Knowledge Infrastructure: Mechanism and Transformation in the Information Revolution

The information revolution has been unfolding for a few thousand years. The changes of the past half-century fit in; differences in degree become differences in kind. Transformation happens, but what’s the mechanism? This talk suggests that knowledge (or more precisely, epistemic) infrastructure can frame the causal mechanisms of transformation in the information revolution. I describe the baseline idea of epistemic infrastructure and its evolution through three social mechanisms: the academy (or organized education, broadly); systematic collecting (especially as seen in the LAM – libraries, archives, museums); and crowd-sourced knowledge (Wikipedia and related things). The gist of the argument is that changing epistemic infrastructure changes access to knowledge, and changing access to knowledge changes human agency. Sounds good on the surface, but as everyone who’s read Animal Farm knows, while all animals are created equal, some animals are more equal than others. The question of whose interests are most served by this revolution remains sticky. Same, too, for the relationship between the past and the future. This talk won’t attempt to tell the future, but it will attempt to make sense out of Faulkner’s observation: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Speaker Details

John Leslie King is W.W. Bishop Professor of Information at the University of Michigan. He was a faculty member in computer science and management at the University of California, Irvine from 1980 to 2000, and has been at Michigan since 2000. Along the way he has been department chair, dean, and vice provost, a Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School, and a Canon Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore. In the past decade he spent a good deal of time helping to build the Information Schools movement. His research is on the relationship between technical and social change, focusing mainly on information and communication technologies in highly institutionalized production sectors such as criminal-justice, common-carrier communication, health care, freight and passage transport, financial services, electric power generation and transmission, and education. He is working on the mechanisms of transformation involving technology and knowledge infrastructure, as well as the strange case of the Antarctic “Republic of Science”. He holds a PhD in Administration from the University of California at Irvine, is a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and holds an honorary doctorate in business and economics from Copenhagen Business School.

Date:
Speakers:
John Leslie King
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Series: Microsoft Research Talks