Emoji Legend

📝 = section that needs further prose development.

🧩 = piece of the argument. current length is a result of ordering the argument, not necessarily how long the section needs to be.

🐍 = needs evidence, do not trust! prioritize getting evidence for these points above other tasks.

Brown text = tentative points that are unfinished, includes commentary.

📝 Introduction

• The internet has yet to produce communities of scientific and intellectual inquiry that rival legacy knowledge institutions
• But because new information behaviors on new media layers do not interface well with older institutions, there is increasing conflict and pressure for reconciliation between these two knowledge environments
• In this paper we’ll look at some of the features that make existing knowledge institutions successful, and compare them to the new institutions emerging on the internet
• Through this inquiry, we identify what we call a “credit culture”: a set of protocols that define a community of knowledge over space and time
• What can we observe about the nascent “credit cultures” that are forming on the internet? How is power accruing to different knowledge communities in similar or different ways? What could make internet knowledge communities more successful?

Part 1

• The institutional repository of the world that internet migrants were born into: law, academia, science, medicine, business, trades.
• 🧩 The importance of institutions
  • institutions form the bridge between past, present, and future
  • institutions constrain and supply certain forms of human behavior [North]
  • communities of practice know how to get stuff done and train people to do it [Wenger & Lave]
  • Give some examples of both civilization-critical and life-enriching legacy institutions throughout
• 🧩 Defining scope: which institutions do we care about? Knowledge communities
  • knowledge communities generate questions and answers that embed wisdom and drive progress
  • These communities are responsible for shaping the world of thought and intellectual inquiry via philosophy, and share extensions into the world of practice
  • Discuss the relationship of knowledge communities to communities of practice. E.g. theoretical psychology and clinical practice
  • We aren’t interested in communities of pure practice which persist through the reproduction of tradition. In short we care about communities which persist over space and time through using written or recorded media.
  • Discuss formal properties of the types of knowledge communities we’re interested in
  • 🐍 Maybe something about how written / print media has shaped knowledge communities over time, and or shaped today’s institutions. This could start with Plato’s Phaedrus, or could be the link to some of the “bureaucracy” references [von Mises, Weber, Castells, Graeber]. This part sets up the introduction of “credit culture.”