When we started Open blogs were barely becoming cool. People still laugh at the word sometimes, and then ask shyly what a blog is.
And it seemed as though there was a great deal of writing on the web about napster, the kazaa network, friendster, or blogs, or even email, or instant messaging; lots of writing about these different little manifestations of the complex idea about interconnection and open-ness that had produced the web, but little exploration of that theoretical, historical base for the whole ‘internet’ project itself.

And there was agreat deal of writing in communication theory about the distortions that become part of communication between individuals. Studying media draws your attention to the fragmentation that can still exist in a widely networked world if people are only connecting with people who hear their information through the same networks, or only opening up to people who confirm what you already think and believe.

When you study communications you can come to feel that a ‘perfect’ communication system, if such a thing were possible, would make peace and good choices possible. With Open Journal and “No One Knows Everything” I want to consider the way ‘open source communication’ - the whole wide, long, distributed, chaotic, disjointed field of open software development and open idea exchange that is taking place in digital spaces where the information becomes endlessly reproducible- the way this process can continue to interact with monopolies of knowledge in all kinds of different fields.

In forest management, and in international policy, and in creative writing, and in computer science the wells of domain-specific knowledge are so deep that it can become difficult to communicate with individuals from other knowledge domains who speak a different technical language. In response to the dangers of specialization, Innis and others suggest interdisciplinarity, and this is what Open Journal is after.

Innis- periodicals, journals, university- any media that combats the tendancy towards one-sidedness- should be useful is producing a balanced and healthy society. One which avoids producing or perpetuating systems that create disequilibrium and inequality, either in the economic status of citizens, or in the health of the environment where they live, or in the range of choices they feel they have for their futures.

I began my thesis curious about the history of open source, which opened out into a larger curiosity about the effect of the cold war, and the world wars on our understanding of communication. And with deep reading in some of the under-studied bits of Innis’s writing I got interested in tracing connections between his histories of monopolies of knowledge and biases of communication, and more recent developments in corporate monopolies.

Interpersonal systems are affected by the technological systems they make use of. The Success of Open Source read against Innis’s histories of monopolies of knowledge, suggests that blinkered, monopolized communication, communication that’s forced to find routes around proprietary knowledge, slows the process of coming toward a wider agreement and better systems. In the worst case, knowledge monopolies reify into such rigid structures that they are brought down by force rather then by a natural balancing out.

By contributing whole systems for coordination, collabortation, networking, media sharing, etc, the “free software movement” not only expands the cooperative feeling of the early hacker days but offers tools that increase the field of possible choices and ideas for not-so-monied individuals and organizations.

With Open Journal I want to keep exploring this idea, and drawing the open source rhetoric and logic, if not into the mainstream then at least into other streams! And at very least into the discourse of media studies, where so much emphasis can be placed on instances when the ideals of good communication fail, insteadof on the systems and process that are successful.

(and the relationship between the university culture and government and corporate culture during the early development of unix and the tc-icp protocol, and the unfolding learning process the idea of open source had undergone. One of the most interesting examples of successful open source behavior and governance is in Linux and it’s leader or ‘benevolent dictator’ Torvalds. )

(The thing about open source software (and media generally) is that it needs to be looked at from very close up- at the level of the code itself, how the layers of software interact, what good protocols are for communication- and from very far away- how the software and the process for producing it interacts with the wider culture and processes of collaboration. This is the work that my own thesis is a small part of.)