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August 2, 2009

An Inconvenient Reference. (Content, Knowledge and Information Networks)

At The Global Human Capital Journal,GHCJ pays respects to the passing of an empire of bound knowledge: the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Noting that online search is giving a better topical hit rate, the compelling value proposition of going to the paper shelf comes up mainly as a memory. Somewhat proving the point, I came to the GHCJ post online via a colleague, but at the same time there's irony in the uncertainty of relying on unfamiliar online sources to be authoritative about the passing of familiar offline sources. Online, when it comes to navigating certain topics, I'd prefer to route through a colleague than through Google. That said, as the GHCJ piece was really well put together already, I collegially posed some off-shoot thoughts in a comment left there, and shown below.

When you said "Authority", I first thought of "credibility", not of "power". My reading of your Authority description is that it is about power. I think the credibility issue is more critical to pursue. I would compare not the old hierarchy of a production "pipeline" versus the newer flatter production "collaboration", but instead the old value "chain" versus the new value "network". So far, I think the new production paradigms distinguish themselves primarily in terms of convenience, not credibility nor value: what does happen is that I can presume to meet information deadlines "cheaper", and maybe "faster', although far less certainly "prettier" (even though the acceleration of work is economically "sexy" so to speak). Tech innovation a la the web poses essentially the same risk that process automation does: it is now much easier to do something poorly more often.

And when you said "Knowledge Economy", I again experienced a related but tangential thought. Much of the widespread discussions of these affairs appears to me to terribly confuse "content", "knowledge" and "information". Each term respectively already carries a relatively new and trendy mythology about "producers", highlighting in common the newfound convenience of being one. To this I say that being a producer is "valuable", but being a producer does not "cause" value. And more to the point, the confusions I fear are the heavily marketed notions that content producers create better knowledge, that information producers create better content, that... well you get my drift. I suppose if I could make a practical point here, it would be that while the innovations in production may be revolutionary, the innovations in knowledge are instead still evolutionary. We are experiencing an expansive Content Economy that far outstrips the growth of actionable knowledge.

This brings me to the last thought to share for now: the notion of "reference". By exploiting the vehicles (let's not call them sources yet) for acquiring information, we do one or both of two different things, and it is worth knowing the difference. One of them is "referencing". The other is "researching". Part of the competency of KM is knowing that there is a difference while knowing how to relate them; to create a reference from competent research is still something that is a practice with differing degrees of acquired skill, differences that are more important than whether we are known as professionals or amateurs.

All that said, you hit a big nail right on the head. To summarize my takeaway from your posting: an inconvenient reference will lose out to a convenient one, for better or worse.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at August 2, 2009 11:26 AM

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