Baracskai, Zoltán, Velencei, Jolán, Dörfler, Viktor & Szendrey, Jaszmina (2013) What is the Difference? There was Always Lifelong Learning, 18th International Scientific Conference, 18 April 2013, Subotica, Serbia

The search term “sustainable development” gives you 276 million hits in Google and there are 1.5 million if you type “održivi razvoj”. We will here omit the other languages. We are always suspicious to find such salient popularity. In fact, what we suspect is that there may be no definition for the concept we were searching for. On the basis of having examined several definitions, this time we suspect that there is something wrong with the premises. The usual starting point is the notion of scarce resources. With regards to the majority of resources, no one knows how scarce they are. As we live in the ‘knowledge economy’ and in the ‘knowledge society’, we are primarily interested in knowledge. We are not sure whether knowledge is a resource, but we certainly know that it is not scarce.

What we are really interested in, is abundance. Under the condition of abundance, the models developed for the ‘era of scarcity’ will not work – they lose their validity. Undeniably, we live in the era of ‘knowledge abundance’. Our starting point is that we will learn the particular knowledge that we find ‘then and there’. If we knew exactly what we want to learn we would not mind the abundance of knowledge. But, of course, we cannot possibly know which knowledge will be ‘right’, what we will exactly need in the future. The influence of “post-filtering” will be of exceptional importance under the condition of knowledge abundance. It is exactly the effect ‘post-filtering’, i.e. the validation, that will affect the evolutionary development.