Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity

in a culture of exponentially increasing overload, it’s through these nodes in the information ecosystem, these human sensemakers, human synapses if you will, that this very text or image or video finds its way into our mental pool of resources.

In 2010 Steven Johnson writes in his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From:

The great driver of scientific and technological innovation [in the last 600 years has been] the increase in our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people, and to borrow other people’s hunches and combine them with our hunches and turn them into something new.

In talking about these medieval manuscripts, Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker:

Our minds were altered less by books than by index slips.

Which is interesting, recognizing not only the absolute vale of content but also its relational value, the value not just of information itself but also of information architecture, not just of content but also... See more

Einstein famously attributed some of his greatest physics breakthroughs to his violin breaks, which he believed connected different parts of his brain in new ways.

In 1964, neuropsychologist Roger Sperry drew an analogy between neurons and ideas: Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains.

what enables this derivative creativity and cross-pollination of ideas is a rich pool of mental resources to derive from. And I believe the two main mechanisms of how we fill that pool are curiosity…and choice.

Here’s Kevin Kelly, futurist and Wired founder and brilliant, brilliant man, pondering the future of the book: Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a conc... See more

But curiosity without direction can be a taxing and ultimately unproductive endeavor. Choice is how we tame and channel and direct our curiosity, where we choose to allocate our time and energy, and ultimately, what we choose to pay attention to.

So when we choose to take that recognition away, to not acknowledge content curation or information discovery or whatever we call this, we’re essentially robbing someone of their creative labor, and perpetrating another form of piracy.

Here’s Kevin Kelly, futurist and Wired founder and brilliant, brilliant man, pondering the future of the book:

Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a conce

... See more