Literature/1999/Rayward


 * http://www.scribd.com/doc/52505258/H-G-Wells-Idea-of-a-World-Brain (better)
 * http://people.lis.uiuc.edu/~wrayward/Wellss_Idea_of_World_Brain.htm

Authors

 * University of New South Wales

Abstract
What exactly is the Wellsian World Brain or World Encyclopaedia ideas to which reference is so often made? What did they mean for Wells? What might they mean for us? This paper examines closely what Wells says about it in his book, World Brain (1938), and in a number of works that elaborate what is expressed there. The paper discusses aspects of the context within which Wells’s conception of a new world encyclopaedia organisation was formulated and its role in the main thrust of his thought. The paper argues that Wells’s ideas about a World Brain are embedded in a structure of thought that may be shown to entail on the one hand notions of social repression and control that must give us pause, and on the other ideas about the nature and organisation of knowledge that may well be no longer acceptable. By examining Wells’s World Brain ideas in some detail and attempting to articulate the systems of belief which shaped them and which otherwise lie silent beneath them, the author hopes to provoke questions about current ideas about the nature of global information systems and emergent intelligence.

Excerpts
This paper has been published in


 * Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50 (May 15, 1999): 557-579

H.G. Wells’s Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Re-Assessment

W. Boyd Rayward

School of Information, Library and Archive Studies,

University of New South Wales,

Sydney, NSW 2051

Australia

w.rayward@unsw.edu.au


 * Conclusion
 * Wells’s vision of a World brain is troubling in and of itself. But it also raises issues of a broader kind that pose a challenge to contemporary accounts of the Word or Global Brain, whether they echo Wells or not. All of these accounts embrace a kind of evolutionary determinism which suggests that a new kind of sentient super-organism is emerging from the complex social arrangements by which we live our lives. What is being referred to is not simply the modification of existing or even the development of new social and personal arrangements to accommodate new political realities (the new Europe for example) or technological innovation (such as the motor car, the telephone or the Television). Something far beyond the ken of ordinary people and "alive" is envisaged. It is alive also in a way that requires the subordination of the will, intelligence and interests of ordinary people. As individuals are subsumed by or absorbed into it, their independence and instrumentality in their own lives are inevitably curtailed in the expectation of general social betterment rather than an enhancement of individual potential. It is neither tool nor prosthesis but may be interpreted as becoming an expression of totalitarian values and authoritarian control.

Chronology

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 * Rayward, W. Boyd (1993) "Some Schemes for Restructuring and Mobilising Information in Documents: A Historical Perspective," Information Processing and Management, 30: 163-175.
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 * Rayward, W. Boyd (1983) "The International Exposition and The World Documentation Congress, Paris, 1937," The Library Quarterly, 53: 254-268.
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 * http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v2p640y1974-76.pdf
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 * http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p540y1883.pdf
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 * Rayward, W. Boyd (1983) "The International Exposition and The World Documentation Congress, Paris, 1937," The Library Quarterly, 53: 254-268.
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 * http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v2p640y1974-76.pdf
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 * http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p540y1883.pdf
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