A Personal Philosophy of Shared 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

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?

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 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.

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

Entire cultures, ideologies, and schools of thought—the very bedrocks of our societies—are built upon the notion that as one person grows more wise, so can the whole community. However, the idea that knowledge’s evolution happens privately and individually presents us with a problem: how do we manage knowledge and wisdom collectively?

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

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

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.