Lightsurgery

I was listening to a radio 4 programme a while back, where academics were mentioning the fear they had about the rise in social communication, and the effects it is having on research.

grrr. That annoyed me that did!
My thoughts:

Whilst the traditional academy has its respected place in the educational hierarchy, the academic institutional ideology is under attack from the internet, and specifically the use of social tools for two reasons:

1. The idea of knowledge remaining in one geographical location, traded as a unique commodity, is no longer a realistic proposition.
The idea that a person, corporation or institution can assert ownership over an idea is now impossible to enforce.

2. Academics with intimate knowledge of a subject and the ability to cite and reference existing discourse have always been the assessors of new learning. Today the internet is providing new understanding of knowledge by interweaving multi-disciplinary contexts such as geo-location, chronology, and emotive reference, with peer reviewed expert knowledge not limited to what is known and contained within the four walls of the academy.

The internet further breaks down the ideas of ownership and localised knowledge when issues of copyright are considered. At present the social media sphere is enabling real-time discourse around the world, DRM is being replaced by one-off subscriptions to service providers, and out of date copyright legislation cannot close down torrent sharing sites.

When pressed on current academic methods of assessment and the belief in localised ownership of knowledge, most representatives of the traditional institutions state in their defense that:

Academic knowledge implies the ability to accurately cite peer reviewed content, whereas the aquisition of knowledge from internet searches does not.
The internet is transient and in too much flux to be a permanent place to cite and reference material (often by the time a reference is included in a bibliography, it has been lost, moved, or deleted on the web).
Intimate knowledge of a subject provides an academic institution with a way of quantifiably assessing research and graduate work; the web is too large to gain intimate knowledge of all the available texts and discourse, with which a quantitive assessment can be made.

My approach to dealing with these three issues are as follows:

The interconnectivity of social peer networks is extremely powerful as a tool for referencing and collating live realtime understanding and contextualised knowledge.
Symptomatic of its constant updates, additions, and culturally reactive content, the permanence of online publishing relies upon being peer reviewed. Social tools provide the referencing and citations in terms of popularity, and each citation that is micro-published within a network, increases it’s chance of permanence and further peer review. In other words, the act of mass peer reviewing contributes to the rating and permanence of the knowledge on the web: a self solving problem for those that want to be able to contextualise and reference web content.
For a review and practical assessment of research by experts with an intimate understanding and knowledge of a subject, why not submit to the very community that the academic cites and references? The users of social tools, and the contributors to social media. These people are living, working experts, not limited to the non-vocational, and the professors and academics behind the wall of the institution.

The question of knowledge ownership, comes down to whether it may be understood that:
the users own acquisition of meaning, and any subsequent referencing of knowledge, is just a small contribution to a larger body of work not owned by the enterprise, institution, or network that assesses it;
The body of work is considered a finished article, and may not be added to.