CI 8395 reading reflection#1

I took some short breaks from the gluing my eyeballs at the 8395 readings. Browsing on the Internet and digging out some old books of my interests from my bookshelves, I found an antique (in 1995, according to the Internet chronicle) book of Sherry Turkle’s - Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.It rekindled my awareness of the multiple selves and multifaceted eyes in learning, thinking, and reflecting on the nature of knowledge and its constructs in the cyber era (in addition to Emerson’s dreams and beasts analogy, there are multipledimentional entities streaming in the subconscious as well as unconscious levels that keep the comprehension of knowledge intriguing). One of the rethinking was that I how I could conduct a comprehensible knowledge management on these oceanic information inundating in every minute and every second without being drowned?Then, I think I need to be a tough swimmer to propel myself into these knowledge 7 seas. I started greedily collecting all the glittered and non-glittered gems of wisdom and endeavors from thousands, thousands of knowledge workers and some tycoons. I began to reflect on my selfishness in these heartily harvesting. I cannot be a knowledge consumer most of my time - it is just unethical. But to be a “formal” knowledge producer (or better in this way- a “contributor”) stills quite a daunting task. See the following alarming statement stuck on my head- the Open Access Movement (http://www.scholarlyexchange.org/open_access.html) claims that:”Scholars have one primary obligation to themselves and society. That is to develop new knowledge and share it openly with each other and society. The Open Access movement has arisen partly in response to that desire and partly in response to the growing costs associated with traditional scholarly publishing efforts. Increasingly, new knowledge is being placed behind financial firewalls that impede access and benefit primarily the packagers rather than the producers of this valuable information.”Yes, generosity is a great virtue, I think. But reciprocity makes the virtue lasting forever- I am sure. So, there is a toggle between the recognizing individual’s endeavors and the demanding of public sharing. How do our knowledge producing and consuming communities render this issue justifiably? Where is the appropriate midpoint of the capitalistic rewarding system and socialistic democratization processes? Look at the currently rampant protecting movement of the intellectual property rights versus the widespread pirating acts coexisting in the cyber-world. What are the fundamental driving forces of the above phenomenon? Are most of the knowledge producers/workers so capitalistically driven (or motivated) to produce knowledge? Rethinking about Max Weber’s multiple dimension of SES argument, he remarked that not all the human beings chased monetary success. Prestige, fame, privilege, power, recognition, respect are sometimes more invaluable to certain categories of people in certain societies. And these invisible (or less quantifiable) rewarding systems of knowledge power and recognition maybe underplayed by the capitalistic mentality behind the scene, but why and how?To what extent the knowledge producers appreciate community members’ adoption, appropriation, borrowing and crediting their contributions versus prefer to proprietarize their knowledge products as commodities?
Posted by Crystal at 9:43 AM 0 comments Links to this post
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