Below you’ll find a quote from a very favorable review of a new technology – namely Trampoline’s SONAR – that promises to introduce a paradigmatic shift in the way organizations and their employees can make use of information and knowledge – what they do is in fact not so new but there is at least no other application around, except to some extent I see System One in the race tough they lack – as far as I know – social networking capability. If you click the link you’ll find a description of an amazing concept and piece of software. I really like the idea of making things visible – done automagically by tools. But and that’s the reason I’m pointing you there: this entire approach makes only sense if you believe there is a hidden truth that only needs to be unveiled by some magic.

Trampoline: Harnessing Social Behavior in the Enterprise: “Trampoline’s SONAR platform brings a fresh approach to information management, by harnessing the social behaviour that occurs within organizations. SONAR plugs into the corporate network and connects to existing systems, including email servers, contact databases and document stores. It analyses this data to map social networks, information flows, expertise and individuals’ interests throughout the enterprise”
Read/Write Web

On the contrary I think Social Software or Enterprise 2.0 is – at least not only – not about making things visible via decoding meaning and/or social action but essentially about enabling an organizational framework that supports collaboration based on people, objects and the needs of those people on an individual level. To get there you need a change in mindsets first, proper tools that help you to associate on purpose and only eventually tools that make the hidden things visible. Paradoxically by the same token, however, I think those tools – the social software ones – need to support making things visible and invisible at the same time.

I myself wouldn’t trust the data-mining tools of the SONAR kind if I were a knowledge worker. I’d like to be in control and like to freely choose what is in/visible. In German I’d call the impressive SONAR Rasterfahndung (dragnet investigation) which has a rather bad connotation. Somehow this tool is some kind of travesty of the visions of social software by turning some of the basic principles into toolsets of control. Sounds like the old Foucauldian dispositif (thanks to Martin for the link) – a net of un/spoken discourses, institutions, tools, and laws – creates and analyzes the “You” newly from the perspective of the social networking analysis.