Invitations and Becomings

I think I may have found a new tool for developing the idea of an Intranet Sociology that has been floating around with me since April.

Browsing through some bits and pieces, I came across this quote from Mark Choate's book Professional Wikis

"Being propositioned by some young twenty-something about brain-dumping your wisdom into a wiki after having every utterance scrutinized by your superiors for your entire career is like suddenly being told by your wife of twenty years that she thinks you should loosen up a little and get a girlfriend."

It made me laugh - it still does - but the more I think about it, the less I'm satisfied with just laughing. Because there's something serious in there. After all, is it so obvious that we should all loosen up a little, be a little more promiscuous with our knowledge, or cognitive surplus or whatever?

Unlike internet sites, on intranet sites consideration is rarely given to the user experience. UX is paid lip service in the form of consistency of branding. Yet people spend far more time on an intranet site. So, while it obviously isn't motivated by sales, UX and usability in general are actually a lot more important on intranet sites than their appearance would suggest.

It's just after five, and I've been lying in bed for the last couple of hours with ideas running through my head about the possibility of writing a radical sociology of intranets. Let me start to sketch what I have in mind...

Are wikis and CMS's mortal enemies? Can they be brought into some sort of collaborative or even competitive harmony with each other? Or is connecting Confluence and Sharepoint just going to drain the benefit of either approach?