What’s a Cultural Commons? by risa
This is a little old draft that’s been kicking around; just some thoughts about knowledge, communication, culture and the brain. It makes me think: I don’t know nearly enough about neuropsychology.
I think the ‘cultural commons’ is a generalization about the entire network of knowledge that’s ever been exchanged. I heard once that it’s easier to do the NY Times crossword puzzle the day after its been published, because the answers have been found and have increased in circulation.
I think the commons is an emergent property of complex human brains building and adapting with new evidence and experience over time. And this emergent, at-least-temporarily-agreed-upon knowledge is not a complete resource. There exist excluded individuals who have different knowledge about history, or human interaction, or their environments, and so the opinion circulating through the commons has always been prone to bias.
As different kinds of knowledge make their way into wider publics, they force the evolution of the cultural commons. They add links and chains to the minds and larger knowledge structures they interact with. We go about our days in this shifting context, trying to survive and thrive, figure things out, and make good decisions.
Mario Bunge writes, on the shaping of the mind system, that
“the human brain is plastic rather than rigid or elastic: it can learn and unlearn, perceive or conceive new items, and sometimes create whole new ideas. People reconstruct (rewire) their own brains as they learn and unlearn; and individuals with different experiences and different professions develop correspondingly different brains. By contrast, nearly all the other organs, such as the lungs and the kidneys, have fixed specific functions.”
Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge. University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Brains can learn and unlearn. They can learn to accept a pattern and then learn to accept a better one and to perceive the differences. They can also learn to see cruelly, two-dimensionally, for a while. Hopefully, being aware of this possibility makes us slightly less likely to be fooled by unbalanced, unfair systems.
November 8th, 2005 at 7:12 pm
It’s very interesting that you bring up Mario Bunge’s, “E. & C.: … and the Unity of Knowledge” in this ‘commons’ context. A while back I read E.O.Wilson’s Consilience: Unity of Knowledge, Carl Sagon’s Billions and Billions and D.R. Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: Eternal Golden Braid, from these books I started piecing together a picture of society that I have now come to believe is best described as “Open Source.” I also call it OpenCulture, OpenBusiness, OpenContent, OpenMedia, etc.., OpenX if you will…
The idea of your Cultural Commons is appealing but I wonder how it could realized… I mean, “the entire network of knowledge that’s ever been exchanged…” is a very large network… How would we go about managing such a thing? What are the checks and balances on the relevance some knowledge would have over others, how do we go about retaining this vast knowledge database? I guess some might say… Google. (i joke, i kid with you.)
Anyway, very interesting… I hope to hear more thoughts from you about this.
p@, austin tx
November 8th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
hey p@, you’re all over the site today poking at these ideas of mine and i think it’s awesome..welcome p@!
entoutcas..
here’s my response to your interesting query:
the idea of the ‘entire network of knowledge that’s ever been exchanged’ is not that it could ever be something that would or could be managed. The question of how best to manage people’s opinions (their ideas, their knowledge, maybe even their feelings) is, I think, the wrong question. It is certainly not the question that open source poses. The real challenge that open source and other creative systems embrace is not to manage the knowledge, but to make their own best expressions of it and contributions to it.
By shifting the focus from how we could force knowledge to be good, to how we could contribute to its becoming better we can avoid the disasters and cascading failures of rigid and closed systems. Or at least maybe the mediocrity.
November 16th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
So given Risa and P@’s great comments, it becomes clear that there are complicated questions and certain dangers that need to be addressed when we talk about applying open source theory to big, vexed concepts like culture or society.
One danger, hinted at by Risa’s talk of the excluded, has to do with outcomes. And open source is a model easy to turn into one concerned with best outcomes.
That is, the danger is that this kind of system ends up as an evolutionary, Darwinian one. As we all know, in evolution, there are pools of traits that help or hinder or neither, but in the end, those most attuned to survival come together. It’s harmless if something like a product or a business practice is spoken of in this way. When we talk about product X, the correlative to the evolutionary concept of survivial might be utility or efficiency. What is environment in evolution (that is, what survival responds to) might be something like consumer demand or need. The best outcomes arise for the moment — and as an ongoing process, different relationships and combinations will be produced, superceding earlier outcomes.
But it can be troubling when the best outcome model is used for forms of art. What drives artistic movements (say, Impressionism)? What would be the equivalent of survival or utility? The tendency and risk is to end up with a highly sociological, proprietary model of “art and consumer” or supply and demand matrices, or else an Arnoldian aesthetic of the “the best that has been thought and said.”
So there is good reason to tread carefully when discussing huge concepts like art, or culture, or society, whatever. Open source is an indispensable premise that could easily fall into familiar potholes. And it’s always worthwhile to think through what — if anything — the source code is ultimately for, and how the entire process is conceptualized.
December 2nd, 2005 at 10:45 am
i think art, great art, is always pushing up against clouded spaces in our brains. it unfolds through how we interact with it. i think poetry and drawing are a great deal like open source code. and the interesting thing about code, as i heard myself say to Matthew, a writer who came by our pre-launch premiere for indyish last night, is that 90 percent of it doesn’t work, just like how 90% of poetry is bad.
the source code is for building. it’s for uniqueness and innovation. it’s for the stubborn people who want to tailor make their own experiences of the software. and it’s for learning- it’s tough to understand what was done once the code has been compacted and polished up for the machines. in source code form, software is potentially legible. there is all kinds of space in the code for notes and names and messages. it’s a kind of palipmsest of effort. it has, as julien pointed out in the robotics post, a kind of aesthetic.