The Culture of Open Networks, or: Watch What You Tag
I’m getting into an excellent free pdf called “In the Shade of the Commons,” a publication from the Waag Society, which bills itself as a small group of enthusiastic idealists … with a mission “to make new media available for groups of people that have little access to computers and internet, thus increasing their quality of living.”
They sound like a nice little bunch of information hippies in the Netherlands.
“We value information as a human resource of cultural expression rather than a commodity to be sold to consumers. … We realize that intangible information resources raise the issue of a digital ecology, the need to understand ecosystems constituted by information flows through various media. ” The Vienna Document
In the Shade of the Commons.
They have quite nicely put together a range of material about the fragility of openness in up-and-coming information societies and the need for “intellectual commons.” My favorite part of it so far is the “Vienna Document,” (quoted here) which summarizes a number of thoughtful progressive info-principles.
The lesson I’m taking away is not just that “information should be free” (ZZZzzzzzz…. ), but there is also need for a kind of “humane” network design that leverages openness in ways that are beneficial to more than just a select minority.
For those of us who design software (which is now 99% defined by networked computing), I think this has pretty hip implications.
I think it is brilliant to conceptualize information, as they do, as a product of “intellectual labor.” In this light it becomes clearer how the information that we produce (in the context of, say, social tagging) can be evaluated as a product that can be shaped by the conditions in which it is produced, controlled, consumed and potentially misused.
Really, what is the most profitable thing to do with a massive database of human generated metadata? Exactly how often should we expect The Most Profitable Thing to line up with the most useful thing for real-live human beings?
Anyway, this line of thinking seems especially relevant to me now that I am so frustrated to discover that more than 1000 nptech tags are apparently not shown in some views of del.icio.us. I can’t really blame del.icio.us for whatever is causing this, but it is a reminder that we are trusting our attention data to the databases and algorithms of a corporation with no vested interest in the integrity or proper use of our data. It’s enough to make me want to start googling for an open source alternative … but then there goes my intellectual labor being photographed again …