Sociate

Commons thinker James Boyle of Duke Law wrote a great opinion piece published in the FT on August 7 titled "A closed mind about an open world." (Thanks for the link, Anthony and BoingBoing.)

Once we open that door, it's important to point out that the world isn't swinging wholesale to open stuff. The world is just rebalancing, because open stuff was hard to build collectively until the recent burst of connectivity, and until there were places to put open things so others could find them. Can't do that in the phone system or TV network.

On this theme of balance, my favorite paragraph in Boyle's article runs thus:

It is not that openness is always right. Rather, it is that we need a balance between open and closed, owned and free, and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong. Partly this is because we still do not understand the kind of property that exists on networks. Most of our experience is with tangible property; fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes more sense. We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a communications standard). There the threats are different, but so are the opportunities for productive sharing. Our intuitions, policies and business models misidentify both. Like astronauts brought up in gravity, our reflexes are poorly suited for free fall.

Our reflexes are poorly suited, indeed. It takes considerable effort, plus the occasional gut-twinging aha!, to retrain those reflexes. And the changes open new risks. Those are some of the reasons why this transition will be slow.

It feels like we're a third of the way through a 20- or 30-year process of rebalancing. Along the way, the people and organizations that are threatened with pitch fits and fight back. But this tide is inexorable, and the sooner the players figure out where the new resting point of the fulcrum will be, the sooner they can settle into a new business as usual. It'll be awkward from today's perspective, but oddly more humane and reasonable overall. At least that's my hope.

(Boyle is also the author of The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain, available in PDF here, as well as Shamans, Software and Spleens. Gotta meet him!)

In that last post, I completely forgot to note that Colbert seems to have installed Mediawiki and cranked up a really funny wiki at the domain Wikiality.com.

Check out the warning on the assassin page, the history of Fidel Castro, Ann Coulter as a recipe and the Al Franken Communist Seal of Approval on the Hollywood page.

Are you a Factonista or a Colbinista?

Shortly after Colbert's report on "wikiality," I checked Wikipedia to see if they had a page for it yet. After all, they had truthiness. No entry yet, but they did mention wikiality as the Word segment in a summary table of Colbert episodes, which was groovy.

I checked again today, and sure enough. Type "wikiality" into Wikpedia's search bar and it doesn't quite go to a page dedicated to wikiality, but does resolve to this page on Wikipedia in popular culture. Wikiality is a subsection there, alongside many other interesting tidbits.

The page for The Colbert Report has changed, too. The big, useful table summarizing elements from each episode went elsewhere. In its place, sort of, is a page on The Colbert Report recurring elements.

Interesting. And very fun.

Scott is a Jedi Master of visual communications. Author of the cult classic Understanding Comics, he has a way of making comprehensible deep insights about how we make and share meaning.

I just watched him cruise through a bunch of great ideas in his quest for the durable mutation that helps comics thrive on the Net. As he was talking, I recorded a minute-plus segment in video and put it on YouTube. Click here to see it:



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