UNIVERSITY AND INFORMATION:
Society and culture of information in academic institutions.

M. en I.S.I. Carlos Gabriel Rodríguez Camargo

The organic principle of the knowledge is the information that contains(1). Nevertheless, in certain contexts of change, the knowledge of the tool or the mnemotechnical tools that organize it, are more important that information itself. This metainformation constituted by "the data on data on data" (Millán. 2002. 1) is going to prevent that any group make a game of cyber-parrot mindlessly, grouping lots of information using an exercise of search and analysis that is reduced to press the keys ctrl + c and ctrl + v.
Is worrisome to observe how this insufficiency of technical and methodological knowledge affects an endless number of social activities, from the policy and the news until the entertainment, but is really dangerous which it happens in the classrooms, from the elemental school to the university. Such situation is syndromatic: symptoms like the academic-administrative disinformation, the low quality of the scientific production(2) or the discretionary reserves of some information that are certainly of public knowledge, constitute a scene that is darker while less diffusion make the administrators of this information. The affected fields are almost so varied as the information that carries: administrative, intellectual, academic, ideological. Each particular field has its own procedures and ethical rules, but they make an exegesis necessary of all of them to the light of a conjuncture that forces to see the problem from the informational-communicational field.

THE MANIPULATION OF INFORMATION ON INTERNET.
All knowledge and information have a technology that aid they to conserve and diffuse themselves. The use of these technologies is, in first place, an election and decision of the publisher of this information but, with passing of the time, in later instances, such information most be include in different archives, not being necessarily coincident with its genealogy or its rightly inclusion in an index. We can consider this phenomenon like a communicative distortion that affects the context and the mechanism of communication; the particularity of such distortion is that it takes place in the mnemotechnical mechanisms that were used to organize the information and could present faults. The find engines can inform about texts that belong to archives with ideological differences in a same category of an specific index, because use simplified systems of organization and nomenclature: clue words as 'revolution' or 'subversion' can produce as results links to Web sites of the EZLN, IRA, FARC or AUC (3), also can show links to documents about Internet where found the phrase 'revolution of information'. Without give more information about the ideological character of the theoretical principles that involve the examples, is already perceivable the possibility of mistake of the systems of indexing without a responsible characterization and identification for each cibertext by his publisher. But, farther, before the inevitable confusion of texts on Internet, the websurfer need a testing toolbox, a file of ciber-ordeal for the information, their mnemotechnical tools, their content, their genealogy and their context. Withal, the information avalanche continues and grows.
With all these uncertainties and imprecisions, we can say without doubts that Internet is the 'system-network-of-systems' where the researcher seek information today. Other big archives of useful information are constituted by the off-line encyclopedic libraries, sometimes reduced to software Encarta of Microsoft Corporation that is settled as bait of purchase in the PCs with operating systems Windows or occasionally are illegally copied for pedagogical use. Now is necessary to make the precision that we are speaking of decodificables information by reading skills and its basic strategies, we did not talk about more sophisticated languages like the employees in the systems developing and informational hacking; this other linguistic level manage procedures and tools, that are more restrictive, elaborated and complex. In both cases, although we speak about the same habitat (the electronic device of diffusion and exchange of information) we must distinguish the methods like first element of analysis, scientific precaution against communicative mythologies and "overreacting attitudes" (Castells, 2001. 1)
The manipulation of information gains complexity with the intervention of 'paratexts', estranges about the technological tools of the communicative device: cultural, social or racial ambit, faith or ideology, even mental health - illness. But the technological tools still being of publish knowledge (Castells, 2001. 2) and with them and its knowledge, can be acquired the ability of selection and reconstruction of information.

