Reading Gorman's posts made me feel a bit old. Sometimes I feel like him, the places I felt allowed some surety of thought and expertise eroding away. I find a listing on wikipedia I know is downright silly, and I wonder how anyone would have it be that way. Then I grab the Brittanica (any edition after the 9th) and realize that they don't list authors and sources as they used to.

The refereed journals and books I see coming out of the academic world (I am currently pursuing a graduate degree in history, so this is a world I find myself in frequently) seem to disagree on almost everything imaginable. They do agree on one thing, however. Those who think of the world as divided into data, information, and knowledge, and that these things were somehow separable and the subjectivity became involved only after the information was somehow cosmically created, is living in a bit of a fantasy.

I then go to my bookshelves (I have been a used and rare book dealer for more than a decade now) and find that the information at my fingertips is minimal compared to what I can access through my university internet account (and the books and stacks at the university library have yet to be visited in more than a year of study). The 'zotero' application that is being developed at the university I study at seems to be bringing together Web 2.0 concepts and traditional academia in a powerful way.

At one time I feared that emergent / social information systems propagating through the web were running away from us but that position was as much a position of ignorance as it was a position of fear of change. Now that I am diving into things I find it to be nice, fresh water that makes this particular mind excited at the intellectual and academic possibilities!

Wayne

@ Wayne, can you clarify the second paragraph of your comment please? I don't really understand the point you are trying to make there.
However in the last paragraph you mention the startling influence that emergent collaborative models are having on web use, and I think you are right in suggesting they are a good thing. Having recently written a paper using http://www.bibsonomy.org as one case study, it is easy to see how complex and effective systems can be built from external contributions.

Glenn,
I was referring to the classic division Gorman makes between information as something that somehow exists prior to human processing whereas knowledge is the result of human processing. Data and information are also artifacts of human processing and whereas Dave rejects the "wisdom" component as arrogant, I go further and reject the idea that there is something like "the objective external world", residing in "data" or "information" that is processed and made subjective, resulting in "knowledge". There are artifacts that are created by humans which have different persistence (speech, writings, art, architecture, etc.) and then there is the processing of those artifacts, which creates new artifacts, etc. To divide them into categories is, I think, the beginning of the confusion over knowledge and where and how it arises and is transmitted.

BibSonomy looks interesting. I will have to do some exploring on it! Zotero is built as part of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University http://chnm.gmu.edu/ One nice feature is the link with the FireFox browser that allows you to simply click on a web page and have it load the info direct (e.g., Amazon, something handy when you put in an ISBN and get a detailed link for your indexing). Either way it will be interesting to see if Zotero has enough user base to allow for the emergence we see in other systems.

Wayne

I want to argue that we need to separate the debate about with wisdom or otherwise of crowds (hive mind, social computing etc. etc.) from one about the role of an Encyclopedia. I also think its time for the debate to move on from a false polarity.

On to read the rest of your post (and comments), but just wanted to applaud the above two phrases.

You may have covered this, but I expect the debate / dioalogue about expertise to eventually focus on the differences between socially-constructed knowledge versus passed-down, individually acquired and usually-but-not-alwyas officially sanctioned expertise.

This probably goes without saying, but official experts have a vested interest in their expertise being more expert than other forms or sources of expertise, and most of our institutions and acepted structures for doing things rely on our acceptance of that.

.. read the rest of the post.

Its time for the debate to move on, its far too polarised. We need to think about the interface between social computing and traditional world of publishing and validation. Throwing out babies with the bath water is one of the least attractive aspects of human history.

Yes.

I agree Carr's last sentence is not careful. I think "everybody" is stretching it ... maybe it's more like "Here come many, sometimes, and some, many times".

The hard part of the scale of social computing for everyone to grasp, I suspect (including me, no doubt) are the tens or hundreds of thousands of small groups, of loosely joined small pieces who slide back and forth into and out of contact with some other groups via individual nodes .. flickering. The application of purpose and the boundaries derived from it and the tasks it generates create the environment for developing expertise, and when developed it is the purpose and focus that push it out into the networks of neworks, initially through individuals in interaction.

But it's not "everybody" .. it's actually a small percentage of the planet's population (only it's a lot more now than those who used to be privileged to lay expertise onto and into the rest of us).

Thanks for clearing that up Wayne. That explanation makes much more sense :). I'm not sure I agree, but I think I will reserve judgment at this stage because I've only recently become interested in this field.

Along with this discussion, there is the new book The Cult Of The Amateur by Andrew Keen. From the discussions I've had and seen, this book has similar problems to Gorman's issues with "expertise."

Glenn,

I am not sure I am any less a novice than you are, especially compared to some of the folks who post here, let alone folks like Dave who have lived this stuff for far longer than I have even been out of school. I have been trying to synthesize some of the stuff I have learned from hanging out with Dave and through my own readings.

Where I am at right now is that the waterfall charts I see with the data, information, knowledge, wisdom stuff makes things look 1) Way too linear, as if each step in the chain doesn't impact and loop back on previous steps, and 2) That outside factors, such as the environment in which the process is taking place, don't impact each of the 4 steps in that chain. That is why I assert that it is one big loop, with the external world and the person continually interacting, creating new external artifacts and creating new synthesis or meaning internally, which alters the way previous artifacts are viewed, ... ad infinitum.

Maybe a bit too philosophical for a practical application, but I fear too many people look at the water-fall view and think that data has independent meaning, so lets focus on that because it appears to be the easy part of the problem.

Wayne