Matthew Allen

I commented recently on Twitter that Facebook = the new AOL and, not surprisingly, then discovered that many others (e.g. Kottke.org had already had my apparently novel insight! (This effect can either deflate one’s confidence or increase it – I am not the first, but I am as wise as the crowd – some examples from the crowd thanks to googlesearch). And, clearly, Facebook is trying to create an experience of online life / augmented reality / social and cognitive networking that stands apart from, or is potentially isolated from the ‘web’ within which Facebook exists – though it claims to be embedding itself into the web, of becoming a sort of underlying social networking of people, data and places throughout the web, I actually see the plan as one to enable its users to never leave the facebook environment except when prompted to do so by something in facebook, and then be returned to facebook. So, in this model of online behaviour, Facebook users would look out over the low walls of the garden and observe interesting things elsewhere in the jungle of the net; would at times scurry out into that jungle, but otherwise would remain safely inside the habitat of Facebook. As Siliconbeat reports, Google should be worried about this new wave of Facebook’s expansion of the way it will encompass online behaviours into a single space: communities that serve Facebook.

There’s a real sense of imperialism about Facebook. Sure we worry about the approach to privacy (see Raynes-Goldie, First Monday and the casual manner in which Facebook treats its users, by changing rules on them, making them feel (and indeed be) disconnected from their data bodies. But what worries me more, at this stage, is how Facebook is attempting to exploit more and more of the Internet for its marketing purposes (through the ‘like’ function, and by embedding internet affordances into its environment) and to claim that what matters in information acquisition and production is what is liked, or networked, between its users. (note too – Facebook acts as if everyone online is a Facebook user – a lot of them just don’t know it yet). So the challenge we face in responding to Facebook and its extraordinary (and network-effect growing) power is not how Facebook works in its own terms (after all, one can opt out, to some extent, if you don’t like it), but how it acquisitively eyes the Internet as the source of the raw informational material which it needs to sustain itself.

Google has an equally imperial view of information – witness the book digitisation issue, the constant acquisition of individual online behavioural data. What I find interesting to consider, though, is the difference between how these two behemoths of the online world approach their activities. Google achieves its empire (an empire of mind and data) by networking diverse nodes together – there is, really, no one place where Google ‘is’ and can be found / managed or located. Googlemaps tells us that Google is everyone and nowhere all at once. Note how Facebook is absolutely locatable – it’s all about what happens inside that Facebook environment (content brought into that space); Google is all about what happens everywhere else (but monitored by Google). And, while Google ‘profiles’ us when we sign up for its services (and even when we don’t), there is one key component of most online activities which we don’t find through Google – the public profile. Google is, truly, ‘faceless’ book – except that your face is very clear to google, if you choose to embrace its multitude of data services.

Facebook, then, strikes me as the inheritor of Yahoo!’s location in the web-world of the 2000s – a place for ‘us’ to form networks; the networks are a consequence of accepting what we give up when we use Facebook. Google is the service where the network is t he starting point: the network of data, the networking of us within the infoverse of the Internet. While Facebook might be viewed as a force for the enclosure of the net, as a company that seeks control (and market profitability) through a very explicit presence, an overlording curator of those within its domain, Google – equally potent – disperses itself throughout the Internet; invisibility, implicitness and distributed power work for this company.

Since both of them are searching, in the end, for revenue streams from advertising , Facebook and Google compete (though Facebook is far less pervasive, less successful in those terms). But the competition is not just for ‘who wins the most revenue’: like most deep struggles within capitalism, Facebook and Google are engaged in a kind of ideological struggle to define the Internet in ways which (in the minds of users) will constrain and shape the Internet’s future. So, in years to come, will the Internet be – largely – seen and used inside the low walls of Facebook’s crowded gardens? Or will it be itself the garden, and Google a kind of viral thread interwoven with its every use?

A definition of knowledge work might be something like this (and, thereby, includes a definition of knowledge):

Knowledge work is the development (and ongoing redevelopment) of mental constructs that internally represent for an individual the world to be ‘known’; such constructs consist in claims about the world, both what is and what ought to be, and the associations between these claims which form consistent and plausible relational structures; the mental constructs that knowledge work produces enable knowledgeable action in and for the world which is, through knowledge, represented in this manner to an individual; this potential to act in the world is intimately linked to the work of understanding world, such that knowledge always has the potential (and often the actuality) of acting as an intermediary between thought and action.

And, in terms of thought, knowledge work is cognition, but it is not just internal mental processes. Knowledge work, if we were to attempt to isolate its constituent components, proceeds from intent or purpose, through a variety of activities exploring or fulfilling that purpose, towards completion and reflection upon that process. At all stages, knowledge work involves acquiring, arranging and expressing information-as-knowledge; (as an aside I would suggest that the frustrating difficulty of attempting, ontologically, to separate information and knowledge, should simply be resolved by accepting that they are inseparable). Put simply, knowledge work is about inputs, processes and outputs; while this model might echo attempts to link information science and cognitive psychology that have been criticised for their simplistic nature, I believe there is real value in reducing knowledge work to such a simple core; but, at the same time, recognise that every input is someone else’s output; that my outputs are others’ inputs; and the processing does not neatly occur between the acquisition and expression of knowledge but is a continuous process which from time to time can be recognisably differentiated as involving flows of information in or out of a knowledgeable system.

So, knowledge work is also collaborative because of the circuits of interaction between knowledgeable subjects that are implicit in the simple recognition that inputs and outputs are merely a matter of perspective and that processing of information, the constitution of knowledge, occurs continually. Moreover, the dialogic nature of language, within which claims always speak to someone (even if only our own inner ear), calling out for interpretation and association, ensures that knowledge work is communicative, quite apart from a common tendency for people to discuss and share their constructs of the world – their knowledge – as a fundamental part of experiencing ourselves as social beings.
 
I would suggest that knowledge can be conceived of, understood from, four perspectives, all of which are reasonably common in the literature devoted to understanding what knowledge is. I would summarise these four perspectives as follows:

• Knowledge as object, in which we can discern a distinct and transmissible ‘thing’, existing in forms which can and do regularly externalise knowledge (if only temporarily) from knowledgeable humans and make it distinct from their social and other organisational contexts;
• Knowledge as conversation, in which knowledge only emerges from and through the communications between people (in a variety forms) and in such a situation knowledge comes to be more than just the sum of each individual contribution to the conversation (and the additional, unaccounted for value is largely to do with the the meta-knowledge supplied by conversational context and the social bonds formed through communication);
• Knowledge as process, in which – essentially – there is no object, and conversations are but part of a wider and deeper continual process by humans of ‘coming to know’, creating, critiquing, changing, and confirming their knowledge;
• Knowledge as enactment, where knowledge is discerned through observable actions in the world, inferred from what happens by observers and, perhaps more importantly, understood by the knowledgeable subject themselves through actions, and never as abstract from the world which knowledge represents.

Crucially, all four perspectives are of the same indefinable entity; yet it is also worth remembering that – in many cases – people do not naively do knowledge work without reflecting on what it might be. In other words, all these perspectives play a real part in the doing of knowledge work, as people employ them as categorisations to make sense of their own knowledge work, as much as we might use them to define knowledge for academic purposes.