Building knowledge cultures in the age of the digital reason

Since the Second World War, academics have described and critiqued the transformation that has occurred in Western society. This transformation entails a fundamental shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, emphasising the production and consumption of knowledge, and symbolic goods as a higher-order economic activity. Professor Michael A. Peters from the University of Waikato focuses his research on this transformation, discussing a range of potential developments and in particular considering the role of the University in these developments.
The shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy has brought about significant changes in the focus of economic activity. There is an increasing emphasis on knowledge, which has wide-reaching effects on both the economy and wider society. Academics differ on the nature of these societal effects but agree that this shift is epochal and that it signifies a continual automation and technologisation of processes of scientific communication, including access, distribution and dissemination, which are core aspects of knowledge creation.
The knowledge economy and the knowledge society
A number of scholars have contributed ideas to the concept of ‘knowledge economy’, a system of consumption and production that is based upon intellectual capital as well as to ‘knowledge society’, a society that generates, shares and makes available knowledge to all its members. Attempts have also been made to relate these concepts to wider changes in the nature of capitalism, modernity and the global economy. Both ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge society’ are complex concepts, which hold both descriptive and analytical force but these are largely based on separate literatures developed in isolation from one another. The term ‘knowledge culture’ is an attempt to overcome this dualism and recognise the significance of both streams.

The three forms of knowledge economy
Professor Peters has discussed three forms of knowledge economy: the ‘learning economy’, the ‘creative economy’ and the ‘open knowledge economy’. Analysis of these concepts draws from economics, sociology and philosophy. The ‘learning economy’ was first coined by Bengt-Ake Lundvall, a Swedish economist, in the mid-1990s and refers to the capacity to learn, which increasingly determines the relative position of individuals, firms and systems. Sustainability of these learning economies depends on the distribution of capabilities to learn. Analysis of the ‘learning economy’ focuses upon the learning processes that are responsible for the production of knowledge.
The ‘creative economy’ originates in the work of Charles Landry, John Howkins and Richard Florida in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It emphasises the creative industries and institutions as an interlocking sector producing cultural goods and services as a rapidly growing and central element of the new global knowledge economy. These industries draw upon both the individual and collective resources of creativity, skill and talent but the idea of creative economy extends beyond this, to new creative and open processes around which technological development and economic development is organising itself. The creative economy holds strong potential for the generation of wealth and job creation through the development and exploitation of intellectual property.
The ‘open knowledge economy’ emphasises that information is the vital component in a ‘new’ politics economy which links space, knowledge and capital in networked practices. Freedom is essential if these networked practices are to develop into knowledge cultures. Ground rules for democratic societies have changed to favour the individual active consumer-citizen who accesses or creates blogs via the internet, bypassing mainstream media. New media thrives on a constant streaming of opinions involving many ‘information transactions’ but also serves as a vehicle for constant feedback. An information state exists in which nobody is immune to information and information cannot be policed or controlled. Issues around state and corporate surveillance, however, remain a threat to both privacy and democratic rights. New theories have been recently put forward by critical thinkers concerning ‘cognitive capitalism’ and a new socialisation of knowledge processes through developing social media production (Peters & Bulut, 2011).
With open arms
Openness has become a complex term to describe a range of digital trends and movements and has emerged as an alternative mode of ‘social production’, based on the growing and overlapping complexities of open source, open access, open archiving, open publishing and open science. In this context, openness pertains to open source models of scientific communication, knowledge distribution and educational development. It also is connected more widely to government (‘open government’), society (‘open society’), economy (‘open economy’) and psychology (openness is one of the ‘big five’ personality traits).

There is an increasing emphasis on knowledge, which has wide-reaching effects for both the economy and wider society

‘Open science economy’ refers to open source models of scientific communication, knowledge distribution and educational development and has important consequences for education at all levels. ‘Openness’ is now a leading source of innovation in the global digital economy. It is increasingly adopted by world governments, international agencies, multinationals and educational institutions as a way of promoting scientific enquiry and international collaboration.
Role of universities
The university plays an important role in these knowledge economies. Contemporary ideas about the university are based upon three main ideas: the Kantian idea of reason, the Humboldtian idea of culture and the technological idea of excellence. Many features of the contemporary university stem from Humboldt’s idea of the university as a public good. Public goods are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous as their consumption does not reduce availability to others. The university contributes to the development of the public sphere for rational debate and deliberative democracy in evaluating and originating innovative public policy. In this sense it helps to determine what is in the ‘public interest’ and cultivates the conditions for democratic citizenship through the academic development of ‘civic intelligence’.
Creativity and the university
Professor Peters, along with other academics, has developed a model of ‘the creative university as a digital public university’. This model proposes a conception of the ‘creative university’ which embraces user-centred and open-innovation public ecosystems, which are based upon a shared ethos underlying ‘co-creation’, ‘co-production’ and ‘co-design’. These new platforms draw upon theories of collective intelligence and commons-based peer production. This model is in stark contrast to historical models of German idealism and Romanticism that emphasise individual creativity attached to passions and dark developing unconscious forces. The model of peer production and collective intelligence is instead a product of social, networked and rich semiotic environments in which everything speaks.

