Knowledge Networks

Community-curated systems for organizing and surfacing knowledge, as distinct from feeds or newsletters. Sari Azout (Nov 2020) argued these represent a new and important digital category: the internet put millennia of human thought at our fingertips, but our brains aren’t equipped for the abundance. Curation is a partial solution, but current curator formats — link lists on a schedule — are still ephemeral. The real gap is information architecture: rather than just reducing volume, knowledge networks introduce digitally-native structures that add context and relation, turning the internet’s archive into something navigable rather than ephemeral.

The feed-based status quo makes us “obsessive consumers of the present, yet largely indifferent to the archives of the past.” The goal of knowledge networks is not more reading but better thinking.

Where this appears

• We Are Living Through the… (tweet) — Sari Azout’s thread (Nov 2020): the emergence of community-curated knowledge networks as a new business category; critique of feed-based architecture.