Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

Reading Polkinghorne, I see my commitment to narrative inquiry and blogs becoming all the stronger and intertwined. Narrative captures knowledge that the positivist methods of the natural sciences can't. Narrative captures more than knowledge; it captures the wisdom that Laszlo and Laszlo see as an essential part of social knowledge management. Blogs are the tool to capture those narratives and the meaning and wisdom they carry.

Storytelling is already recognized as a vital knowledge management tool. There are lots of ways to seek out and record the narratives of members of an organization. Blogs may be the most direct way to capture the raw narratives of individuals within the organization. In the social knowledge management setting, in the absence of a formal organizational structure to coordinate the gathering and ordering of narratives, blogs provide a way to capture and archive the narratives of citizens. That archive is then available for other readers to incorporate into their own narratives.

Blogs themselves are narrative experiences. Their authors present episode after episode, arranged temporally. The individual posts matter less than the continuing storytelling, the weekly or daily ordering of personal experience and current events into a public construction of meaning. The narrative of each blog is the overarching understanding of the world that each blog in toto constructs. My job in this dissertation is to identify not merely instances of narrative-like texts in scattered posts, but the overall narrative that motivates and is constructed by each blog.

Each one of us constructs and lives in some sort of narrative. Each one of us forms a narrative that gives our lives coherence. Giving that narrative form on a blog is a new step, something that better captures our daily personal sense-making than the books and columns and other print outlets of the past could for their authors. We can share the blogs each day, as we compose our narratives. No single post lasts, and that's fine: readers come for the process, not some single product or object that we enshrine on a shelf.

Narrative meaning is a cognitive process that organizes human experiences into temporally meaningful episodes. Because it is a cognitive process, a mental operation, narrative meaning is not an "object" available to direct observation. However, the individual stories and histories that emerge in the creation of human narratives are available for direct observation [Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 1].

The narrative that matters is not the story that I tell on October 6 at 11:15 a.m. The narrative that matters, that gives meaning, is the understanding that arises as I write story after story, as readers follow along and revisit stories, and as we converse about these recorded experiences and thoughts and build our own meanings.

"To see keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately" [Rorty, 1980, p. 378].