Some thoughts on the Knowledge Economy

In 1969 Peter Drucker popularized the phrase knowledge economy. The idea of a knowledge economy is that knowledge is viewed as a product versus knowledge as a tool. The knowledge economy is based on the economics of abundance. I touch on this in Open Source: The End of Scarcity Means More. Information and knowledge increase through the act of sharing. The more data/information shared, the more growth in knowledge results. Knowledge flows as water, it drips then becomes a steady stream or torrent where ever there is demand and few barriers. In the knowledge economy, wealth is based on ownership of knowledge and information.

Forty-two years later Drucker’s children are the knowledge workers – the Gen X and Yers, the Millennials and Digital Natives are established or entering the workplace. As suggested in my post, What If Work Were Fun?, the worker of the 21st century is becoming a knowledge worker. Schooled in new media, the brightest of them are capable of both convergent and divergent thinking, they can be collaborative, evaluate priorities, make connections, establish and nurture relationships, and be flexible enough to both create new paradigms as well as modify existing ones.

Social media has risen in importance and currently drives the knowledge economy because communication is a fundamental component to the stream of knowledge and information. Social media highlights the importance of relational capital – one based on interactions and relationships. The act of transforming information into knowledge is the creation of value.

Just a few years ago we did business differently. The rule was - I offered a product/commodity for sale, you bought it (or not), end of transaction. It was an even exchange, a closed system. But the knowledge economy has changed that. The open sourced, new way of doing business also values expertise and the concept of “know how”. Meshing social with business creates an emotional bond. It’s about more than just selling, these relationships foster an interactive and cooperative exchange.

The old way of doing business doesn’t work effectively anymore because more social effort needs to be invested to get people to listen. Business must engage and be present vis a vis their customers who now demand openness, flexibility and a willingness to embrace change.

I have an actor friend who used to believe that once he landed an agent, he could just sit back and the jobs would come rolling in. He believed that an agent would do the heavy lifting for him, bring him work so he wouldn’t have to hustle. This didn’t happen, so he fired the agent. But once my friend realized that he was his own best representative - his career started to take off because he was creating value for himself. He was giving to get. Now he’s got several agents chasing him.

“What you give is what you get.”

I used to talk about this concept a lot when I was a fundraising executive. We rallied our board members around the Give/Get principle because we expected them to create value for the institution.

It’s not really that different in business. By giving value for the people around you, you will get value in return. Value creates thought leadership, someone who people want to know and do business with. People want to give business to those who give them business. This is not a new idea, but it’s one worth being mindful of because emphasizes reciprocity, an exchange which creates a relationship.

I try to create value everyday because I appreciate the community I inhabit. For me, it makes for a full and fulfilled work life. Who doesn’t want that?

Photos from: Wikipedia, Teamsubmarine & Mr. Cheapstuff

Alternatives to Facebook -- what are the options?

Maybe you've just had enough. Perhaps your profile's been hacked, or you can't sort out the byzantine privacy settings options, maybe one of your "friends" mentioned a sex organ in status their update, (Once was enough to get me to "unfriend" you...) Or maybe you just long for something different.

Well dear reader, before FB Quitting Day May 31, 2010, here are some of your choices. Old and new soc nets (social networks) for your review.

Diaspora - the latest new, new thing. It's the sweetheart start-up developed by four charmingly geekalicious young lads from NYU and crowd funded by Kickstarter. It's not actually a social network yet. But they're working on writing the code to make it an open source alternative. They aren't the first ones out there per this link I found. (However to be honest, the Linux, Apache, MySql and Php talk starts to get a bit too techy for me and my brain melts just a little. Anyone care to enlighten me?)

Friendster - 'Memba them? I first heard of them in 1994 and even then it was a little late to be an early adopter.

Then there's Whspr, another recent entry into the soc-net-o-sphere which I mentioned in last week's Noo Yeek column.

Posterous - is a blog/soc-net hybrid you can see mine here. I know it's a bit light on the content, I'm just trying it out.

Ning is an option that I have used for an alumni network or maybe Orkut, a soc-net that is integrated into your Google-verse.

And another exile from soc-net Hipster-ville that might get a resurrection from the Facebook "diaspora" (oh those boys are clever name choosers!) is MySpace which seemed to loose steam and members once it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch.

I doubt people will leave LinkedIn or stop using Twitter due to privacy concerns since those are more readily controlled in terms of whom they broadcast to and yes, while Twitter isn't quite a social networking site, (really microblogging) it is a soc-net tool.

