Argomenti trattati: copyright, cyberspace, ipertesti, comunicazione, network
4. ownership of knowledge in cyberspace
In this context, then, what might the second shift, from print to the electronic space afforded by word processing, computer conferencing, and hypertext, do to our sense of the ownership of knowledge?
One of the most important features of typography, if we believe McLuhan and his followers, is metaphorical. Here we are not talking about the investigator's use of metaphor to extend the past into the future, the metaphor that Heim is so reluctant to pursue. We are talking about an entire culture's metaphorical transfer of characteristics of its communications medium to other aspects of the culture. McLuhan suggests, for instance, that the reproduction of texts from straight rows of exactly repeatable, individually meaningless units of type is an amazingly close analogue of, and perhaps the model for, the specialized industrial society in which an entire economy is assembled out of small bits of individually owned private property--including intellectual property. These sorts of speculation can be taken to the giddy heights of unprovable assertion that McLuhan is justly derided for. Yet if we accept provisionally that the medium can sometimes be the metaphor, we can perhaps learn something about the effects of the second transformation by looking at the metaphorical ways in which it allows us to conceptualize knowledge.
One of the most important ways in which the electronic metaphor operates is not so much to change what writers do when they build knowledge, but rather to make this process more immediately and more obviously visible through the types of operations which it allows and the physical steps which the writer goes through. It has, after all, been observed for some time that the myth of the individual discoverer of knowledge is exactly that--a myth. Perhaps the best summary of this literature is Karen Burke LeFevre's Invention as a Social Act (1987), a work that brings together accounts of collaborative invention from postmodern literary theory, language philosophy and social psychology to argue for a new emphasis on collaboration by writing teachers. One of the most important of these sources is Michel Foucault:
[Foucault] describes the beginning of a discourse as a re-emergence into an ongoing, never-ending process: "At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it.... There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path--a slender gap--the point of its possible disappearance." Elaborating on this perspective, one may come to regard discourse not as an isolated event, but rather a constant potentiality that is occasionally evidenced in speech or writing....
Such perspectives suggest that traditional views of an event or act have been misleading when they have presumed that the individual unit--a speech or a written text, an individual hero, a particular battle or discovery--is clearly separable from a larger, continuing force or stream of events in which it participates. For similar reasons Jacques Derrida has criticized literary theories that attempt to explain the meaning of a text apart from other texts that precede and follow it. (p. 41-42)
Sociologists of science support this conception of knowledge as communal rather than individual. Diana Crane's seminal study Invisible Colleges ( 1972), for instance, documents the extent to which ideas are nourished and developed through networks of interaction among scientists who may come from many different "official" disciplines but who form a powerful social group around a common problem. Yet the print technology through which this communally-developed knowledge is typically delivered--distanced, fossilized, abstracted from the network of interconnected minds that formed it--continually enforces the opposite message. The metaphorical meaning of print technology is isolation, not communality. In particular, the ability to claim one's particular share of the intertextual web and stamp it with one's own name--an ability made possible by the same printing press that made widespread cumulation of knowledge possible as well--suggests that knowledge is individually owned.
I believe that computer mediated communication provides a totally different metaphorical message, one that can take theories of collaborative knowledge out of the realm of language philosophy and stamp them indelibly in the consciousness of the entire society. Let us begin by looking at what is now the most mundane aspect of computer-mediated communication, word processing. Remember that one of the most important psychological effects of writing in general and the printing press in particular is the fossilization of text as an exteriorized object. However, composing on a word processor divides the production of the text into two distinct stages. Ultimately the text issues in a final stage of more or less complete closure, once a "final" draft is published in a hard codex. But the word processor greatly extends the fluid stage of text, abolishing the sense of discrete drafts and smaller divisible units (pages) and turning the text into a long continuous document, a scroll examined through a twenty-five line sliding window. Although this small window can be a problem for students who cannot always visualize the entire text as a unit (see for instance Richard Collier, "The Word Processor and Revision Strategies," 1983), expert writers generally lose their dependence on what they can see on the screen and internalize the sense of a text that exists in an infinitely mutable state. Even the printout, apparently hard and immutable, comes to be seen as purely provisional, for a new one incorporating changes can be produced at whim.
