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.

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

Narrative formats enable one person’s hard-won wisdom to be translated into an accessible experience. Rather than storing knowledge as a series of facts in a CMS or in another type of productized, collaborative tool, narrative enables a writer or storyteller to simulate a knowledge-growing experience in the mind of a reader. And with a little effor... See more

Each time we explore a new format, we ask: How do we make it easier for readers to find wisdom that’s relevant to their own unique knowledge gap? Are certain knowledge gaps shared by all creative people at one point or another? How might a reader translate knowledge gained through a narrative format into actual wisdom?

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.

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?

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

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

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

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