Taking the long view
May 25, 2006 on 9:01 pm | In Uncategorized | 2 CommentsI read this great Henry Jenkins piece in which he argues that culture was always made by the people for the people. Check out this quote:
As more and more amateur works have entered into circulation via the Web, the result has been a turn back toward a more folk-culture understanding of creativity. Historically, our culture evolved through a collective process of collaboration and elaboration. Folktales, legends, myths and ballads were built up over time as people added elements that made them more meaningful to their own contexts. The Industrial Revolution resulted in the privatization of culture and the emergence of a concept of intellectual property that assumes that cultural value originates from the original contributions of individual authors.
In practice, of course, any act of cultural creation builds on what has come before, borrowing genre conventions and cultural archetypes, if nothing else. The ability of corporations to control their “intellectual property” has had a devastating impact upon the production and circulation of cultural materials, meaning that the general population has come to see themselves primarily as consumers of — rather than participants within — their culture. The mass production of culture has largely displaced the old folk culture, but we have lost the possibility for cultural myths to accrue new meanings and associations over time, resulting in single authorized versions (or at best, corporately controlled efforts to rewrite and ‘update’ the myths of our popular heroes). Our emotional and social investments in culture have not shifted, but new structures of ownership diminish our ability to participate in the creation and interpretation of that culture.
I believe he might be on to something and these days technology is empowering people to be more creative and expressive again, which is what this is all about. Interesting that when one talks about these things it often seems futuristic yet this draws a circle that spans way into the past.
The future of social software
May 25, 2006 on 3:56 pm | In Uncategorized | 1 CommentOur world is in 3D and I believe that the future of social software is too.
As Gibson writes, Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you can cruise around and have a grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated.
This may sound more like a video game than social software, but multiplayer games and virtual worlds like Second Life show us best where social software is headed.