THE REVOLUTION OF I.C.T.(4)Y AND ITS PRESENCE IN CLASSROOMS
Without doubts, the big measure of information in Internet supposes an equal increase in selection difficulty, troubling the access to a specific content (Giannetti, 2000. 4) When common people suffer this complex, depends to the university, like academic, investigative and administrative place, to teach and to find competent tools to make a properly search and use of information. Based in recent history of Internet (Castells, 2001) we can suppose that appropriate and corrected use of computing sciences tools by specialists in university, whom contemplate Internet phenomenon in its real historic-social, ethical and technological magnitude, is going to bring to the members of all community a highlight that allows them to take control of the tool and able they to develop their own dynamics.
The interactive classroom becomes an opened classroom, a forum of discussion made possible by the curricular structure and the pedagogical practice. The multimedial classroom is the most appropriate tool to develop modern pedagogical activity, nevertheless, multimedial classroom is not reduced to the use of high technology or real time data bases or last generation softwares, also related about sociocultural competitions that allow to decode information inside and outside the academic atmosphere social application of the knowledge through the use of the multimedial tools that go beyond student commissions and preprofessional practices, that overcomes the instruction and prohang by the development of the community in network with the university.
In right application of the new technologies of information - in and from the university - it must mediate a responsible analysis of the context and their realities, of the social/economical necessities of the community, independently of the public or private modality of the institutions, going faraway to the investigation and generation of a serious theory that sees beyond the existent organic divisions (technical, technological and professional education) or the political commitments of the governmental administrations (standard of quality and pairs accreditation) and the affairs of the global market. The revalidation of communitarian values and codes in the informational world can only be given from a serious reflection of technological conditions like support of the learning and not only like an ephemeral goal.

INFORMATIONAL SOCIETIES AND CULTURES.
When we talk about societies and cultures of information, we goes inside the sphere of the communitarian affairs like tool of constitution of the groups. The informational society offers the traffic tools but it lacks the spirit of participation and the informational culture that the technological activeness supposes. If we assumed that "Internet is an instrument that develops behaviors but does not change them, more than when the behaviors take control of Internet and, therefore, they are amplified and growing from which they are" (Castells, 2001. 10) the informational theory is made eccentric to Internet and the I.C.T. to becomes and integral part of social development of informational domain. The groups seize of the technological tool to develop a reformulation of codes and to show their identity frame of values, their cultural characteristics.
The university communities cannot admit a raising of the informative services tools without an efficient development of the use of the own organic information. We cannot suppose informational clarity in institutions that do not allow free access to his protocols and public information. Academic and administrative decisions or acts of university boards must be public and plentiful diffused. The constitution of informational culture begins to assume the disagree and the discussion like incentive of the constitution of the university.
The university is the generator and diffuser of cultural educative paradigms of each community; on the quality and responsibility of each academic group and faculty, it depends if they admit a paradigm spurious that it betrays the necessities that its own community demands or, on the contrary, to make an independent exercise that reflects the idiosyncrasy and the identity, helped by the technological tools and the discussion that its use causes.

UNIVERSITY IDENTITIES IN SOCIAL AFFAIRS AND INFORMATIONAL TRAFFIC.
Another perspective of manipulation of information, shows that can be distinguished two types of university institutions in agreement with their capacity of action and diffusion. The first type of institution is the one that has a developed knowledge and a sufficient access to tools of informational traffic: electronic mail, forums of discussion, data bases and consultation online, protocols of informational traffic widely diffused at academic as administrative levels, virtual campus; in short, institutions that have sophisticated tools of information production that they are evaluated permanently. The other type of institution does not have this tools or it does not dominate the technology adapted for his use. By first hand it seemed to exist a merely instrumental difference from the I.C.T. that concerns to hardware and methodology of informatics technologies, but if we seen on a bigger context around the university institutions and their social function, we found an element that makes critic the situation: the capacity of social/political action.
Without trying to make an evaluation of the quality of action of university institutions, it is possible to see that a huge handling of information and mnemotechnical informatics tools, combined with a low capacity of social/political action inside the near community because the nature of curricular programs (a graduate studies in international management or M.B. programs focused to global economy) in certain social economical or political characteristics ("expensive education" for multinational markets) or in the kind of institutional member (military or religious universities) will cause that a great depth of knowledge has a minimum rank of direct application in the community or promote in society an imaginary of alienation. On the other situation, where a big field of social and political action is mixed with a bare formation in informational theory and mnemotechnical methodology of the I.C.T., conflicts arose in curricular objectives (replication of programs, disorganization of professional profiles, unawareness of the objectives of the market) socioeconomic constitution (public, private or mixed organizations lost of its university knowledge commitment with the community) political ideological thinking (public 'marxists' universities versus private 'capitalist' universities, secular versus religious institutions, popular versus elitist education) investigation methodology and scientific discipline (technological investigation of engineering erroneously based on model design instead technological adaptation, or professional investigation of engineering indecisiveness between technical or technological application of new knowledge). These conflicts can be localised inside informational culture, without leaving the context that an informational society proposes. Such situation causes distortions in objects and aims of a desirable education that uses informatics tools for a global competitive development that increase identity of a community.

