The word

The first time I heard the term "knowledge work", I must have been in high school. To be honest, I remember being somewhat confused by it - it may have taken a while for me to assimilate what was meant. It seemed to elusively point at something I could not quite grasp.

An encounter with each new word or term is a bit like meeting a new person (though in this case, a citizen of our semantic realm). Words will tell you about the parts of their world that they inhabit, the interactions that they have had with groups of humans (sometimes across millenia and often with both the human and the semantic counterparts becoming changed from the encounter). A word will sometimes reveal to us the state of mind in which people approach the thing that it refers to, how frequently such a thing gets thought about in that culture, and really a host of other things (this could be a separate post).

The thing I found peculiar about encountering the term "knowledge work" is that it did not "greet me back" in the usual way that a word does - nor did it show me something about its origins or about how it helps humanity with a vital function by being at the nexus point between object and meaning.

In my mind, every human has knowledge and does work - this work will depend on the human's knowledge bank in varying degrees (and also have varying yields of fresh knowledge) - but none of this seemed to warrant creating this new term, not to mention the methods of quantification and tresholds seemed anecdotal at best.

I suppose the fact that it was part of coursework at first, and a conferred identity later (in a number of courses, you become [^1] a knowledge worker), made the term sort of blend in with the rest of the dictionary crowd and become a part of my lexicon.

The experience

I never really saw myself as a knowledge worker (I think my "Tsaheylu" [^2] with this term didn't really happen reliably enough for it to affect my self-perception). Nevertheless, for most of my life so far, most of the work I've done falls under what our civilization refers to using the term.

When I first joined the workforce, so to say, my impression was that it was surprisingly easy. It felt like cheating to "just" move bits of information around and get paid for this [^3]. As time progressed, of course, I saw the world dynamics which not only warrant performing and valuing this sort of work, but also possibly justify the otherwise clumsy-sounding term. Certainly many of the functions in this grouping are very important for us.

Shaping dynamics

Just as physical work shapes the worker (which movements need to be performed with which force by which muscle groups, how often) - mental work shapes us as well (and I'm not referring to the slightly higher propensity to having a belly ;). The mind/brain(/body) complex is both intelligent and adaptive, and it will undergo changes as it works with information so that future work with similar kinds of concepts can happen better and quicker (including quantitative improvements).

This means that when we get to knowledge work, what specific deep interests the person has, what they studied, and what they work as - probably to some degree shape their general cognition, with an effect on the rest of life.

One area that I believe can be somewhat sensitive to discuss (but may really be worthwhile) is how different elements of the systems we are embedded in, affect us. Who we are, changes even as we adjust spaces, situations and activities - let a long a fully immersive area of life, played out over a long period of time. How do the following impact the development of cognition:

• individualism
• collectivism
• capitalism
• socialism

I think it can be interesting to note that each of these, depending on immersion, would influence a person differently when it comes to areas like Independent Thinking, Equity and Social Justice, Entrepreneurial Drive, Cultural Context, Self Reliance, Empathy, Economic thinking, Relationship to hard work, Dependence on state, Conformity, Competitivity, Sense of community, Materialism, Critical thinking, and others.

[^1]: I imagine one just "turns" at some point. Maybe like a werewolf? When exactly does it happen? The graduation? Is it customary to let one's family know that they will never be the same? [^2]: Tsaheylu is a Na'vi word meaning "bond" or neural connection. This describes the physical process by which Pandoran flora and fauna mentally connect to one another by the use of their queues. From James Cameron's "Avatar". [^3]: It did not occur to me at the time that physical labour was the same thing - moving bits and bobs of "matter" from one place to the other, organizing them in all these different structures based on their uses and properties. There's just no escaping it - human activity seems to have at (or near) its core a logistical component. [^4]: I still find it a bit haphazard though. It feels like we're grouping human activity by the mere fact that they're performed by using a specific part of one's being. Just imagine if, by a similar logic, we grouped leg day at the gym, standing in a queue and running from a dog during rain as modalities of "leg work". Is it totally meaningless? No. Are the other activities under "leg work" a sort of paresthesia when wanting to reference, for example, dancing? Yup, in maybe 95% of the cases.