| Communication expert calls on SIS to form center tackling global challenges BY MATT GETTY Usually discussions of overpopulation, melting ice caps, and giant meteors headed toward earth offer little hope for the future. But that wasn’t the case with the keynote address from last week’s annual conference of the SIS Division of International Communication. Raising the specter of these and other impending calamities, Joseph Pelton, director of the Space and Advanced Communication Re-search Institute, admitted that the human race could face extinction in the next 100 years, but he also had a plan to make sure that doesn’t happen. And that plan centered on AU’s School of International Service (SIS). 
Photo by Jeff Watts
Joseph Pelton, director of the Space and Advanced Communication Research Institute and NASA advisor, proposes a new global studies approach that transcends national and academic boundaries. “With their unique capabilities AU and SIS could become one of the nodes in a global network . . . addressing what I call these ‘megatrends of the future,’” said Pelton, who has written 16 books on technology and international communication, including Global Talk, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The key to this “global brain” uniting experts on pollution, space exploration, terrorism, and population growth, argued the NASA advisor and former SIS adjunct professor, will be a new global studies approach that transcends boundaries between nations and academic disciplines. Beginning his speech, “A New Paradigm for Twenty-first Century International Studies,” with a brief overview of human history, Pelton argued that the nation-state, formed by human civilizations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is outdated. Since the formation of the Rhine River Association, which sought to prevent printers from several countries from dumping ink into the Rhine in the nineteenth century, Pelton said, international problems have increasingly called for international solutions. The growth of weapons of mass destruction, multinational corporations, international trade, and transnational terrorist cells in the twentieth century, he argued, has accelerated this trend too rapidly for political systems to keep up. Said Pelton, “The nation-state, which is built to deal with problems within a confined border, is not particularly adept at dealing with these issues.” The network of universities that would deal with these global issues, he argued, would not only have to be international, but interdisciplinary as well. “Higher education in the twenty-first century will need to be a lot more horizontal,” he said. “We need a lot more trespassing across disciplines.” For that reason, Pelton said that SIS is nicely equipped to form a “Center for International Communication and Knowledge Development” that would be a key part of this interdisciplinary, international learning network. Noting the interdisciplinary history of the school’s International Communication program, Pelton maintained that its former director, Hamid Mowlana, has laid much of the groundwork for the international network he envisions. Under its current director, Shalini Venturelli, he added, the program continues to build on this work. The challenge facing such a center, Pelton said, is not a dearth of information on these global issues but rather a lack of knowledge. Arguing that the recent information technology explosion has left us with “information overload but knowledge underload,” Pelton said that information exchange is growing increasingly dehumanized. “Our communications and information technologies are no longer driven by human speech or human thought,” he said. “They are driven by high-speed computer exchange.” To put human beings back in the communication driver’s seat, he stressed, this center must wrestle with the question of, “How do you distill from all these petabytes of information exactly what’s going on and produce knowledge rather than just information?” Though many might look at the looming global crises he touched on as problems without a solution, Pelton remained hopeful that turning information into knowledge and allowing that knowledge to flow freely across political and intellectual borders will allow humanity to thrive for a billion more years. “Socrates said that the only vice was ignorance, that the more we know, the better off we are,” he said. “In a recent New York Times editorial, David Brooks suggested the opposite, that the smarter humans have gotten the more they started wars, created weapons of mass destruction—that the continued growth of knowledge is a very dangerous thing. I’m hoping that Socrates was right.” |
