Knowledge has always been central to human performance. Sveiby defined it as “the capacity to act” and Davenport and Prusack added that knowledge “is a high value form of information that is ready to apply to decisions and actions.” The history of managing knowledge goes back to the earliest civilizations. The palace archives of Sumer and Akkad and the extensive cuneiform archives discovered at Ebla in Syria, all more than 4,000 years old, were attempts to organize the records of their civilizations so that high value information could be used to guide new transactions and to prevent the loss of knowledge from generation to generation.
This imperative to preserve knowledge led to the great libraries of antiquity, the most notable was the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, founded around 200 B.C. and lasting almost 1,000 years. At its peak the library contained more than 500,000 hand written works and copies were disseminated throughout the world. This time-consuming hand-done reproduction and hand-carried dissemination fortunately saved much of the knowledge of Antiquity as the library was often burned by invading armies. Driven by the need to make knowledge capture, storage, and distribution more efficient, new technologies were developed.
Each new advance in communication and learning technology expanded the possibilities for knowledge capture and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the requirements to enable them. Take text or writing for example: the invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. made enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.
In the pre-writing oral tradition, the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic. To promote memory, instruction and knowledge preservation made use of verbal and musical rhythms; however, these rhythms placed severe limits on the verbal arrangement of what was said, as in Homer, and the need to memorize used up cognitive energy that otherwise could have been devoted to learning. Because of the heavy memory load, the epic poets did not actually memorize content verbatim; they created new versions from a set of possibilities as they went along.
The concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science and essential for many forms of instruction. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. Greek thought changed and such works as Plato’s “Republic” are described by some scholars as an attack on the oral poetic tradition of knowledge distribution (see Eric Havelock’s “Origins of Western Literacy” or his better known “Preface to Plato”).
Cognitive Performance Questions: What cognitive requirements are lifted with the use of a global electronic knowledge management network? Where do we no longer have to invest a portion of our mental energy?
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