Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

I was playing around with Slattery Communications‘ Facebook widget/application a couple of weeks ago and it got me thinking. Get Creative is a brainstorming tool where users can input ideas into a database or search it for inspiration. Clicking into the database you can see that Slattery staff are mining ideas and good work that they’ve spotted.

The funny thing that ran through my mind before contributing an idea was the thought ‘If I share my ideas, am I not technically putting myself at a competitive disadvantage by sharing knowledge with the competition?’ Slap to the face as I realised what a stupid thought that was. I would credit the Internet for playing a big role in my rise through the ranks. The reason for this is amount of knowledge I had access to at my fingertips. Whether it was PR veterans like Tom Murphy or other novices entering the ranks at the time like Stephen Davies, I was able to compliment my experience on the job with insights gleaned from my peers online.

I recently picked up a copy of Manuel Castells’ series of books on the Network Society after reading about it in John Grant’s ‘After Image‘. Grant gives an overview of a key observation by Castells:

Sociologist, Manuel Castells, studies the Network Society. His three volume book on the subject charts a global shift, taking in the rise of the Internet and the fall of communism. Castells describes the overall trend as ‘Informationalism’. Which means a technology-driven change in the organization of society.

He points out that it’s not enough to say we live in a ‘knowledge age’. Knowledge has been the key driver of progress in many past societies. The Romans had roads, laws, engineering and drainage. The protestants had printed books and accountancy.

What other ‘knowledge ages’ didn’t have, according to Castells, was a new technology paradigm with three special features:
– A self-expanding processing capability (eg integrated circuits)
– A recombining ability (eg the World Wide Web)
– A distributional flexibility (eg networks and mobile phones)

These aren’t just Internet or IT properties. Castells shows that they also apply to genetic engineering, which has the same potentially explosive impact on society and economics. His point is that we have built technologies for self-reinforcing, accelerated learning.

It was stupid on my part to even think about hoarding knowledge. The whole point about innovation is about figuring out how to do things simpler and then sharing this knowledge with society as a whole in order to improve the processes we use in our every day lives. The web makes this easier, as Grant points out it is self-reinforcing, accelerated learning. Get Creative is a great tool in this respect, albeit that I think it is better suited for a site like LinkedIn.