Social networks as information filters :: Blog :: Headshift - The Diigo Meta page

• 13 Jun 09
  

  Arne van Elk

  Weergave van de presentatie van Lee Bryant (Headshift) op de IP-lezing 2009 in het Hilton in Amsterdam. Compleet met de uitgeschreven (praktisch volledige) tekst!
  Bryant, hield een, hoewel erg optimistisch, overtuigend verhaal over de informatiewaarde van online sociale netwerken: "Social networks as information filters". Via blogs, twitter, Facebook, Hyves en/of Linkedin komt er een constante stroom van gefilterde informatie op je af. Deze stroom zorgt voor wat Bryant noemt een 'ambient awareness', een soort allesomvattende kennis van wat er om je heen gebeurt. Veel van de kennis die je uit deze netwerken haalt lijkt misschien niet belangrijk, maar alles bijelkaar kan de kennis wel degelijk bepalend zijn voor te nemen besluiten. In Bryant's visie is information overload eigenlijk 'filter failure'. Het is belangrijk om je netwerk relevant en vertrouwd te houden, en daarnaast open te staan voor nieuwe invloeden.

  information filters informatiegedrag informatiemanagement social media sociale netwerken information overload kennismanagement km ambient awareness intranet social tagging tags tagging filtering filters

  • To cope with these problems, we need better filters and better
    radars.  Your 'filters' are your network including Twitter, Delicious,
    Digg, Stumblupon, etc, signaling links or sites you should read because
    people you trust think they are important.  But using your network as
    filters, in isolation, can lead to group think as you tend to be
    attracted to people with similar interests, views or roles. In built
    bias is not a bad thing as long as you have other mechanisms for
    finding new information.  This is where your 'radar' comes in.  It
    comprises alerts, searches and smart feeds, which are always on the
    look out for new stuff.  The combination of the two things is needed to
    capitalise on ambient awareness.

  • In fact, one of main purposes of knowledge management is to help
    people find good information on which to make better decisions.  This
    is far more  involved than people processing email, memos and other
    document-centric communications.  People are incredibly adept at
    receiving and processing ambient information.  In the office we
    overhear other people's conversations, we see what people are working
    on, we receive snippets of news from our feeds or the paper, and so
    on.  This information is constantly feeding our consciousness. And the
    human brain has evolved process these huge volumes of fragmented
    ambiguous information.  But if people constantly have their noses in
    their inbox, or they are forced into document-centric models of
    information sharing, they are  cut off from valuable information
    sources and flows.

    
    

    Online social networking acts as an excellent operational
    information filter.  We are used to connecting with people and
    exchanging information in spaces, and this behaviour is reflected
    online in social and business networking sites like Facebook and
    LinkedIn.  Instead of going to Google to search for the best
    restaurants in NYC, people now go to their network and get better more
    relevant results.

  • 2 more annotations...
  • • Likewise, the process of social tagging is fascinating, especially
      its effect on interactions and understanding.  As we label our
      information, we find people that share our perceptions or interests, or
      we even add new meaning through the label itself. This is the power of
      folksonomies over taxonomies which for decades have made information
      impossible to find for most people.  Instead of trying to structure
      everything and remove all ambiguity, we should use a top-down
      categorisation system for things that are broadly correct (e.g.
      regions, products, practice areas) and below that allow human-generated
      emergent metadata like labels to act as a more effective social way of
      navigating through information.  Allowing the structure of the language
      to come from people in the field.
    • For information professionals, this means moving from tending boxes
      and labels to becoming information networkers.  It means being guides
      rather than gate keepers.  Information professionals need to share 21st
      century competencies with people, helping them to use their networks as
      filters and establish their radars giving greater control to the
      individual.  All of this points to a much more interesting future role
      for information professionals.
• 

  Mike Nall

  socialnetworking

• 

  Driessen Samuel

  socialnetworking filtering

Would you like to comment?

Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.