Jim McGee wrote what I thought was a very thought provoking piece on this blog, Literate thinking as a barrier to Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Here are some additional bits as I reflected on what he wrote. I am first going to go back to the beginning of literate thinking. Each new advance in communication and learning technology has expanded the possibilities for communication, knowledge capture, and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the requirements to enable them. 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 and innovation. 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, plays strong roles in many academic and legal matters, and is 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 and most likely keyed off their audience for direction and context. 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”).

It you have an accessible visual record of thought it becomes transparent and can take on a life of its own, independent of your original thought. It needs to be carefully composed to convey your intended meaning to multiple audiences without you there to have a clarifying dialogue. If you are more skillful in the speaking, you can better spin your thoughts to fit your audience. You can look for reactions and make adjustments. If you converse better in writing you are composing thoughts that need to stand outside their immediate context and you have much less control over their interpretation.

I have seen a number of people within large enterprises showing great hesitation about the transparency that Enterprise 2.0 offers. I think Jim’s comments suggest that it is more than simple privacy concerns but it is also about losing control over the interpretation of communication when it becomes asynchronous and literate. When we hear privacy issues raised we should also look for concerns about being successful in literate communication.