(1997-06-09) Thinking Without A Tank

Thinking Without a Tank. The year is 2050. The place: Earth. The possibilities... Which future is in store and what, if anything, can or should be done about it? These questions were collectively addressed by environmentalists, economists, academicians and policy makers. But while the Rand Corp. and the World Resources Institute helped set up the debate, the arena was not a conference room. Instead, it was Hyper Forum.

At Rand, Lempert said, "We still have our tank." But the notion of a tankless "think tank" is not an oxymoron -- not in cyberspace at any rate

now the technology that arose from an academic environment is returning in a new guise: as a tool for research centers to reorganize policy discussions, build agreements among specialists and reach out for new voices and new perspectives.

"The problem that everyone is trying to deal with with the Web is the information glut," which "degrades the usefulness of the information," Lempert observed. To resolve this problem, he said, Hyper Forum uses a moderator to guide the discussion.

what distinguishes the Internet is that "you have the ability to establish very rapidly shifting groups of people to form ad hoc collaborative arrangements."

The Internet is providing "a better informed and better expressed forum for deliberative discourse," Murray said, adding: "I think the Web is an amazing revolution. I think it's a millennial change and not just a decennial or centennial one."

In addition, he said, while huge amounts of information have previously been organized "in a serial sense," alphabetically, or by number, information on the Net "is defined only in connection with other information" (associative) which is "much more the way the human brain works -- pattern recognition."