Tim's Weblog
Tim Strehle’s links and thoughts on Web apps, software development and Digital Asset Management, since 2002.
2008-01-23

Hacking the Noosphere

Jon Udell - Hacking the Noosphere:

"Think back to that band of chimps watching one of its members learn out how to use a termite stick. With humans, as with chimps, it's monkey see, monkey do. We learn by watching and imitating. For most of human history, humans learned how to use tools by watching other humans use those tools, then copying the behavior.

But it's a funny thing. Although we feel hyperconnected in the era of networked communication, it turns out that we have surprisingly few chances to watch and imitate how other people use their software tools and information systems.

When we're sitting side by side, we can look over each others' shoulders, and watch, and learn. But for decentralized teams, voice and text are still the dominant modes of communication, and they don't enable that same kind of direct transfer of knowledge and experience.

Screensharing can mediate that direct transfer synchronously, in realtime. For that reason, I think it's critical for us to get to the point where it's just as trivial to share screens and keyboards remotely as it is to set up a text or voice session.

One reason why this matters has to do with tacit, or unconscious, knowledge. Things we know how to do, but don't really know that we know, and can't articulate or explain."