Letters....Words....Knowledge

Yes. I understand I am on a blogging spree today. So what? Huh? Knowledge doesn't come one (piece) at a time....all the time. It may come all at the same time and overwhelm us or it may act like it doesn't exist at all and make us brood endlessly or sometimes it may decide to regulate and discipline its entry and make us think everything is beautifully controlled. But knowledge is welcome whenever it comes....in whatever form it comes.....and however frequently it comes....as long as it keeps coming! :-)

One of the best ways to share knowledge many many years ago would have been through letters - hand-written letter, that is. At a time when the Internet and Web 2.0 certainly did not exist....neither were there telephones....and even travelling to meet someone would have been very difficult because of lack of infrastructure and resources. Yes. That's the era I am talking about. It would have taken many many days for the knowledge provider to reach out to the seeker or vice versa through letters. But that was probably the only means to share thoughts and ideas when the two parties were not co-located. So, there would have been a lot of value attached to writing....the written word would be the carrier of knowledge. Body language and the like would have had a minimal role to play in knowledge sharing and transfer. Jumping into today's world, pure text blogging is probably just like that (leaving out the pics, audios and videos)....except that you have to wait no more than a few seconds to read the "letter" and respond to it and continue the conversation endlessly if you wanted to.....

Speaking of which, there's a small related tidbit that's been hogging my mind since this morning....I noticed a huge billboard advertising a new movie (Hindi) and its tag line reads "Sometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people".....ummm....I like it.... yes....! :-) I think that's a nice and thoughtful tag line!

Apart from the emotional and relationship-based flavour that the movie-makers obviously aim to communicate, I see a knowledge sharing/collaboration flavour to it.....! :-) For knowledge sharing to work, people will have to have the motivation, dedication and commitment to travel this distance.....! The processes will provide some effective ways of getting there and the technology some ways to get it done efficiently (and in a painless or even a lazy way).....but it's the people who have to eventually take the steps and cover the entire distance!