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The Age of Reason:
The Perfect Knowing Machine Meets the Reality of Content
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1 December
2003 |
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In the ongoing debates about what should
constitute the perfect way to capture and share knowledge,
a lot of ideal scenarios are concocted to get the world of
tacit knowledge properly disseminated to those that would
serve it with useful content. But who can ever know you
perfectly - and do you know yourself perfectly? It gets
silly pretty quickly.
The
Robin Good
weblog recently highlighted some of these themes, and
emerging from the fray is the clear picture that the true
nature of content is not well grasped by many who would
change the way in which we manage to acquire it. Thank
goodness we're not perfect knowing machines! |
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Knowledge Management experts are
an interesting crowd, if you catch them from the right angle.
Listening to their talk about explicit and tacit knowledge and
such can leave one pondering just what the true nature of being
human is all about. Caught from the wrong angle, though, a lot
of KM expert opinion sounds somewhat Utopian at best and silly at
worst, rather like an enclave of bewigged elites at a
salon gathering during the 18th century's Age of
Enlightenment. "I
think, therefore I am" was fine for Rene Descartes, but
having established that we're reasoning creatures it's kind of
nice to figure out what to do with all of that reason. So it
was with some interest that I read "Personal Knowledge Mapping
And The Concept Of Data Emergence," a fine summary of some of
the latest thoughts on personal knowledge mapping and data
emergence
on the Robin Good
weblog, a repository of "new media" thinking edited by
Luigi Canali De Rossi. The sum of this collected wisdom paints
a picture of the ideal knowledge system of which Descartes
himself would be proud, but which probably would not thrill
many professionals trying to add value through content creation
and distribution.
In brief, the concept of "data emergence"
that is central to this knowledge Nirvana is best summed up by
James Snell as "the
incidental creation of personal information through the selfish
pursuit of individual goals."
From Snell's perspective, content value is shackled by dumb Web
browsers that are used to share information about individuals
with Web sites that then try to "personalize" their content -
an experience that must be repeated at each and every Web site
visited, since this knowledge about individual interests and
preferences is not shared site-to-site. Instead of this, the
perfect world would have a "smart" content service, probably on
one's PC, that would retain knowledge of all of one's personal
profile and interests in accessing content; content providers
would then be "dumb" sources pumping information into the smart
service, not having any detailed knowledge of who is using
their services and how. No more nasty Web site publishers, just
one perfect tacit machine that knows exactly what you're
thinking and allows you to obtain and share thoughts with
others.
There's a lot of merit in this thinking,
just like there's a lot of substance in a wheel of Swiss
cheese. But for the benefit of the more Earth-bound amongst us,
let's take a look at a few of the holes that bubble up in this
idealistic scenario:
- Content is not "stuff", it's
something that comes to life with audiences. Weblogging
has brought many important benefits to the world of content,
but one of its worst downsides has been the introduction of a
highly egocentric view of publishing - "I blog, therefore I
am," if you will. In this view of the content universe,
content is just "stuff" that's consumed by people via
machines. But in fact the core of what makes content is not
its "stuff-ness" but the fact that it is something that is
used by an audience in specific venues that they value. Some
people prefer to be their own personal filter for all
knowledge: many do not. Many value the services of
intermediaries that can package information and experiences
into something that is valued by more than just one person at
a time. Ironically, a good example of this can be found in
Canali De Rossi's editing of Snell's work in his weblog summary:
without Canali De Rossi's work, Snell's thoughts would be unknown to
many. It's important to recognize the power of personal
motivation in creating content value, but equally important
to acknowledge that very little publishing is done without an
audience in mind - even in weblogs.
- Aggregation can happen anywhere to
the satisfaction of many. In the Snell view of the
content world, Web sites are the enemy, creating artificial
points of content aggregation that must be dealt with
begrudgingly. The ideal aggregator in this vision is a
machine that knows its master perfectly and retrieves and
presents exactly the content required in exactly the form
that they prefer. Wow, that's a pretty powerful machine.
Given all of the billions that Microsoft and others have
thrown just at getting a PC not to blow up on a regular
basis, though, I am not holding by breath for such a machine
to arrive on my desktop - and then to think about what to do
when I go on the road with my PDA. In the meantime we have
this concept called publishing that can aggregate content any
number of ways, and it works pretty well.
- Communities are an integral part of
content value. While a browser's dumbness does
limit one's ability to communicate needs intelligently to
content sources, this very dumbness is an asset in that it
forces me to go elsewhere to establish contact with other
intelligent beings. In the real world, content is formed by
and for the benefit of communities - some accidental, as in
when one finds an interesting source via a search engine or
hyperlink, and many intentional, such as in the bounds of a
corporation or a subscription service. Even the powderwigs
had to trudge down the street to someone's salon to get the
411 in enough interactive depth to create powerful knowledge.
The concept of selfish acquisition of knowledge requires
cooperation even at very fundamental levels, cooperation that
is impossible for one individual to manage to their perfect
satisfaction. Put simply, sometimes other people know us
better than we know ourselves.
There is never going to be a perfect
personal knowing machine for mining content - and there doesn't
have to be. Imperfection is ultimately an essential part of the
content experience, because it requires us to get out of our
own heads to learn something new from a variety of sources and
interactions. Enlightening people through content ultimately
has as much to do with the light that shines in from others and
the filters through which it passes as it does with the solid
object of our consciousness that it strikes. I am, but I think
that I'm not the only one out there.
-
John Blossom
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