FEEDBACK
As a conclusion University - as a knowledge institution - must then develop independent strategies that keep safe the correct use of information without any distinction that this information are provided by new technologies or old information systems. Without these strategies, communitarian institutional evaluative or observe tools will be obsolete or easily annulled.
The challenge that institutions has now is to make be worth its autonomy by use of a correct informational administration, to receive the endorsement of the community and to allow him that summons and communicates his decisions, otherwise this institutions take the risk of seeming needed a governmental local or international intervention to correct errors that can easily be saved. The extended contemporary use of terms like "cibercriminality" (Jospin, 1997. 11) shows how the international policies can justify an indiscriminate governmental intervention inside informational environments of a lot of kinds of institutions and their members.
Necessities and exigencies of educative institutions just can be regulated by independent interests that their own community projects for them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CASTELLS, Manuel. Internet y la sociedad red. [on line] La Factoría no. 14-15 [Barcelona, Spain]: February - September 2001 [cited December 10th 2001] Available in Internet: URL: http://www.lafactoriaweb.com/articulos/castells15.htm ISSN 1139-5699

GIANNETTI, Claudia. La Cultura On-Line. [on line] La Factoría no. 12 [Barcelona, Spain]: June - September 2000 [cited January 23rd 2003] Available in Internet: URL:: http://www.lafactoriaweb.com/articulos/giannetti12.htm ISSN 1139-5699

JOSPIN, Lionel. Preparar nuestra entrada en la sociedad de la información. [on line] La Factoría no. 4 [Barcelona, Spain]: October 1997 [cited February 14th 2002] Available in Internet: URL:: http://www.lafactoriaweb.com/articulos/millan19.htm ISSN 1139-5699

MILLÁN, José Antonio. La lectura y la sociedad del conocimiento. [on line] La Factoría no. 19 [Barcelona, Spain]: October - January 2003 [cited January 23rd 2003] Available in Internet: URL:: http://www.lafactoriaweb.com/articulos/millan19.htm ISSN 1139-5699

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1. We talked about the modern knowledge; the one that is negotiated at sociocultural environments, based on a file compiled through continuous revisions and concerted procedures.
2. Scientific intellectual production cannot be considered only like publication of articles, dissertations and thesis or participation in congresses and seminaries, it consists of effort of file properly and to promote the feedback between pairs, more than only evaluation of organizations.
3. EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) = Zapatist Army of National Liberation. IRA (Ireland Revolution Army). FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) = Revolution Army Forces of Colombia. AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) = United Selfdefences of Colombia. All of those groups represents illegal forces in there own countries, but ideological principles of each one are absolutely different.
4. New Information and Communication Technologies, specially referred to Internet and Electronic Data Bases, also make reference to alternative ways of communication and information diffusion, that going from Rap Music and New Rock - with their exclusive TV channels - through media performances, digitalized animation, urban legends, informative flies and TV infommercials, till electronic music communities, mp3 and their suppose legal and illegal exchange.