I’m grateful to Ana Cristina Pratas (@AnaCristinaPrts) for drawing my attention to this brief post and slide-deck from the London School of Economics on the significance of blogging (including micro, aka Twitter) on the “development and democratization” of knowledge. Patrick Dunleavy’s main interest is the impact of blogging and informal online publication on academic discourse. But it is of course a development of much wider significance.

Blogs and micro-blogs are social platforms for knowledge, with many functions (In suspect we have only begun to discover them) including – as I have argued elsewhere – supremely, reciprocal knowledge curation. https://futureofbiz.org/future/why-twitter-matters/

There are a least 3 principles at work here:

1. Social in relation to other people.

2. Social in relation to knowledge.

3. Social in relation to institutions.

And in the Twitter/blog nexus they all three intersect and interact.

Much to mull here in Dunleavy’s presentation, and to apply even more broadly than he does.

The Republic of Blogs: A new phase in the development and democratization of knowledge