What is a positive effect in this context - in KO? What is a positive social change?
Is it an intervention that increases the potential for human flourishing? And is there, in this vein, a discrete list of actions that can be identified as factors that contribute to human flourishing? Or is the concept of human flourishing as vague as the concept of positive social change?
Could it be that positive effect is not about human flourishing as much as it is about economics? That we can define all positive effects of KO to the reduction in cost in time and/or money? This is positive because it would leave room for spending time and/or money on other things, rather than on information organization, and its consequent benefits.
There are other ways to look at this, yes? What are they? Aren't lists of "good things" controversial precisely because their inventory is not discrete and that such an assemblage can be read in a pejorative or paternalistic way?
Even with this trouble, it seems that we'll need to define what a positive effect is in order to prove whether KO research brings it into being.
Thoughts?
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2 comments:
I think that a positive social change is the mediation to prevent the dissemination of prejudiced and discriminatory ideas, specially in bibliographical catalogs and/or users.
Hi Fabio:
I see. Yes, and this makes sense from an abstract vantage point, but I feel that there are complications that present themselves when we look closer at the language used to represent ideas. Surely we can find instances when we'd want to identify terms that appear as historical markers of earlier ideas, and so those must be present in our catalogues? We at least want traces of how thought changes in our knowledge organization systems, yes?
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