I also agree that “social sensemaking” could be how a social system performs sensemaking, or builds a joint understanding of some topic. In that sense, Ed Hutchins’ examples of distributed cognition in a cockpit and navy ship are excellent examples of social sensemaking, too.

I think my challenge moving forward is to perform an analysis of social sensemaking on all these different levels. For, as we know, “cognition” occurs on different levels—why wouldn’t the impact of social interactions on information assimilation?

Thanks for your great observations, Matt!

I’m intrigued by this term “sensemaking.” Do you have any ideas about how it relates to terms like “learning,” “knowing,” “understanding,” “cognition,” and so on? I think it has a nice intuitive (phenomenological?) appeal, but I’m wondering where it fits in theoretically.

Also, I can think of another interesting sense of “social sensemaking.” Not only could it refer to an individual using social means to make sense of something, it could also refer to a social system as the thing doing the sensemaking. E.g., a cockpit making sense of its speed, a navigation team making sense of their location and destination, the American public trying to make sense of Obama’s economic policy, etc. Do you think there is room for that sort of analysis?