GLOBAL INFORMATION PLAZA 3

Contributions

From: Michel Fingerhut, France

Date: July 20, 2004

-Translated from French-

1- What if power were to disappear?

2- What if the “cult of information” were to materialize into the establishing of a “Ministry of Truth?”(a la Orwell, 1984)

3- What if Orwell's “novlang” were to become the pidgin-English of the Internet?

4- What if “THE' network were to take over and we became the neurons of a cybernetic monster, as suggested by Pierre Levy (See also the excellent book by Céline Lafontaine: "L'empire cybernétique: des machines à penser à la pensée machine")

5- What if the webs that humans keep weaving around them -financial, technical, etc.- ended up strangulating them after they have morphed into gigantic and powerless spiders, as Kafka suggested?

6- What if humans were to favor relationships with the Other rather than with everybody?

7- What if hmans were to favor knowledge to information?

8- What is humans were to favor social well-being to technological progress?

[I guess I read too much Ellul, Anders and others... Michel F.]

From: Pam McLean,

Date: August 1, 2004

9- What if people in "developing" countries, who can only access e-lists through expensive cyber cafes, could do it as cheaply as their colleagues in the "developed world"?

10- What if people in university departments (or other organisations with relevant interests) helped people "on the other side of the digital divide" to become "e-mail pen-pals" with them, in order to address issues of shared interest?

11- What if people in "developed countries" could cover the costs of their pen-pals' emails - what kind of pen-pals would they like to have?

12- What if international development agencies could "cut out the middle-man" (consultants who go and make contact with various groups) and get to contact the groups more directly through local representative pen-pals?

13- What if it was really easy to make emails affordable for our friends, families, or colleagues in "developing countries"?

From: Martin Dowding, Vancouver

Date: August 10, 2004

14- My "what if" comes from part of my current research. I'm becoming rather obsessed with the thought that "literacy," as we knew it during the pre-technological era, was a certain thing that it no longer is. What is Frontier College today? What is Laubach? (for example). I am assuming that today's cache of "literacy" is all about "information literacy" under the regime of ICT. My "what if," then, is "what if literacy really were still based on the competency to read and understand IDEAS in writing rather than displaying "information literacy" (whatever that is) via intermediary technologies?"

From: V S Cholin, India
Date: August 16, 2004

15- What if publishers (including commercial and society) and professional associations work towards uniform model for subscription rates from country to country provide equal access rights?

viz. for developed countries, developing countries, under developed countries etc.

The publisher models will be too expensive for developing and under developed countries. The IFLA PRAC committee had deliberated on the issue during the last conference.

From: Manju Agrawal, India

Date: August 19, 2004

16- What if all uneducated/rural/marginalised persons could regularly get updated information relevant to their lives, and they knew how to use them? and what if educated literate and highly educated people could somehow not have available to them any such updated or practical information at all?

From: Zova Martirosian

Date: September 10, 2004

17- [slightly edited] What if there were an accident (for example, earthquake) in a country where some large universities or colleges are located, which are equipped with computers with latest means of computer facilities, information technology and software?

18- What will happen with computer networks, to which help there is an information interchange, if there will be an interethnic conflict?

19- What if main servers by which the large enterprises, universities are connected, or a set of computers serving bank systems, will leave out of operation?

From: Ms.K.T.Anuradha, India

Date: September 21, 2004

20- What if all the institutions in the world develop interoperable institutional repositories ensuring that their research becomes mainstream and contributes on an equal footing to the global knowledge pool and all the journals are made open archive and through information and communication technology knowledge is communicated to everyone?

21- What if for measuring and auditing scientific productivity of a country, a comprehensive dataset and database of publications is created by a national body in every country and a fine-tuned metrics is developed taking not only research input and research output measures but also other socio-economic-cultural indicators?