Building a ‘Knowosphere,’ One Cable and Campus at a Time

As I wrote over the weekend, the transition to a new year has provided a valuable moment to review goals for this blog and, more generally, assess prospects that the human condition (including the quality of our relationship with our environment) will be improved by the planet’s fast-spreading web of communication tools. I looked at blogging on Dec. 30.

Now here’s my broader take on what I’ve begun calling the “knowosphere” — a word intentionally echoing the more allegorical “noosphere,” the “planet of the mind” of Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Whatever term you use, it’s clear that the world is quickly being knitted by new ways to share observations and shape ideas that are bound to have profound impacts on the quality of the human journey. (“Knowosphere” has also been used by Larry Kilham, an entrepreneur and inventor who has been writing about how to remain innovative in the age of Google.)

As recently as a year ago, I was thinking that something new had to be built — a kind of online hub and toolkit linking like-minded individuals, schools, businesses, museums and other institutions focused on collaborative learning and experimentation.

It’d include a Match.com-style portal for connecting, say, a harried teacher seeking an explanatory video on geo-engineering with student filmmakers eager to test their chops. It would help connect students from communities in different parts of the world pondering similar issues — like coastal changes from rising sea levels.

The reality is that the tools and initiatives are already out there. See this fun geo-engineering video on YouTube.

And the connections are being made. See the educational work on coasts and climate undertaken by the British group Atlantic Rising.

Some new technology and organization is surely helpful.

In his column on Sunday, Tom Friedman explored this terrain through the work of Blair Levin, an Aspen Institute fellow who is leading the Gig.U project. This initiative is aiming to build dozens of university-centered networks for innovation and education around the United States, with the goal of fostering what Levin calls “high-performance knowledge exchange and generation.”

“Why Don’t We Have Fiber Everywhere” is the title of a new post on the Gig.U Web site. I’m all for boosting connectedness here. But I’m more energized by what’s already happening with fiber optic, and other links (particularly mobile phones) in parts of the world where cheap access to the Internet remains a dream.

The reality globally is that such connections are spreading at a blazing pace.  The most exciting story is not in the United States, but East Africa, and it has its roots partly in the 2010 World Cup.*

Calestous Juma, a professor of “the practice of international development” at Harvard, recently pointed me to the remarkable history of Seacom, a privately financed (and mostly African-financed) fiber-optic cable that was laid from South Africa to Europe in 2009. (Video here.) A substantial impetus for the project was the need to ensure adequate data capacity to reliably broadcast the World Cup matches.

But since the cable was switched on, countries along Africa’s east coast have been rapidly tapping in. And more cables are on the way.

After reading up on this development, I e-mailed the following thought and question to Juma before the holidays:

To me, the laying of this cable — financed on the strength of the bandwidth demand created by the World Cup — is perhaps the single biggest surprise and source of excitement I’ve had all year — showing just how powerful a little connectedness can be, initially for commerce but soon (at least to my mind) for education and true connectedness, of the kind described by the word noosphere.

Combine the cables and related infrastructure expansion with looming ubiquity of smart phones and access to an amazing suite of online courses and knowledge [banks] and you have amazing prospects, to my mind.

Am I over-inflating the significance of what’s happening?

Juma replied:

You are as overinflated as the reality is. Your intuition about a small event resulting in far-from-equilibrium scenarios is right on point. What is even better is the indeterminate evolution. Who would have thought really that the real kick would from a sporting event?

I wrote this piece at the time of the Seacom launch and there were some really difficult conversations with some of the editors who thought I was way too optimistic: “New Africa broadband ‘ready.'”

Your scenario that includes infrastructure, access devices and content creates a vital force in development that will continue to propel the continent for some time to come.

I think mobile broadband there will have a huge impact on traditional and conservative sectors like education, health, creative arts (film, etc.) and certainly democracy. The underlying theme will be access to technical knowledge that has been Africa’s most critical limiting factor to development.

Africa’s have learned to do a lot with so little. You can imagine how much they will do with so much.

But unlike uses in other countries that focus more on blockbuster products that enrich a few individuals, I suspect that there will be a humanistic touch to Africa’s mobile innovations, bringing solutions to persistent socioeconomic problems. The use of text messaging capacity to revolutionize the banking industry is a good example. Here also you have a different model that is humanistic in character: low-cost, high-volume applications reaching out to the masses.

When you combine the kind of work Levin and others are doing with this global build out of connections (which is going into fast forward as smart phone prices drop), it’s hard not to be a rational optimist, as defined in Matt Ridley’s illuminating recent book. As Ridley shows, connectivity and commerce are the roots of innovation.

Just as important, to my mind, they can be a source of empathy and trust by offering a sense of expanding community, as well.

The fiber and satellite and other digital links are only one component of the knowosphere. They are the spokes connecting hubs where people are actively engaged, face to face, with new models for innovation and learning.

There’s enormous ferment along these lines on many campuses, with enhanced digital connections a great bonus, but person-to-person relationships with surrounding communities, including businesses, easily as important.

In a recent visit to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I saw an amazing melding of learning and practice in the Design, Innovation and Society program and other clinic-style courses and labs. Some of the results are already on display, including young businesses such as Ecovative Designs — a manufacturer of mushroom-based packaging and insulation. I’ll be posting video I shot there soon.

As I’ve noted before, it remains to be seen whether the global build out of this network of creative networks results in the kind of unified planet theory of human progress envisioned in a line of thinking from Darwin through Havel.

Deeply embedded traits, particularly tribalism and the dominance of the near and now, cut against the prospect of Homo sapiens having a smooth path toward a mature, interrelating, forward-looking civilization — even if individuals, through the Web, expand what the psychiatrist Dan Siegel calls our “we map.”

But I believe (I use that word because I offer no evidence other than history) that the good will far outweigh the bad.

Progress starts with engagement and intentionality.

It is indeed a small world after all.

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