Living Libraries

We are all living libraries. We carry within us memories, ideas, beliefs and stories. Imagine a world beyond the bookshelves where we function like tribes and tribal leaders – carrying the traditions and ideas of the human race in our conversations and interactions. And stories are built upon and curated by each of us, adding our own perspective on it.

Imagine a world where those interactions exist in real time, conversations between us. And also exist in virtual memories, blog posts, tweets, posts on Facebook. All of these could be seen as different ways to build these living libraries.

Librarians and Knowledge Workers will be shouting to me about the need for taxonomy, for structure so that things can be found. But in a world of advanced search maybe we really don’t need sophisticated cataloguing systems. We would just search these living libraries with the terms that we want to know about.

Would that work? Should we be worried that perhaps 99% of information that is on the internet is part of the long long tail that no-one ever reads because it is beyond the first few pages of search results on Google? Is this why community and connection are so important to ensure democracy of information, to ensure that the living knowledge that we are building is of value to someone out there – even if it is only a very small community?

Living Libraries into the future become an augmented and virtual reality mix between online and in memory sources of knowledge that we develop simple approaches to searching so that we can be part of a gorgeously curious world. Imagine that!

(November Challenge 11/31)

Also published on Medium.