Textual Productivity

Recently, Steven Berlin Johnson gave a talk at Columbia referencing “commonplacing.”

"Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing.

"Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities"

Actually, I feel more akin to his “early modern” readers as I jump from websites to journal articles to Twitter (every thing but FB).

Nonetheless, seeing reading and writing as “inseparable activities” reminded me of Lawrence Lessig (and possibly others before him) talking about our digital Read-Write culture. It seems to me that Jefferson, Milton, Bacon, and Locke were using “commonplacing” to reflect and extend on the issues they encountered, not unlike mash-ups today.

However, in comments that followed Johnson’s blog posting of the talk, some took issue with equating “commonplacing” with cut-and-paste. Johnson responded, in part:

What I was trying to say is that commonplacing shows that re-arranging bits of text out of context, from different authors, creates a new kind of value that is different from the original value of the text…it's true that the way blogs and tweets work is far less studious and attentive than John Locke was with his commonplace book, but it's just as important to point out that Locke's book was exclusively a private affair: whatever he captured went into his mind alone, whereas the blogger can now circulate his discoveries through the minds of thousands. Not the same thing, by any means, but valuable in a different way.

Yes, in deed, some people just cut-and-paste without reflecting--and with out appropriate attribution. Nonetheless, the original ideas get spread further than they might have otherwise.

In my mind, the key issue is “textual productivity.” What’s missing in discussion of IP protection and “walled gardens” is the value created by the flow. In stark terms, if a text, song or image must stay frozen (even though in digital form they are no longer subject to the laws of physics), then the value created is limited. This is the argument (as I see it) behind Creative Commons and business models that produce platforms for co-creation.

Johnson was giving a talk on journalism; perhaps, a more direct analogy for “commonplacing” can be found in open source—open software, open hardware, open universities (course ware). Open platforms provide a nurturing environment for co-creation and, therefore, innovation.

Society benefits when value is created. Our long term interest should favor increase the velocity of this flow. 

WSJ coverage of same talk

Photo credit www.stevenberlinjohnson.com