A Personal Philosophy of Shared Knowledge

Knowledge is slippery, leaky, and ever-shifting. When we spread out our learnings across an expansive, inconsistently used set of platforms, it oozes into multiple digital cracks and crevices. As this happens, the surface area widens, and the depth becomes shallow. In this way, networked technologies enable the evaporation of knowledge.

knowledge and wisdom are hardly “manageable.” They may be channeled, yes, but never fully captured. To capture is to kill. Keep the energy flowing.

When contemplating these questions, it’s easy to get carried away into a techno-utopian dream world where all wisdom is neatly catalogued into accessible bits, so any problem could be easily researched and overcome. While that vision may or may not be attainable, it does feel quite possible to imagine a world in which all people treat their own har... See more

The best we can do is attempt to share the collective knowledge of today in ways that feel honest, generous, and timeless. We need to retain something of the personal, of the human—of the original private triumph of failure.

Throughout time, humans have sought out ways to translate our private knowledge-building experiences into more public forms. At the most basic level, we do this through language. Ever since we learned to communicate through words (or grunts) some 100,000 years ago, we’ve been pushing our knowledge-sharing techniques further.

Artworks don’t manage knowledge—they channel it. It takes time and attention to understand an artwork’s meaning. Each piece demands a process of reconciliation, and a merging of two contexts: the artwork’s own history and the viewer’s private knowledge network. When it’s placed in a new context, its meaning evolves and expands elastically. It store... See more

Intentionally or not, networked culture creates patterns of information exchange. Together, these patterns merge to form the public infrastructure on which we all come to build our own knowledge networks. But while we all may share a common current of information, the way the current gets channeled, plugged into, and illuminated is a personal affai... See more

But in many ways, it felt like we were moving in a spiral, building up new sets of knowledge just to orbit the same ideas from a slightly more advanced perspective. We expected the satisfaction of linear knowledge growth, yet despite all the tools at our disposal to expand and archive knowledge, the more we learned, the more we seemed to forget.

To have deep knowledge about something is to have a rich inner world built around that subject’s orbit. How, then, does knowledge come to exist in the world beyond an individual’s private mind?

In the field of creativity, shared knowledge and wisdom have historically been hard to come by. This may be due to the house-of-cards structures upon which many creative industries are built. Or, perhaps it’s due to the fact that industries that seem to reward buttoned-up, ego-driven practices do not tend to generate great knowledge-sharing economi... See more