Jim McGee is thinking about "enterprise 2.0" and the importance of thinking styles. Literate thinking as a barrier to Enterprise 2.0 adoption
Most of the technologies lumped under the Enterprise 2.0 label presuppose some facility with the written word. I wonder to what extent that presents a barrier to adoption in many organizations? Moreover, I wonder how visible that organizational barrier is to those who are already facile?
Jim's going deeper than I have in the past, but there are two threads here. One that he has addressed before on the idea that people in leadership circles exhibit more oral thinking than literate. The other, related, thread is the basic idea that if people are expected to contribute (blogs, wikis), then they need to be able to contribute. For the most part this means that they need to be able to write (and feel comfortable doing it).
Participation in a computer-mediated world is about writing. And as Jim discusses it, this is more than being able to e-mail or slap together a PowerPoint deck. It's about reading and writing for others and with others.