The Sum of my Curiosities, or Why Social Q&A is Awesome.

Lots of people mostly like to talk about subjects they know a lot about. I do too. Who doesn't? It's comfy to stay within our own realms of knowledge.
And also dull. You might teach someone else something by talking about things you know. But what will you learn?

I want my conversations, and therefore my relationships, to be based on what I want to know, not what I know already. I am much more excited about the questions that I have than the answers that I have.

According to a recent study I did by looking at the internet for five seconds, there are a jillion question and answer websites. Many, many people are trying to commingle Q&A style interaction with social networking technology. My two favorite such sites, Kommons and Quora, are doing a great job of making shared curiosity a basis for relationships in social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook.

Myspace and Facebook were/are all about molding an online identity. You curate the events of your life in pictures and text, so that you can show people who you were, are, and are becoming. Whether you portray yourself accurately, or carefully redact parts of your life to present a tamer self for your online audience is (mostly) up to you. Either way, most of what you post is about the past.

Question based social networking is much more forward looking, and therefore thrilling, in my eyes. Kommons allows you to "follow" questions that have been posted by other users, thereby grouping you with those users solely on the basis of a shared curiosity. By choosing questions to follow, you curate an identity for yourself, not based on what has been, but what you want to be. You and someone else have the same question. You're trying to grow your knowledge in the same direction.

Quora (whose budget, it must be mentioned, is tens of thousands of times that of Kommons) goes a step further and lets you follow people and topics as well as questions. This is one more step towards making mutual curiosity the basis for deeper relationships.



Discourse based on experience will always be valuable in its own way, and mutual curiosity has always been a basis for relationships. I am excited about online explorations of how to make all of it easier.

People often define themselves by the sum of their experiences.
I'd rather be defined by the sum of my curiosities.
Not what I do know, but what I will know. Not what I have been, but what I will be.