[p2p-research] Why you never see people complaining about "knowledge overload"...

[Samuel Rose]

This post is not just about “quantity does not equal quality”. This is
about volume of information and how it can affect decision quality.
It’s also about a more scaleable and sustainable ecology and economy
for your activities online.

The technology of the weblog (and more recently the microblog) have
led to the emergence of an *unsustainable* set of media ecology
approaches. Your ability to track, read, digest and understand blog
posts cannot match the exponential volume of blogs emerging on the
internet every day (even just in the subject areas that you are
interested in). The paradox is that the perceived model for “success”
in blogging, online community building, and representing projects and
businesses online is to “blog frequently”. The idea is that you become
an “information source” about particular topics. This is fine if you
have a strategy for being a frequent source of information. However,
if your intent is to be a source of re-usable knowledge, then focusing
on frequency of posting, and statistics of people looking at your web
or blogsite could become difficult to sustain.

The purpose of this blog post is to argue that blogging frequently is
*not* as important as quality of what you write about, if you seek to
be a re-usable knowledge source. A second purpose is to argue that if
your success in the digital medium hinges on the fleeting attention,
focus and choice of other people using the internet, then you are
likely using an unscalable and non-sustainable model for success.

What really makes this approach unscalable, and unsustainable?

The two factors:

1. Volume thresholds

2. Nature of information, and knowledge in networks

Volume of information affects decision quality

http://holocene.cc/card_images/0000/0062/Normal_Distribution_CDF_Diagram_large.png

(adapted from Morville, P. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes
Who We Become. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2005. p.165, in turn adapted from
The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More, Barry Schwartz, Ecco, 2005,
p.3)

There is a threshold after which the decision-making quality of people
begins to *decrease*, as the *quantity* of information *increases*.
This means that your reader’s ability to derive value from what you
are publishing will tend to decrease after a certain point. Finding
this threshold is a key component in successfully participating in
networked ecologies. The amount of people looking at your website, or
even linking to your website, are no longer as important as the amount
of people successfully synthesizing what you are sharing with what
they are making, sharing and using.

The nature of information, and knowledge in networks

*Data and information* in networks tends to travel and replicate
exponentially. Knowledge in networks requires transformation to travel
and replicate. Knowledge, as it transforms, molds itself to the
world-view and patterns of understanding of the people who synthesize
it from their perceptions and understanding of the systems they exist
in.

So, what does this mean for you?

There can only be so many widely-followed sources of information. If
you seek to be an information source, you are competing in the ecology
that was described by Clay Shirky in Power Laws, Weblogs, and
Inequality  http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html You
are fighting to be one of the 20% of the population that holds 80% of
the wealth of the ecosystem, if you desire to be an information source
in a freedom of choice ecology/economy.

A more sustainable approach for digesting, understanding, and sharing
for the 80% of people who will not be one of the widely-followed
blogs, is to do it in a form that others can digest, understand, and
share.

This means that you could make one “post” to the internet in your
entire life, that synthesizies valuable information into actual
knowledge, and that it could then exist as a re-usable knowledge
resource towards theory building and actual problem solving for years
to come. This ONE “post” existing as information digested, understood,
and synthesized into knowledge, could be more valuable than all of the
information-relaying blog posts that you make in your entire life.

Richard Adler, Paul B. Hartzog, and Sam Rose comprise Forward
Foundation. We are new type of think tank that combines the designing,
making, and exchanging of technology with embedding literacies about
how to use emerging technologies and processes sucessfully.


-- 
-- 
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Tel:+1(517) 639-1552
Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451
skype: samuelrose
email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
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"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
ambition." - Carl Sagan