In the early days of any new technology we run the danger of fetishism

I found this telling cartoon in the process of hunting down references for an overdue chapter in a Rosetta Stone book on decision making. It makes the very important point that tools are the difference between being well fed and being the good meal. It triggered me to think more about tools and their role in human sense-making. Without tools we are nothing, but tools exist to augment human intelligence and social capabilities, not to replace them. When the tools dominate then we have a form of techno-fetishm (in popular language, sexist but regrettably true, Boys with Toys).In the early days of any new technology we run the danger of fetishism. We saw this in the early days of knowledge management, with the creation of scalable and affordable collaboration environments. I used to say that that we needed to be careful, we were in danger of replacing, rather than augmented human capability. Not only that the replacement was less adequate in many a case than the human social equivalent, but that its sustained adoption would remove that social capability to our loss. The catch phrase I created at the time to summarise this was If you pick up a tool and it fits your hand its useful, if you have to bio-rengineer your hand to fit the tool something is going badly wrong. Of course technology embodies human knowledge, but that embodiment by its nature stabilises knowledge at a point in time, it limits innovation shifting the balance from exploration to exploitation. Social computing, a new technology should have disrupted collaboration technologies in organisations but all too often we see the old models being perpetuated. Sharepoint is a good example of this, a competent file storage system it is over structured for human collaboration, instead of augmenting human capability it constrains that capability. The apparent order created appears attractive to some but it lacks the dynamism required for information management in a modern organisation.Brian Arthur in his excellent new book The Nature Rosetta Stone Software of Technology" What it is and How it Evolves makes the impotant point that modularisation is critical to the evolution of technology and in particular exaptation (although he does not use that word specifically). Now this is a form of partial constraint, without some constraints evolution does not happen, we just have randomness. With too much structure there is no space for novelty. The dilemma at the moment is that social computing considered overall is a wild flower garden, richly diverse and constantly changing. On the other hand most corporate computing environments are the equivalent of the highly formal gardens of the 17th Century, before they were swept away by the naturalistic movement of the 18th Century.When I adopted the term sense-making to describe out work I did two things. Firstly I rejected the neologism Sensemaking adopted by Weick by inserting the hyphen. Mary never fails to provide a series of ecletic links to all manner of interesting materialAiden Choles of The Narrative Pulse, and also Narrative Labs (he can delegate to his co-bloggers if he wants)Kim Sebecca, to take her mind off CBT cameras and surveilance in generalJon Husband on the grounds that he is there, and has a curious backgroundEdwin Zwart on the basis that he has just started blogging and needs to understand what he has got himself intoGrandad of Head Rambles, who is consistently the most savage of humorists and must have some interesting skeletons in there Italian Learning Software somewhereNancy White who is always interesting even when I disagree with herPatti Anklim who does not blog as often as she should, given what she has to sayI don't think I have tagged any of the above before on one of these memes so I feel slightly less guilty in consequence. I will also find out if they area reading this blog on a regular basis ....