I know the origin of this blog is to talk about the future of work, the digitalization & how technological change is making our working environment evolve. The technological change is actually, together with the economical change and the demographic change, an important source of evolution in our century.

Nevertheless, I wanted to touch a more fundamental point today, more simple, but actually not disconnected from the impact of the technological change and social learning: sharing experience and knowledge through writing.

To say that writing has been through a complete change is a euphemism. Writing has actually changed as much as it changed the world centuries ago. We will not share a lesson of history here but if we think that writing was created to transmit a message through cities, to protect information from being lost and to transmit knowledge and history, we can easily understand how important it is.

The interesting point is that many writers and searchers such as Michel Serres agree on the fact that writing and sharing has come to a revolution with the creation of the web. We can write more easily, we can share internationally through forums, we can read without waiting for a book to be translated and published, on a virtual environment. All of that is true, the act of writing as evolved, but in fact it never stopped to evolve since its creation.

The common point about writing, whatever is the historical period, is the objective to share. To share to transmit, to share experiences, to share to be useful for the common good. Sometimes this gift has been misused, history keeps scars of it all over the world. But the objective to share is difficult to deny. I would agree that some writers probably did not intended to be read, but that is another point.

Now from sharing to social learning, what is the link ? If we come back to the revolution of writing that is happening with the creation of the web, we can see the emergence of a web writing culture. I personally consider it as a deep change. Everybody can now be published and blogging, even micro-blogging, is more popular than ever, becoming a job by itself. By opening the possibility to write, we have opened the possibility to share opinions, and feedbacks. We have also open the opportunity to share knowledges and to contribute, with our sharing, to the acquisition of knowledge of others. At the same time we also now really care and benefit from the opinion of others, whether we want to buy a car, to go to a restaurant, to see a movie…anything. So that is why I consider that at some point, writing and sharing online is part of the social learning, and this is a fantastic gift we have in our digital but still very real world.