On Sensemaking
(draft) That elusive thing.
One of humans' biggest quests has been to understand the world around us. I'm not sure we're all that good at it yet.
Visions and inspirations
Sensemaking has many relatives, including:
- Collective Intelligence
- Collaborative Sensemaking
- Hive Mind or Group Mind
- Extended Mind
- Large Scale Collective IQ
- Knowledge Ecosystems
- Superintelligence (which might or might not involve humans)
Of course, it has its opposites:
And of course, sensemaking shows up in fiction:
- The Encyclopedia Galactica in Asimov's Foundation series
- A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age
- Borges's Library of Babel (especially if you can find the index volume!)
- The Minds in Iain M. Banks' Culture series
- The Borg in Star Trek
- Hitchhiker's Guide??
And in speculative (wishful?) non-fiction:
- 1500-500 BC: Indra's Net
- 1937: HG Wells' article World Brain
- 1945: Vannevar Bush's Memex
- 1945: Teilhard De Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky's idea of The Noosphere
- 1960: JCR Licklider's Man-Computer Symbiosis
- 1968: Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos
- 1974: Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines
- 1977: Adele Goldberg and Alan Kay's Personal Dynamic Media
- 1980: Deleuze and Guattari's Rhizomal Networks
- 1987: Apple's Knowledge Navigator video
You can browse all of these, in context, in my Brain here. To suggest others, please write me or comment here.
From the tech side, the many different sensemaking efforts I've heard of include:
- Dynamic Knowledge Repositories (DKRs)
- Distributed Knowledge Graphs (DKGs)
- Enterprise Knowledge Graphs (EKGs)
- Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKGs)
- Personal Knowledge Networks (PKNs)
- Open Knowledge Networks (OKNs)
In my imagination: The Big Fungus. tktktk
Some caveats
Despite (obviously) being a huge fan of sensemaking, I'm also a realist. That means I think many actions we take aren't based on logic, reasoning, and measured debate about actual potential outcomes, but instead are a maelstrom of fear, spin, factoids, misrepresentations, etc.
One of our greatest fears is being shunned by our neighbors, our communities. That's why I have this Thought in my Brain.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.