[Vanguard] Knowledge in a box
Daniel Bobrow from PARC says that Xerox tried to support its repair folks by modeling the machines in software. The repair people were impressed but didn’t find it useful. The conclusion: You can’t put the right knowledge in the box. (He goes on to explain the social life of information, as fellow PARC-er John Seely Brown put it.)
Cool way of putting it. And why did we ever think we could put knowledge in a box? It must have something to do with the fact that we think our human knowledge is in the box of bone that sits atop our neck. Knowledge isn’t in the box because consciousness isn’t in the box. It’s of the world and always outside of itself. (This isn’t mysticism; it’s just a description of consciousness that puts attention at its core.) My conclusion: It’s not just the right knowledge that can’t be put in the box because knowledge is a way the world reveals itself to us and thus necessarily transcends the box.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Hey, how bout the concept of folks at theBrain. These guys have a sense that information organized round a central thought mimics the “attention” element of your consciousness model. And then jumping or moving to other thoughts is done either because they are linked, or because the attention is distracted to a completely different thought… Thoughts are organized and reorganized by end users (much like real brains)
How is it that ones attention shifts? that is the interesting question – perhaps the mystical one – or just the one that has mystified marketing executives;-) But perhaps some way to spider or identify resonant thought threads and weak thoughts (unsticky ones) that are often jumped away from.. That could be interesting!