Still Building the Memex, Stephen Davies writes:
We define a Personal Knowledge Base – or PKB – as an electronic tool through which an individual can express, capture, and later retrieve the personal knowledge he or she has acquired.
….Personal: Like Bush’s memex, a PKB is intended for private use, and its contents are custom tailored to the individual. It contains trends, relationships, categories, and personal observations that its owner sees but which no one else may agree with. Many of the issues involved in PKB design are also relevant in collaborative settings, as when a homogeneous group of people is jointly building a shared knowledge base. In this case, the knowledge base could simply reflect the consensus view of all contributors; or, perhaps better, it could simultaneously store and present alternate views of its contents, so as to honor several participants who may organize it or view it differently. This can introduce another level of complexity.
I am not sure that having “ear buds” from an intellectual IPod like a PKB is a good idea.
The average reader is already well insulated from the inconvenience of information or opinions dissimilar from their own. Reflecting the “consensus view of all contributors,” is a symptom, and not a desirable one at that.
We have had the equivalents of PKBs over both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The consequences of PKB or Personal Knowledge Bases, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the collapse of the housing market, serious mis-steps in both foreign and domestic policy, are too well known to need elaboration.
The problem posed by a PKB is simpler but what we need are PbKB, Public Knowledge Bases.
Even though more complex, a PbKB has the potential to put all citizens on a even footing with regard to debates over policy choices.
It may be difficult to achieve in practice and only every partially successful, but the result could hardly be worse than the echo chamber of a PKB.
(Still Building Memex & Topic Maps Part 2 – Beyond the Echo Chamber)