A key aspect of this form of text is that it can easily be recombined with other texts. Skilled writers who use word processors are well aware of how often they cannibalize their own older texts for quotations, well-turned paragraphs, ideas cut out of drafts and saved for future works in which they might be more appropriate. But this effect does not become truly significant until the writer's own text begins to interact with other sources of text available on-line. The word processor is often seen as a preliminary stage of conferencing, for posted text is often prepared initially on some kind of word processor (whether PC or mainframe editor). However, this metaphor can be reversed: the word processor is coming to be fed by online information as much as the reverse. As other sources of text become available in machine-readable format--texts received through electronic conferences and on-line publications, texts downloaded from databases, et cetera--the awareness of intertextuality that LeFevre speaks of becomes increasingly objectified, its implications increasingly unmistakable. The sliding together of texts in the electronic writing space, texts no longer available as discrete units but as continuous fields of ideas and information, is so much easier in electronic space-- not just physically easier but psychologically more natural-- that it is significantly more effort to keep the ownership of the ideas separate.
Intertextuality,
once a philosophical concept,
is becoming a way of life.
When information becomes disseminated electronically, not only pretexts but also posttexts begin to slide more and more fluidly into the text as the author integrates the comments of others into the evolving document. As Hiltz and Turoff put it in The Network Nation (1978),
The distinction between a draft, preprint, publication or reprint now turns into the same "paper" or set of information, merely modified by the author as he or she builds on the comments from the readership. (p.276)
Ultimately the distinctions between authors and documents may break down completely. Hiltz and Turoffseparate sections of their book The Network Nation with fanciful excerpts from a future "Boshwash Times"; one of these predicts just such a breakdown of individual authorship under the pressure of computer mediated collaboration:
A group of 57 social and information scientists today shared the Nobel Prize in economics, while 43 physicists and scholars in other disciplines captured the prize in physics.... When the first such collective prize was announced eight years ago, the committee tried to convince the group involved to name the two or three of its members who were the most responsible for the theory developed. However, the group insisted that this was impossible. Dr. Andrea Turoff, spokesperson for the collective, explained "We were engaged in what we call a 'synologue'--a process in which the synthesis of the dialogue stimulated by the group process creates something that would not be possible otherwise." (pp. 464-65)
In short, with electronic communication the notion of the static and individually owned text dissolves back into the communally performed fluidity of the oral culture. When the materials of which they are constructed are available in machine-readable form, document assembly--a very telling neologism--becomes analogous to the oral poet boilerplating stock phrases and epithets into familiar plots, reaching into the previously existing network of epic knowledge to create a new instantiation of knowledge that has been in the public domain from before his birth (see Bolter, WritingSpace, 1991). In the electronic world as in the oral, the latent intertextuality of print is raised to consciousness: it becomes more obvious that originality lies not so much in the individual creation of elements as in the performance of the whole composition.
There is boilerplating and boilerplating, of course. As he weaves his stories, the oral storyteller is deeply embedded in a rhetorical and cultural context. His audience is physically before him, and he assembles his stories in a close engagement with both that audience and his characters, the tribal ground out of which his figure arises. "The individual's reaction is not expressed as simply individual or 'subjective' but rather as encased in the communal reaction, the communal 'soul"' (Ong, 1982, p. 46). On the other hand, certain kinds of machine boilerplating, augmented by such mnemonic aids as CDRom's containing thousands of form letters and mail-merge programs with which to distribute them blindly, can become so totally divorced from rhetorical occasion that they cease to have any connection with human knowledge whatsoever (Cragg, "The Technologizing of Rhetoric," 1991 ) . But a process is best defined not by its pathological extremes but by the central uses to which a society puts it. When used by skilled writers who are writing in a rhetorical context, not just recopying formulae in a vacuum, the relatively easy cut-and-paste embedding of chunks of prose from various sources can become an important operational metaphor of intertextual connections.
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