Invitations and Becomings

Browsing through some bits and pieces, I came across this quote from Mark Choate's book Professional Wikis

"Being propositioned by some young twenty-something about brain-dumping your wisdom into a wiki after having every utterance scrutinized by your superiors for your entire career is like suddenly being told by your wife of twenty years that she thinks you should loosen up a little and get a girlfriend."

It made me laugh - it still does - but the more I think about it, the less I'm satisfied with just laughing. Because there's something serious in there. After all, is it so obvious that we should all loosen up a little, be a little more promiscuous with our knowledge, or cognitive surplus or whatever?

A bunch of connections leap to mind (which is what minds are for, or where they're at, as Bergson might say ... but I digress). First is to a conversation I had recently about the commodification of intellect - or, more accurately, how to make money of, you know, thinking about stuff. The upshot of that conversation was that either you give it away or you charge for it, but you have to make a strong distinction between what you're prepared to give away and what someone is going to have to buy off you. The irony is that this strong distinction means you save the best of your brains for your customers, and the least for your friends - you end up only having deep and meaningfuls with those who are prepared to part with cold, hard, cash. (I'll deliberately avoid any prostitution metaphors here - there's probably nothing that's vaguely like selling your body)

Second is to a novel someone at work mentioned, a future dystopia in which people are rebuked for failing to share their most intimate moments with everyone around them... a world in which each apartment block has a master or mistress aggregator who takes it upon him or herself to direct voyeurist traffic to wherever the most engrossing action is. A microfascist version of Big Brother (would that be "Little Brother" or just "big Brother"?).

The third connection is with a book I've been meaning to read (Pierre Bayard is right: they're always the best): The Corrosion of Character by Richard Sennett is a book that "argues... that the steadily increasing insecurity experienced by workers is making it impossible for them to achieve a moral identity..." (that's what Richard Rorty said, anyway, I can't wait to find out if he's right!)

In this context, the question I think Sennett might ask is: What sort of moral identity is required for a moral wiki community? In fact, can the wiki way get in the way of the value of loyalty? In the end, I think this connection offers the richest vein for exploration, because the bulk of Sennett's work is on urban spaces (see Flesh and Stone, for example), and it may be better to look at the problem as one of architecture - balancing the need to respect personal spaces and loyalties with the need to avoid turning wikis into ghost towns.

I'll need to think more about that, but maybe Huey Lewis was right (about that at least): maybe sometimes it is hip to be square.