Twenty years ago the only way to share what you knew with a broad audience was to publish a book, write a magazine or newspaper article, or get on a radio or TV broadcast. In each case the barrier was that some "gatekeeper" (a publisher, editor, producer etc.) had to understand your material well enough to be convinced that there was value in what you had to say before they would put time, money and other resources to work giving you access to an audience.
The effect of this was that information was highly isolated. When I was doing a thesis at that time, I spent weeks looking at catalogues of articles with relevant source material, then the task was to obtain and search through massive amounts of material on Microfiche film rolls. A lot of wonderful expertise was never shared on Microfiche, and what information was shared was often hard to find. The net effect was tremendous inefficiency as we failed to transfer knowledge effectively. Mot innovation was through local solutions that had little effect in solving similar problems elsewhere.
Then came the Internet, and suddenly anyone could publish to a worldwide audience, as we do each time we write a blog post here at ActiveRain.
So, how has this affected the sharing of knowledge?
I am in steep learning curve again because I am in the first year of my new career a realtor. I can ask questions at a staff meeting or training session and draw on the collective experience of perhaps a dozen people. The information I get is very valuable, because it relates to our local market.
For most of my questions, though, I go to a worldwide staffroom populated by more than 130,000 real estate professionals. I use the search feature on ActiveRain to look for answer to problems, and I always find a rich resource in previous blog discussions.
When I post questions in my own blog, I find that AR members are tremendouly responsive, and it's not unusual to get half a dozen replies within 5 minutes. The replies will always provide a range of opinions, which is a richer resource than drawing on any one person's knowledge.
In a way, the Internet has become not only a great repository of human knowledge, but a very effective way to facilitate the discourse needed for human knowledge to develop more rapidly and more completely than has ever been possible before.
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