The meta narrative is privacy online. What is is, who controls it, how is it filtered and layered? Clearly the cows have long since left the barn, so it's really verbum sap sat. Everything you post on FB (or the internet) becomes part of the whole. They know a lot about you, because you give it to them, everyday. As one of my Facebook status updates read this week, "all your Face are belong to us".


Thank you Hank Grebe and Mediaspin.com for such a great image.

"Towards a more robust discourse of meaning in the media"

I'm still exploring the open source/new media education thread at EatTheOther...

Open source media paves a new way of communicating ideas collaboratively so that the old models of journalism and documentary narrative no longer apply. The monopoly of a handful of media moguls is crumbling. Bloggers, citizen journalists and aggregators have disrupted the system of distribution and now provide ever expanding alternatives to the traditional distribution streams. A new, New Journalism is on the rise with social networking creating a linchpin culture of leaders within this movement.

One of these cultural linchpins is the Brave New Foundation’s Brave New Educators (BNE) project. BNE’s mission is to engage people in a narrative to provide context and meaning. By using access to primary sources of moving imagery we practice constructing meaning and use these sources to create a new, unique and evolving sense of perspective in a digital form narrative.

BNE creates an incubator for social change by engaging educators and their student scholars with the catalysts of shock, shame, fear, and anger – the elephants in the room that people avoid.

Though critics may suggest that this bricolage methodology is documentary filmmaking 2.0, however documentaries don’t fully engage their audience. They tend to present an “ain’t it awful” scenario, leaving the viewer feeling disengaged and disempowered. The difference with the experience of Brave New Educators is that the activity of remixing exposes the creator to the negative material while allowing them to move through it and create their own narrative from it, thus empowering students and giving them essential tools for critical thinking in a media convergent society. These multimedia, hypertextual digital texts are light years from the traditional, dry college essays. Students in the BNE pilot program reported that while they found the material surprising, shocking and disturbing, it was the act of engaging with material they found uncomfortable that helped them gain new perspectives and create their own narrative.

Collaboratively involving others in a collective organized movement is a work of activism. Remixed narratives ignite the thought process and become a catalyst for collaborative change. In this way, ideas function as viruses, jumping from place to place until they go viral and create a wave of participatory culture that has the power to effect real change. This sharing and collaboration produce an innovative hybrid in the truest democratic form – organized chaos. The wisdom of crowds is founded on diverse opinions and ideologies. The new media is the catalyst for that.

Re-blogging, like re-tweeting, only bloggier

Here is what I call a "conversation starter" I wrote that was published today on EatTheOther - which is a blog built around the intersection of digital literacy, education and the hypertext mash-up.

The argument for new media in education - how the digital literacy movement is changing the way we think about things.

With the explosion of new methods of distribution for both static and moving images as well as hypertexts, a significant paradigm shift has occurred in communication. Anyone with access to the internet can create , report, comment, remix, distribute and culture jam a variety of texts and discourses in an eclectic mix creating complicated notions of culture, tradition, value, gender and political views. These views challenge the traditional canon by allowing practitioners of these methodologies to become skilled curators of a digital world. Participatory and collaborative engagement in non-linear or chronological fashion allows content creator s to construct narrative threads, provide context and therefore create meaning for human expression in our personal lives, business communications and creative endeavors.

Humans are natural born storytellers. We create mythologies, our narratives to make sense of our world. Narrative forms are determined by the technology available at hand. From Homer the blind poet, to the medieval minstrel, to the craftsman working over his Gutenberg press to the teenager in her bedroom remixing Twilight clips for friends on her laptop – we are compelled to make sense and meaning in our lives. The message is the same, it is merely the scope that has expanded concentrically. Books made it far easier to transport ideas, film and television allowed us to express these ideas globally and the internet is taking that further still with the hypertext – allowing the content creator to utilize multiple media to explode narrative and expand understanding. Never before have we been able to present differing views on the same subject in a simple way at the same time. The vector of new media rejects the hierarchical structure model for a changeable, open and idea infused units of information transmitted from one party to another in an interactive currency of ideas.

This commodification is in direct challenge to the old, closed model wherein the currency of ideas is based on scarcity. The commodification of these ideas has contributed to the current clash between those in power seeking to sustain the commodity paradigm versus those who subscribe to the open source modality of representing and understanding the world. The topography of this open sourced contemporary discourse is a richly diverse one, creating deeper complexity in each iteration. This is the crux of the open source movement. If the user group decides that the idea is owned and utilized by the group in a participatory way, then the idea cannot become monetized.