I’ve been tagged.
All Tips and Tricks has tagged me to respond to the ’5 reasons why I write’ meme. As I said before, memes are an interesting way to get people to share knowledge.
Instead of me just listing why I write, I’d like to list 5 principles for why knowledge sharing matters (and makes me feel the need to keep writing here).
1. Sharing knowledge is important.
Fundamentally, getting the right information at the right time is what we’re all struggling with. Anyone in today’s economy would be hard-pressed to say that knowledge sharing doesn’t impact their job or, in a broader sense, their life.Â
2. Knowledge sharing can be done by anyone.
Everyone knows something that is valuable to someone else. Sharing your knowledge with someone else is a personally rewarding experience that (to me, anyway) outweighs monetary benefits.
3. Sharing knowledge through technology should be easier.
While technology has become increasingly prevalent and important in all of our lives, it also adds an increasing layer of complexity.
Some of our most widespread technologies have changed our lives dramatically by facilitating and changing the way and speed with which we communicate with each other.
We need to better understand how exchanging knowledge about technology and exchanging knowledge through technology depend on one another.
4. I like to write (especially informally).
While I spend most of any given day reading or writing, I don’t often get a chance to write informally to a wide(r) audience.
The growth in popularity of this blog has really surprised me (now up to around 70 feed subscribers), and has encouraged me to keep writing. Thanks to all who keep reading.
5. More people need to share what they know for free.
As I’ve said before on this site, sharing knowledge for free seems counterintuitive, but is often the best option.
The commodification of what we do as knowledge creators and sharers can potentially have detrimental effects that we haven’t even considered. Making knowledge freely available benefits us all as a species.
I’d like to tag North x East (one of my new favourite blogs) and The Digerati Life (one of my old favourite blogs) to let us know 5 reasons they write.
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February 19th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Hi Lucas,
I especially like your points about the importance of sharing knowledge for free. I really think everybody loses out when there is a cost associated with either obtaining or distributing information. It’s extremely discouraging to know that the information you want is out there, but is inaccessible to you until you pay the fee. When you can’t obtain (or conversely, distribute) information, nobody seems to benefit.
How can you affix an appropriate cost (often monetary) to information you are willing to share? That seems to run counterintuitively to the meaning of “share”.
February 19th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Agreed Stephanie. It’s difficult to replicate/attach financial incentives/models to knowledge transfer, due largely to the intangible nature of knowledge.
People share information for many reasons, but sharing for financial gain is often the most short-sighted reason to share (and usually, the financial incentives run in the opposite direction — we are compensated for hoarding, rather than sharing).
February 16th, 2009 at 4:37 am
Of course the great thing about sharing knowledge is not only that it is free, but that it is infinitely expandable in the world! So the commodification of knowledge is essentially about restricting it, and thereby minimising the prospects for harnessing knowledge to solve the problems of the world.
Someone (who?) once said that “what we want to gain, we first have to give away”. True of love, and probably of knowledge as well!
Thanks for a great blog post!
February 17th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Very true Mark. It’s interesting the effect that the internet has had on exactly that phenomenon… in a sense, everything on the internet is ‘commodifiable’ — yet it’s in the best interest of the content owner to make the content as widely available as possible (even old-school sites like the New York Times have realized this, and opened up their content).
There will of course, always be a place for specialized knowledge (i.e. just because I have access to every piece of legislation ever passed doesn’t mean I’ll be able to not hire a lawyer).
I like the quote as well — I think there’s a great deal of truth to that statement.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:16 am
i guess the point about lawyers is that now we can have intelligent conversations with them – rather than just being in awe to them because they are lawyers – and the same is true of other professionals like doctors etc.
Mark
February 25th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
What really gets me wanting to write is the fact that I take interest int something. i have a very curious and eccentric way of thinking, and when I run across a blog or site that is unique and downright genius, it aspires me to want to keep writing. Right now, I’m just updating my blog, but I thought I would start a blog on things that interest me instead of trying to write what everyone else is such as making money online, etc.