His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal

The Challenge of Informed Humanity From "Infosphere" to "Cogitosphere"

The challenge of informed humanity is to render information an instrument for development and prosperity. Peace and stability are essential for this purpose. This means that we have to ensure that information works for peace and not against it.

Today, network-centric forms of conflict and peacemaking are in confrontation. There is a need to reshape what has been described as "infowar" into "infopeace". I think this is one of the most serious challenges facing humanity in the new Millennium. In the Club of Rome our mission has always been to turn difficult challenges into opportunities.

As stated in the invitation note, our Annual Conference this year will focus on this contradictory development: on the one hand we recognize an increasing flow of information that may potentially provide us with more knowledge about the world around us. On the other hand, we also identify a growing information overload causing confusion and disorientation and an increasing tendency to misuse information and information channels obscuring the premises of public and private decision-making and increasing public ignorance.

Our objective in the Club of Rome is to tap into what one scholar has described as "the surplus capacity of information networks to awaken a global critical consciousness." For that purpose, we should seek to understand through information technology how in the words of that scholar the "Digital Age" and an "Age of Terror" converged on 9/11.

In his opinion, we need critical questions and counter-visions to ensure that IT is not transformed into weapons of mass distraction, deception and destruction.

The challenge of informed humanity is to make certain that IT is safeguarded as a weapon of mass instruction, education and reconstruction.

The international "politique" of the revolution in information technology can be classified under four categories:

• Participation: new platforms have emerged that enable diverse and previously powerless actors to short-circuit existing channels and exert influence.
• Legitimacy: the effect on democratic accountability and identity.
• Security: new definitions of state interests and power base.
• Governance: centralised state control of dissemination of information.

Positions differ widely on the impact of the revolution in information technology on democracy, governance and an emerging global civil society. They range from those who think that this impact has been grossly exaggerated, to those who consider that this revolution is no longer of benefit to civil society and has fallen under the control of governments.

To strike a middle path and identify a way forward it is relevant to refer to a number of provocative questions:

• Though the Digital Age extends in the United States from Silicon Valley to Alley and globally from Bangalore to Singapore, is the distinguishing characteristic of the Digital Age its spatio-temporal intensivity rather than its geopolitical extensivity?
• In other words, is its main distinguishing feature its capacity to intensify global effects through a collapse of time and distance?
• Is the Digital Age short on universality and long on instability as it develops unevenly within and across nation states, punctuated by rapid cycles of new economy booms and busts?
• How has the Digital Age come to occupy such a hegemonic position over other facets of modernity?
• After 9/11 and the ensuing crises, will it continue to dominate all other challengers?
• Does modernity in a Digital Age manifest itself as a more advanced era succeeding an earlier backward one or as rapid oscillations of message and medium (signal-to-noise ratio), regressive repetitions of images (feed-back loops), and phase-shifts between order and disorder (complexity)?
• After 9/11 has the owl of Minerva taken wing? If so, is it signaling the arrival of wisdom, or simply leaving the scene of a heinous crime?
• Can we forget the day of terror and reclaim the Digital Age?
• Has IT given rise to a new digital media based on a moving image of the world, in both senses of the word?
• Does this mean that image-based sentiments of fear, hate and empathy now dominate word-based discourses of ideas, interests, and power?
• At the electronic level, does the speed of transmission matter as much as the content of the message?
• Has the global networking of multi-media become unstoppable? And has this resulted in a public attention deficit disorder that leaves little time for critical inquiry and political action by a permanently distracted audience?
• Are we trapped in a new interwar of technological and theological fundamentalisms?
• Just as religious fundamentalism depends on IT for the projection and magnification of its powers, is there a rise of a new techno-fundamentalism, in which secularists seek security, salvation and transcendence through the fetishisation of technology?
• Have we entered the "Age of Infoterror"?
• How has the revolution in networked forms of digital media transformed the way advanced societies conduct war and make peace?
• How can we move from infowar to infopeace?

I wanted deliberately to share with you these provocative questions because what faces us today are grave environmental risks, a growing gap between the rich and the poor, and conflicts between different cultures. The course of humanity will not change to the better by itself.

Our task in the next two days is to identify specific courses of action towards an alternative. We will benefit from contributions from eminent persons. Minister of Education and Sciences, Mrs. Tuula Haatainen's address on Finland's goals for Informed Humanity is both thought provoking and illuminating. The fact that this meeting takes place in Helsinki is meaningful. For in Helsinki, during difficult times, human will, and ingenuity, against all odds, turned war into peace, dominance by powerful neighbours into constructive neutrality, and backwardness into prosperity. Not least, we remember Helsinki for its Final Act of 1975 and the Helsinki Process that paved the way to a peaceful alternative to the nuclear nightmare that threatened humanity for the better part of the second half of the last century.

Professor Mona Makram-Ebeid will examine the importance of freedom of expression as a deterrent to violence. This is a key dimension in our troubled world and we look forward to this contribution.

Former President Martti Ahtisaari will speak to us about the importance of informed global politics. Professor Joseph Semboja representing Tanzania's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will tell us about the importance of knowledge as a tool for development. This is followed by Roseann Runte who will examine the challenges for the United States of politics in the information society.

I am sure that everyone looks forward to listening to these contributions and to the other distinguished members participating in the workshops that will focus on specific dimensions and instruments within our theme.

These will range from the role of NGOs and civic engagement in overcoming ignorance, to the challenges for democracy posed by the information overload and infotainment, in addition to the challenges for business from the irrationality of markets in the information age.

Throughout our deliberations, it is vital that we do not lose sight of out objective: how to change ignorance and the lack of vision into global responsibility and awareness. How to motivate the commitment to achieve global change?

The new digital media, with its high speed, makes it all too easy to lose sight of clear objectives in our information age. Here, I would like to refer to Paul Virilio, architect, critic of the art of technology, cultural theorist, and increasingly considered as the inventor of concepts such as "dromology" or the science of speed. He has analysed over a long period of time how media-driven acceleration results in what he describes as the "aesthetics of disappearance". The political subject, be it the accountable leader, participatory citizen, the deliberative process itself, is diminished and engulfed by a growing "infosphere".

In Virilio's universe, people "no longer believe their eyes … Their faith in perception" has become "slave to the faith in the technical sightline". He conceives of vision machines as the accelerated products of what he calls "sightless vision" - vision without looking - that is itself merely the reproduction of an intense blindness that will become the latest and last form of industrialisation: the industrialization of the non-gaze.

Whether one agrees or not with Virilio it is relevant to say that our task in the Club of Rome is to elevate what I call the "Cogitosphere" (or the realm of thinking and reflection) above that of the Infosphere in order to avoid that sightless vision and to focus our deliberative process on the real challenges facing informed humanity.

Thank you.