Opening up to Other Eyes: the story and theory of OpenJournaL by risa
- OpenJournaL: just 1 year old.
- founded with the intention of opening up knowledge construction in the MA in Media at Concordia.
-because of the response to the ideas and to the hybrid perspective it became an ongoing project, as well as a practical experiment with the open source theories of communication and organization I was exploring in my thesis.
Media theory so often seems to come down to the question of balancing out against one-sidedness in communication. And the open source process seemed to have evolved attitudes and mechanisms that were successful in the creation of really complex new knowledge.
Because open source is able to sit on both sides of a traditional problem- the contradiction between opening yourself up to change and protecting yourself against distortion (bad change):
1. by opening up the source code you create a rigorous environment where assumptions and biases which are built into the construction of software (or any organizational structure) can be seen by other eyes. Other perspectives.
2. by protecting to right to fork the development of open source software (literally forking the group) the original idea can be protected against distortion; or better or complementary versions of ideas can be allowed to emerge out of the new group.
Open source code creates a fundamental twist in traditional ideas about competition, and here we could talk about the Cultural Commons, if we wanted.
But specifically, open source creates a wider understanding of the difficult process of collaboration on complex ideas, and these were principles I wanted to see explored in academic knowledge construction.
Open Journal aims to open up for discussion cultural codes and processes, and to expose media theory’s complex architecture of good ideas and biases to the challenging waters of open discussion. We wanted to speak academically without confirming in our language an ivory tower.
we wanted an academic journal with a much wider idea about where media theory could come from. We wanted to include photography, drawing, poetry, and fiction along with articles and essays, and we wanted to publish these in a space where readers could expand and critique them.
Because of this desire we’ve moved increasingly toward blogging softwares and tools-
bc blogging was evolving at this same time into a democratic, open environment and developing tools and plugins that often met our needs.
Then we added phpbb. In both cases we use the software a little differently. The comments on wordpress are more like footnotes or diverging arguments and the posts in the forum make it more like an expanding catalog of notes and observations which can be expanded upon and drawn onto the front page of Open.
We also wanted the forums to be a resource for other projects and collectives. Instead of having their own whole forum they were welcome, if they liked, to have a branch in ours. The benefit of this, besides not having to worry about the technology, was that they could open themselves up to other audiences and could insert themselves into other debates or projects. Open is interested in the fact that most people have a surprising array of interests and abilities. Humans aren’t machines designed with one purpose, we are endlessly creative and changing.
Software- like all media- can either be another layer of rigid structures telling us who we are and what we should think and how tasks should be completed, or it can be something else. Open source is the field for the creation of that something else over time, and on Open Journal we’re exploring the theoretical potential in that.
When we started Open it seemed as though there was a great deal of writing on the web about napster, the kazaa network, friendster, or blogs, or even email, or instant messaging; lots of writing about these different little manifestations of the complex idea about interconnection and open-ness that had produced the web, but we wanted to see more exploration of the theoretical, historical base for the whole ‘internet’ project itself: The Hacker culture, the homebrew club, the idea of the people’s machine, the Whole World Catalogue, the architechture of the research buildings at RAND…all of these were interesting instances of some new ideas, and i wanted to look at the relationships between these projects and ideas and the evolving politics and economics of open source.
There was a great deal of writing in communication theory about the distortions that become part of communication between individuals. Studying media draws your attention to the fragmentation that can still exist in a widely networked world if people are only connecting with people who hear their information through the same networks, or only opening up to people who confirm what you already think and believe.
When you study communications you can come to feel that a ‘perfect’ communication system, if such a thing were possible, would make peace and good choices possible. With Open Journal and “No One Knows Everything” I want to consider the way ‘open source communication’ – the whole wide, long, distributed, chaotic, disjointed field of open software development and open idea exchange that is taking place in digital spaces where the information becomes endlessly reproducible- the way this process can continue to interact with monopolies of knowledge in all kinds of different fields.
In forest management, and in international policy, and in creative writing, and in computer science the wells of domain-specific knowledge are so deep that it can become difficult to communicate with individuals from other knowledge domains who speak a different technical language. “Specialized skill in language creates a monopoly of knowledge that will eventually be brought down by force.” In response to the dangers of specialization, Innis and others suggest interdisciplinarity, and this is what Open Journal is after.
Innis- periodicals, journals, university- any media that combats the tendency towards one-sidedness- should be useful in producing a balanced and healthy society. One which avoids producing or perpetuating systems that create disequilibrium and inequality, either in the economic status of citizens, or in the health of the environment where they live, or in the range of choices they feel they have for their futures.
I began my thesis curious about the history of open source, which opened out into a larger curiosity about the effect of the cold war, and the world wars on our understanding of communication. And with deep reading in some of the under-studied bits of Innis’s writing I got interested in tracing connections between his histories of monopolies of knowledge and biases of communication, and more recent developments in civilizational crisis and monopolies of knowledge.
