2. Current approaches to knowledge management
- Humans are poorly adapted to the Information Age, which has arisen only in the last ~0.02% of our evolutionary history. While the brain does have a remarkable capacity for raw storage, probably in the range of several petabytes,2 it is infamously fallible in processing information. Memory retrieval is lossy and unreliable, while many of our hardwired cognitive biases and heuristics misfire in the modern world, distorting our perception, judgement and decision-making ability. The plasticity of the brain enables it to rewire itself with new connections, but even this is a ‘use it or lose it’ feature, causing neglected neural pathways to atrophy.
- Many technologies for organizing knowledge outside of the brain have arisen in response to these limitations. Physical books and journals proliferated after the invention of the Gutenberg Press, and have since been partially supplanted by word processors, websites, blogs, forums, wikis, and software applications.
- While we are presented with a plethora of choices for organizing knowledge, almost every technology follows the same basic ‘file cabinet’ format: A unit of knowledge is saved to a certain file path, which places it within a taxonomy of folders, chapters or categories. Tags may be applied when an item relates to many things, but each file is generally only stored within one nested hierarchy. To access the information, the user must remember where they stored the file, what they tagged it with, or use a search function to locate it.