Knowledge proliferates but wisdom languishes. This chasm needs to be bridged before the end of this decade if we are to reverse the present trends toward disaster. The system of communications encircling the globe today seldom uses its tremendous potential to spread global values and foster a more caring, compassionate consciousness. What is urgently needed is a U-turn in our communications and educational policies.

                                                                                                Karan Singh

                                              
WWA Communications Network

The focus of the World Wisdom Alliance communications network is to catalyze action on the most critical global issues in a way that synergizes the wisdom of leading world experts with local activists who are making a difference, and simultaneously, through the World Wide Web, to inspire a widespread creative focus of energy and activities. The mechanism is a new, web-based ‘internet community’.

This ‘wisdom community’ will feature a new type of hybrid Website which will present four dimensions of new media-experience; communication, multi-perspective video, web-linked networking and issue content (meta-knowledge). The new communication network will interconnect ‘global issues’ experts with many ‘global citizens’ at any distance, to interested groups (and schools) and, through an interactive Web portal, to all other interested individuals wherever they are.

The Web portal will further give access to background and archival materials and have virtual spaces for discussion, expression and creative interactivity. The intention is to shift the best ideas and research into necessary actions and practices.

New methodologies, extending the ideas and work of the Toronto School of Communication (McLuhan, Innis, Havelock, Carpenter, et al), which allow a synthesis of new modes of awareness, new forms of organization and new types of presentation and experience, will be integrated into the website and communication network.

Intended outcomes include the development of an active worldwide Alliance and cross-generational dialogue addressing critical global challenges and opportunities. We will demonstrate a new synergy of best ideas and practices which can catalyze global education and present positive evolutionary directions for our society and culture at this time of "systemic gridlock".

These outcomes will be based on these unique approaches:

The 'New Communications' Factor

New approaches to creatively applying communication ideas are based on the integration of the dynamic factors of connectivity, interactivity and content-message for the constructive contribution to the progress of culture and society.

The effectiveness of the work will be based on the fact that it functions on three levels, simultaneously, the personal, the local and the global/universal.  These dimensions are, at once, connected and interactive. The practice of this work is composed of four elements (each with three aspects). At the outset it is necessary to identify and express the values, principles and especially the vision of the initiative.

The practical effectiveness of the experience is based on a creative tension which exists between the situational factors; adaptation, stabilization and continuity, and the catalytic factors; acceleration, integration and concentration. And the results and outcomes of the work can be comparable to what is experienced as symbiosis in Nature, a flexible and dynamic balance between synergy and synthesis.

Ultimately, progress at any one level of communication (micro, macro or meta) is leveraged or enhances the progressive changes at the other levels. This results in a final outcome that manifests as a quantum leap forward for the overall situation - a “hyper-communication” effect. 

Toronto New School of Communications

(The McLuhan Factor)

Potentially the most important advantage for advancing the practice of constructive communications lies in the ideas and work of the Toronto School of Communications.  

The extension of the human faculties and organs is not anything new, but needs to evolve to make a significant difference for the 21^st Century. It is no longer necessary to choose between technological and humanistic approaches and solutions for critical challenges. A more effective approach is to work with and apply multiple ideas, multiple disciplines and multiple media in creative problem solving.

The key is to perceive and work with new patterns of functionality when dealing with situations of transition and change. This means developing new forms of pattern recognition when dealing with complex environmental dynamics such as; convergence, integration and conservation. 

The process requires looking at new structures of information, how they relate to our perceptual transformations going on at this moment, and how they result in new forms of awareness. Behind this are more fundamental issues of human consciousness, such as; analytical vs. analogical understanding, visual vs. oral knowledge dynamics, metaphorical and symbolic knowledge issues, and what we are doing with simulation technologies.

The most urgent need is to demonstrate the ability to evolve ‘the ways in which we learn’ and that 'we can change the ways we change’ before the errors of our past overcome us.