Rafiqul Islam 
Knowledge Management and Communication in the Information Age [PDF ebook] 

The information age came with the promise of transparency greater than anything witnessed heretofore by humanity. Of course, transparency is the essence of foresight and knowledge. The hope was for a greater accountability that would follow increased transparency, compelling policy makers to depend on knowledge and foresight rather than disinformation and hidden agendas. Recent events of the new millennium indicate that the increase has been in opacity and disinformation. The information age, often dubbed as the ‘knowledge era’, has become the antithesis of knowledge, however; even its most ardent proponents admit that. Despite globalization, the information age has failed to generate knowledge-based decision-making tools. The failures of the information age to generate knowledge and remove or attenuate much of the basis of international conflicts are symptomatic of a deeper illness. Science has become the captive of the ‘New Science’ that focuses on short-term, tangible, and status-quo, and doesn’t even allow the real science to face in a direction that would allow the knowledge-model to launch. This science is incompatible with nature, even in competition with nature, and is not even facing the same direction as the science that is needed to increase knowledge – the only process on which rational hopes of discovering the truth may be placed. Consequently, all the promises of the information age have been failing spectacularly. Today, we have medicines that don’t cure, an economy that doesn’t economize, education systems that don’t educate, purification techniques that do not purify, and justice systems that award plaintiffs or deliver discriminatory treatment of an accused depending on ethnic origin, religious belief, or skin colour. Today, we do collect data at an unprecedented rate, and, yet, we do not process a single set of data with any technique that is truly natural. Today, in the name of simulation, airplanes do not emulate how birds fly, computers do not emulate how the brain computes, cameras do not emulate how the human visual cortex captures and fixes an image, electricity disdains to emulate lightning (insufficiently continuous) or the electric eel (too dependent on the material properties of the receiving medium), commercial ships forego natural sources of locomotion like wind, and submarines do not emulate how fish navigate beneath the water’s surface. If nature is the truth, our New Science must be falsehood.