Fabulous post from WDavies in iSociety‘s continuing quest to examine the reliance of the networked society on emergent GoogleTruth. He attended a seminar/discussion about the influence of the kind of knowledge and ideas produced by policy thinktanks on society, which includes this fascinating list of characteristics:
“The type of knowledge produced by LSE and Demos is defined as:
- vehicular not ultimate [particularly interesting idea: this knowledge is not expected to remain valid, but to be a useful way of producing further knowledge by drawing interesting people together; its constantly snowballing and fragmenting]
- diagnostic not predictive
- meaning rich/information poor
- communicative not representational
- transient not timeless
- inclusive not polarising“
All it ever takes is a view well-placed /stutter/edit/ a few well-placed, finely-crafted, meaning-rich/info-poor Oblaat-shielded memebullets… The world is slicked with the vaz, and everything slides. Goodnight, United Nations.
Petafloptimism 
I’m glad you found this interesting Matt. But if you’ll forgive some further navel-gazing, I’ll add something else which I think builds on this. Normally I (like most people probably) go along to these events with a bunch of friends or colleagues, sit next to them, whisper stuff to them, write notes to them (with Wi-Fi I guess I’d be instant messaging them) and then head for the pub afterwards to have an almighty argument about what we’ve heard and what we think about it. The result: we get sick of talking about it, and feel confused as to what it is we’ve heard, what it is that we’ve said, and what conclusions we’ve come to, if any. We probably generate one slogan-type idea which we all agree on and will refer to in the future, but then forget about it. This is actually part and parcel of ‘vehicular knowledge’: you take ideas, stir them and circulate them, change them, then throw them into some other debate and the process continues.
(At the LSE/Demos event, I happened to be there on my own, and mulled it all over on my own for some time, before blogging the ideas. The result I think is better.)
Which makes me think: we know that emergence means that a large collection of separate agents will unintentionally produce sophisticated behaviour, but only if they’re each behaving in a simple way. But where they’re each trying to behave in a /sophisticated/ way the opposite is the case, and the outcome is rather simplistic. Ten people in a pub all trying to analyse a set of sophisticated ideas may produce worse outcomes than one person. And this is the problem with ‘vehicular knowledge’: you can’t prevent each individual trying to provide the over-arching theory. According to Johnson, emergence occurs where agents ‘think local, act local’, but a lot of the time humans (unlike ants) want to do a hell of a lot more than that, and that’s where things come unstuck.