Societal knowledge resistance

Many organizations and individuals use items from the international documentation system to support pre-logical positions which are completely undermined by other documents (which are not cited, even if they have been consulted). This is part of the drama of the political arena and is accepted as such. Many are responsive only to the immediacy of verbal presentations, or to scientifically-backed arguments, or to arguments of a delegation with a strong power-base. Others are affected, or unaffected, by the style of presentation, whether it stresses order/disorder, static/dynamic, continuity/discreteness, spontaneity. On the other hand, and more important, many (at every level of education) are totally indifferent to the whole process which the international documentation system is designed to serve. For them, those documents contain no meaningful information. They are unaffected by efforts for change through the mobilization of public opinion. Although little is known about this pre-logical limit as it affects information, the receptivity to some forms of information only, means that there is a limit to the extent to which an individual or group can learn from information in other styles and modes. It is not simply a question of 'multi-media presentations' but of the pre-logical orientations inherent in any given form of information. The question is how these orientations complement one another and what this limit implies for information systems designed for communication of insights between users of every orientation.