Surviving the information glut or why knowledge management can lead to chaos

Knowledge makes the world go round. But taking a very personal view of strategies of knowledge management in a time when the internet age has fuelled an information glut, can help understand why important assumptions about knowledge have led to many social and political ambitions falling a long way short of what was achievable. As the attached article shows, going right to the heart of the information revolution can help explain why many other idea-driven projects from a free-market panacea for global ills to biodiveristy conservation as bullwark against an inevitable ecological transformation, are fundamentally flawed from the outset.

There is a lot of relavant information that work, interests and simple curiosity will lead to. Passively receiving this incessant data stream is mentally numbing and ineffective for achieving personal and professional satisfaction. But organising information with bookmarks, tags, notes and reviews requires more than hierarchies. Analytical organisation fails to reflect the complexity of the world and the everyday cognitive approaches actually used to abstracting relavant knowledge. Some mental strategies are called for that should be reflected in the tools used.

For a person exposed to and active in a knowledge driven world - and that excludes nobody today, acquiring knowledge is a fundamental skill. It is a process that involves scanning, understanding, reflecting on, acquiring and applying information. But interests, emotions, expectations and needs drive this process in different directions. To channel knowledge management efforts requires the application of conscious strategies to overcome inherent tendency towards chaos.

Strategies for personal knowledge management should draw on semantic content but must be purpose oriented. Purposes can be divided into categories including immediate tasks, on-going projects with definable outcomes, general domains of activity such as study, work, home and family as well as maintaining reference information, general resources and tools to do the work.

Mental resistance to this effort can come from a lack of discipline manifested as unclarity, complacency, procrastination, and plain laziness. The result is ambiguous organisation and incomplete tasks. Ambitious and unrealistic goals, that is, not well thought out approaches contribute to this. But just intellectual rigour is not enough.

Thinking that refrains from risk taking and creativity, that conforms to old habits and conservative approaches will inevitably lack comprehensiveness and innovation. This must be countered with lateral thinking and an openness to ideas.

Writing for an audience is one way to structure and evaluate knowledge management. As long as it can avoid constraining the organsation of information just to social norms and expectations, it offers a constructive motivation. But it shoud be one of several outputs.

Distinguishing research tasks with clear questions - ranging from 'Where should I go on holiday?' and 'What should I do once I am there?', to 'What would be a good book to give as gift to continue a previous conversation?' - can also be effective, especially if they are accompanied by some explicit reflection.

Another way is to formulate general interests into important, focussing questions. Who should I vote for? What is my opinion on what society should do about global warming? Why should this author be read at this time? Where can I find relavant and authoritative news for my interests? Implicit in all these questions is the ability to be able to justify the answer towards others. This contributes towards what Habermas calls a communicative rationality.

Getting Things Done has become a popular tactic as a way of organising to-do lists. In spite of its ephemeral appeal, it reflects an action orientation that people have always resorted to when stress threatens with overload. By focussing on action from the outset - always keep your inbox empty - it provides a simple, generic strategy relavant to information organisation as much as to project management. Coupled with an awareness of categories of purpose, the relavant domains and tasks and one's experience of resources needed to achieve these, information can be tagged, labelled, bookmarked, noted and reviewed accordingly.

Whether hierarchies of knowledge are adequate or not, it is the underlying purpose that must not be lost in the avalanche of information that internet and media have unleashed on us. But where does action purpose come from? By the time information moves from the personal to the social, it is transformed from addressing personal needs - be they physical or emotional - to constructing social goals. These must reflect shared worldviews. This is where shared goals are formed, common understanding becomes assumptions and knowledge is diluted in misdirected projects. Technical solutions end up masking polical philosophies that frame humans as thinking and behaving like simple rational agents without acknowledging the richness of the human experience. If information is distilled to logical hierarchies eliminating ambiguity, audience expectations and personal questions then the information glut only risks washing over us into a world of increasing knowledge chaos and risks diminuishing a shared communicative ratinality.

For a very interesting reflection on fallacious thinking about what knowledge really is and how this can create white elephants, the internet domain offers the story of the much-hyped semantic net, a doomed project that will stumble over its own assumptions. To learn why, read The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. Personal and social knowledge management as an intellectual project risks stumbling in the same hole.