“I would say the other big insight for us was around knowledge creation, which is also called “sense-making” in the information science academic discipline. We have really seen a shift over the past several years that we’ve been doing ethnography.
In 2004 people really said that knowledge lives with experts and the experts help them make decisions.
In 2007, people said that search engines actually had all of the knowledge in the world and it was just there for them to go out and pull it out. And now, in 2010, people told us that they created their own knowledge, that even though the search engine never really had all the knowledge in the world, it was linked to information.
People are much more sophisticated now in how they think about that. They say “The search engine’s a great tool for getting access to information, but I need to look at that information and contrast and compare it, and come to my own conclusion about what the right answer is for me. And when I do that, that’s knowledge, but before that, it isn’t knowledge.” People have a sense that knowledge is something that they are actively creating and that is very personal to them.”