Interpersonal systems are affected by the technological systems they make use of. Stanley Deetz and Habermas talk about “strategically distorted communication.”
The Success of Open Source read against Innis’s histories of monopolies of knowledge suggests that blinkered, monopolized communication, communication that’s forced to find routes around proprietary knowledge, slows the process of coming toward a wider agreement and better systems. In the worst case, knowledge monopolies reify into such rigid structures that they are brought down by force rather then by a natural balancing out.
By contributing whole systems for coordination, collaboration, networking, media sharing, etc, the “free software movement” not only expands the cooperative feeling of the early hacker days but offers tools that increase the field of possible choices and ideas for not-so-monied individuals and organizations.
With Open Journal I want to keep exploring this idea, and drawing the open source rhetoric and logic into other conversations. At very least into the discourse of media studies, where so much emphasis can be placed on instances when the ideals of good communication fail, instead of on the systems and process that are successful.
The thing about open source software (and media generally) is that it needs to be looked at from very close up- at the level of the code itself, how the layers of software interact, what good protocols are for communication- and from very far away- how the software and the process for producing it interacts with the wider culture and processes of collaboration. This is the work that my own thesis is a small part of.
some places we can juxtapose open source history with the history of other networks:
-the making of the oed
-asquith and torvalds- parliamentary tactics for coming toward agreement
the northcliffe press and microsoft- the danger of monopoly
-conferences, universities (”we are collectively, what’s wrong with the university” Innis to the assembled presidents..)
the relationship between the university culture and government and corporate culture during the early development of unix and the tc-icp protocol, Paul Baran and the idea of Digital.
the unfolding learning process the idea of open source had undergone. How this environment because a recursive algorithm for system innovation. One of the most interesting examples of successful open source behavior and governance is in Linux and it’s leader or ‘benevolent dictator’ Torvalds. Access to source code creates this recursive possibility, but it’s indivduals who understand that potential who make it meaningful. So the way we think, and the way domains like psychology approach the question of knowledge and change defense mechanisms and hospitality all can benefit from open source theory.
-and interestingly, so can our understanding of the universe. the behavior of networks in nature. Microsoft, Bose-Einstein
In all of these places- Opening up information is a pragmatic and political act that resists the formations of monopolies which are threatening to civilization.
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ways we use our website (little features of our ongoing attempt at open-ness):
- we open with a photograph of us- i have some ego-guilt about this, but when i think about it objectively i do think it’s important to open a website with human faces. i think the fundamental fact of the collaboration between art and science, guy and girl, writing and code that this photo represents is pretty key to the way we understand ‘open-ness on our site. In part, we are open sourceing ourselves with all our websites.
-we offer some key use information along the top, (submit, why ads, forum, blogs, about)
- and then show the categories of topics along the side. these are general fields of inquiry and often we’ll post entries in different categories so that you can come across ideas in different contexts.
-below the categories we added our flickr feed- the idea of sharing photos publicly in the flickr way works well for us, and allows us to publish photos by different authors, and to easily update the look of our site.
right now we’re featuring a series of graffiti photographs bc i’m interested in the way that writing on public space reclaims it, makes an argument about who owns property and who is allowed to communicate. In a way, I think open source and graffitti share a politics of access.
-below that you’ll find some of our google ads. and up at the top and in the forums you’ll find explorations of the ethics of including ads. I argue that we are open, in this way, to other ideas of the good, other attempts to be of value, and other interpretations of our audience and their desires, and bc they are chosen by Google’s content algorithms, they also suggest alternate interpretations of our site.
we’re going to need some income to survive, but sometimes they still make me uncomfortable.
-at the bottom you can get our rss feeds, check that our xhtml and css is valid and find out our page rank. elran works on keeping out site valid and optimized.
From the back end of wordpress we add keywords for the search engines, and technorati tags for the bloggers. we are trying to be accessible in different contexts and from different points of access.
- at the top right you’ll find our different css options for viewing. We started this because my gramps mentionned he found the site impossible to read due to his colour-blindness.
-then we have the big css button to participate in the donation forum, and the paypal donate button underneath- started for books to indonesia.
-then we have the forum feeds- we wanted to increase the feeling of interesting things to read changing all the time. the forums are active at different times, but we always use them for ourselves as a way of cataloguing interesting, open-related information.
-and then our google search,
-and then what i think of as our lamp stack buttons- though they also feature open office and firefox.
-Off the front page, in links- our logo and Ecosystem blog network.
-archive: heat map- again, just to offer different ways of moving around the material on our site
Things we’d still like to do (code hacks and life hacks):
-switch to a wordpress template that automatically adjusts the length of the page to the contents.
-add a page featuring our contributing editors.
-systematize what can be done by the editors- be better at delegating in an organized way.
-continue to improve the design. get into 9rules Network.
-add “most recently edited” and “most recently commented on” feeds to front page.
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