.
The development of different types of printing, allowing increasing use of books and papers to store and access knowledge [11] , [12].
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Sources |
| Ref. | Publisher | Date | Title | Category |
| 1 | The Economist | | The Economist (2001) 'Lessons of a virtual timetable', 15th Febuary | Soc |
| 2 | Other | | The Detroit News (2006) ‘More students pursue degrees online’ 22nd June | Soc |
| 3 | Other | | The Register (2005) 'Google Books under fire', 25th May | Soc |
| 4 | BBC | | BBC News (2005), 'Google's books online under fire', 24 May | Soc |
| 5 | Other | | The Register (2006) ‘Google to subpoena Yahoo! and Microsoft in library battle’ 6th Oct | Soc |
| 6 | Other | | The Register (2005) 'Microsoft vs Google heats up', 24th May | Soc |
| 7 | Other | | Live local | Soc |
| 8 | Other | | Google Earth | Soc |
| 9 | National Health Service | | NHS Direct | Soc |
| 10 | News International Group | | Jonathan Weber (2006) ‘Why books resist the rise of novel technologies’ The Times Online May 23 | Soc |
| 11 | Other | | Caleb McDaniel (2005) ‘The Keyword Revolution’ Cliopatria, George Mason’s Univeristy History News Network, 19 May | Soc |
| 12 | Other | | Roger Chartier (2004) ‘Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text’ Critical Inquiry 31, Autumn 2004 Academic journal | Soc |
| 13 | BBC | | BBC News (2005) ‘Support for EU 'digital library'’ 4th May | Soc |
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| The contents of this paper were provided by the Outsights-Ipsos MORI Partnership. Any views expressed are independent of government and do not constitute government policy. |
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