As Edwin Hutchins writes, cognitive anthropology “turned away from society by looking inward to the knowledge an individual had to have to function as a member of the culture. The question became ‘What does a person have to know?’ The locus of knowledge was assumed to be inside the individual….But knowledge expressed or expressible in language tends to be declarative knowledge. It is what people can say about what they know.”

So what am I rambling about? As far as I can tell, cognitive theory itself only recently, early 90’s, turned away from focusing solely on the individual and what a person knows. They’ve since developed the notion of socially distributed cognition. The concept I love is that the cognitive properties of a group is NOT simply the sum of the cognitive properties of the individuals.

Software is facing parallel false assumptions now. Is there any software being built that focuses on socially distributed cognition? I’m not talking about web 2.0, groups, friends, tags, etc because that ain’t it. Ya sure, it’s a leading question and I’m talking out loud about what we’re working towards with brainpark but isn’t that what this medium’s about? Software that supports cognition in the context of an individual is good, but it would pale in comparison to software that tackles socially distributed cognition….maybe…..I think…..but I’m just one person….

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 10:00 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.