Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Sounds to me like you're talking about intersubjectivity and communities of interpretation (akin to communities of practice - best read: "Communities of Practice - learning, meaning and Identity" by Etienne Wenger) - which is a well known concept within communication and media studies for instance. Learning and Knowlege Management in its original sense (John Seely Brown and Paul Duguids book "The Social Life of Information" and to some degree Davenport and Pruzac "Working Knowledge") also points to the users and their informal social relationships as the basis for knowledge management - as opposed to the top down approach and technology centered approach mostly associated with these matters, and extensively exploited by consultancies.

As recent as yesterday there was a post on the Information Architects list (Sigia-L) dismissing the value of blogs and wikis. It seems to me that we have kinds of blogs, and my own is probably mostly a personal affair (even though I do have a few hundred visitors a day, and I also have people subscribing to my taxonomy item based feeds).
I value my ability to connect, gather and organize information via my website, and the outcome: a knowledge repository - with taxonomy and search ability - build with Drupal which is in my opinion the best option - it has a good taxonomy module, and can syndicate via RSS - for each taxonomy term.

Also worth checking out Michael Suk Young Chwe's "Rational Rituals," a book that explores the economic ramifications of what he calls "common knowledge," a quality which sounds like a byproduct of your "multisubjectivity." to put it simply, lots of our decisions hinge on what others will do (even as their decisions hinge on ours)... by improving our ability to create "common knowledge," blogs will radically improve our ability to coordinate economic decisions: which standard to support, which service to buy, which fashion to sport.

For a concrete recent example of common-knowledge-building, one might point to Dave Winer's blog-networked campaign to bully Microsoft into the RSS standard.

Your comments on multisubjectivity tied in for me with the idea of paying attention, and the way we make sense of too much information.

In an interview he gave to The Book & The Computer, Sugiura Kohei describes the whirlpool of senses he experienced at the Taj Mahal:

When your sense of hearing comes to the fore, you're suddenly aware of how noisy the frogs are. But when you focus on your sense of sight, everything else fades away, and you're totally immersed in that living, breathing light. This whirlpool of the senses that threatens to overwhelm us -- this, I thought, is Asia.

He goes on to ask:

whether the equipment we have today is capable of recording this exquisite shifting of the senses

In contrast to the way a microphone picks up every sound, often surprising us when we hear its version of what we heard ourselves, our way of hearing is selective. The focus of our attention can shift in a moment, sometimes it is constantly shifting between competing sounds.

Information is transformed into knowledge when disparate data is drawn into a pattern, giving a shape to our experience of reality. The question as to whether we construct our own reality may occur to some, but it is not the issue I want to engage with. I am concerned with the overwhelming and incessant information that is available to us with information and communication technologies.

In our information age in which so much data is out there, how do we focus our attention in such a way that we are able to make meaningful sense out of the ocean of information? How can we make the technology work for us in the achievement of focus without it then constraining us within a fixed and filtered framework? Creativity depends in part upon an element of chaos, cognitive dissonance, and contradictory perspectives. How can we retain the necessary chaos but without drowning in the almost infinite morass of views and verbiage to be found on the web? Many of the technologies we use constrain us to certain ways of thinking and doing. Are those constraints too tightly drawn? How can we use technology to provide us with frameworks and platforms but with also the freedom to break out and do something unexpected and unanticipated. No application can be programmed to provide for every eventuality. An application can be programmed to cater for every conceivable need, but then we are limited to the vision of the programmer. That would be like imposing a grammar and syntax check on a contemporary Shakespeare.

The current thinking and emerging practice in the blogging world provides some hopeful indications of how we can pursue and manage human knowledge. The blogging world offers multisubjectivity, embedded subjectivity, social subjectivity or whatever else we would like to call it. It seems to me that blogging is a little like belonging to the best kind of university faculty with its stimulating conversation and synergy of learning.

Objectivity sounds dull. Lets stick with multisubjectivity.

If you are interested, my own weblog on Technology, Culture and Human Values is at www.towlson.com/weblog/blogger.html

Life is just one damned thing after another.

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