Both ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge society’ are complex concepts, which hold both descriptive and analytical force

Collective intelligence and peer production
Collective intelligence represents a cultural and evolutionary development of human intelligence, emphasising the social basis of language and consciousness. It is the evolving cultural infrastructure for the national systems of higher education. Peer production is one form of collective intelligence and is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organising communities of individuals. In such communities, labour is coordinated towards a shared outcome.
We are now entering a new age of digitally enabled peer production, involving the democratisation of economics, politics and culture, the participation of citizen-amateurs and the open sourcing of journalism, science, library science and field of cultural production. Questions remain about the relationships between peer production, collective intelligence, the higher education marketplace and knowledge dissemination. Professor Peters’ work sets us on the road to answering these questions. The ‘creative university as digital public university’ model proposes that by fostering economic and social equality, free discourse can be sustained and developed in the public arena, which serves to guide the political practice of democracy.

Is there a downside to relying solely on digital media as an information source?
Digital media are now the new normal for research, scientific communication and innovation. I use the term ‘the epoch of digital reason’ to describe this philosophical shift in culture and while it has scalability, global mind extension, network and open access effects that are generally positive, it also has consequences in terms of the fight over intellectual property, knowledge and information monopolies, and the reliance on digital media and sources that configure metrics and citations controlling scientific performance emphasising the values of control and efficiency. Digital reason is an operationalisation of a two-value algebraic logic – not all knowledge or wisdom can be captured by this process.
You describe the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) as a ‘dubious practice’ – could you expand on why such schemes are problematic?
I’m strongly influenced by the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard who provided a strong critique of ‘performativity’. Such schemes capture that which is easily counted (number of article views in top ranked journals or citation analysis); they do not reveal the full complexity of human practice or interaction that takes place in conversation or teaching. I question the consequences of inadequate methodologies that rank institutions in terms of the quality of teaching as is now the case in the UK. I think that tremendous harm to academic teachers will be done by metric systems that come to govern funding patterns through a narrowing and new regulation of what is officially acceptable.
You have collaborated with a number of other academics over long distances. What is the value of these collaborations in the context of your own work?
One of my aims consistent with a belief in collective intelligence has been to collaborate with as many people as possible that are different from me (especially in terms of culture, gender and age). (See my ‘Radical Openness…’ (Peters, 2014); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ5zb8gyAr4). I have consciously entertained an epistemology based on a ‘theory of links’ and the quality of the relationship. I am also interested in mentoring and building networks through journals that I have established, or through organisations like the Editors’ Collective. In most cases I have first met these collaborators in person and only later developed collaborative networks. I prefer the notion of ‘creative academic labour’ to human capital theory.
What has been the reception of other academics to your ‘creative university as digital public university’ model?
I started this process when I was at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and gave a course on the ‘creative economy’. Later, I collaborated with Dan Araya, one of my PhD students, to edit a collection on Education in the Creative Economy (Araya & Peters, 2010) which was well received. At Waikato University, I worked with Tina Besley to organise the first Creative University conference in 2012 and established a book series with Sense. The idea is to provide a wider agenda to the emphasis solely on innovation from an economic viewpoint. It is also to demonstrate the significance of the humanities and processes of social innovation to the creative economy. (See https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/1636-the-creative-university.pdf).
Where do you see your research going in the next five years?
There are two major strands to my work: a philosophical strand based on the philosophers Wittgenstein, Foucault and others, especially in areas of epistemology, cognition, learning processes, subjectivity and truth; and, political economy of knowledge and information in emerging capitalism focusing on questions of the creation, production, access and distribution of knowledge. Political economy is the interdisciplinary studies of how politics influences the economy and economic outcomes. My aim is to more effectively link these strands in a version based on a concept of digital reason that sees education as a mode of development envisaging a new type of modernisation theory that also registers the significance of politics, ethics and subjectivity to forms of ‘knowledge economy’.

Research Objectives
Professor Peters’ work examines knowledge cultures and where institutions like universities sit in the increasingly digital world.
Funding

• PESA
• University of Waikato
• School of Sociology, Beijing Normal University

Collaborators
Prof Peters has collaborated with many scholars some of who are listed below:
Jim Marshall; Tina Besley; Petar Jandric; Jeff Stickney; Marek Tesar;
Dan Araya; Peter Roberts; Paul Smeyers; Richard Heraud; Yusef Waghid; E. Jayne White; George Lazariou; Ruyu Hung; Susanne Weber; Nick Burbules; Duck-Joo Kwak; Arjen Wals; Zhu Hongwen.
Bio
Michael Peters is Professor of Education at the University of Waikato (NZ), Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (US), Visiting Distinguished Professor in the School of Sociology, Beijing Normal University, and in the Education Department at Zhengzhou University. He is the executive editor of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and founding editor of five international journals. He has published some 80 books and over 500 papers. He has acted as an advisor to governments, UNESCO and research agencies in USA, Scotland, NZ, South Africa and the EU. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ in 2010 and awarded honorary doctorates by State University of New York (SUNY) in 2012 and University of Aalborg in 2015.
Contact
Professor A. Peters
The University of Waikato
Private Bag 3105
Hamilton 3240
New Zealand
E: [email protected]
T: +64 7 858 5171
W: http://michaeladrianpeters.com/
W: https://www.waikato.ac.nz/staff-profiles/people/mpeters

Building knowledge cultures in the age of the digital reason