serendipityoucity

Creative Commons is about many things including

laying the infrastructure ground work for this new kind of culture, a new kind of folk culture…

it is this bridge to this future you have to move away from thinking about content to thinking about communities, communities that develop around content, and the sharing that the licenses allows communities to come together…

a physical commons is like a park where anyone can enter equally, the commons with intellectual works is actually much freer…

it really is going to be the pillar for communications between people for cultural exchange

a space for more speech more free expression and that is the kind of commons the creative commons is trying to create.

Excerpts transcribed by moi from the CC A Shared Culture Video.  The video is part of the CC fundraiser.

I watched the video serendipitously after reading a great paper by  Yola Georgiadou,  and Vincent Homburg, 2008, The Argumentative Structure of Spatial Data Infrastructure Initiatives in America and Africa yesterday.  The paper was about how

policy, including technology policy, is made of language. Politicians, bureaucrats, and consultants use language to shape action and ways of thinking by fabricating rules that enable individuals to deal with unresolvable contradictions of everyday life.

The CC video is an aesthetic bricollage of moving images and narrative loaded with language invoking physical metaphors to make tangible the intangible world of creative ideas.  Geougiardou and Homburg

analyze[d] and critically examine[d] the myths that underlie Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives as they mutate while traveling from distant think tanks to various real world settings (2008:32) and

how myths become domesticated across space and time (2008:34)

They looked at how myths are invoked, what myths represent, how they contribute to established bases of meaning and experiences and they listed some recurrent features of myths.

• Myths are ubiquitous,
• they rest on soft data – selectively drawn,
• they use soft logic – persuasively drawn,
  
• and they win over competing ideas by persuasion in communication processes rather than hard evidence.
• Myths can be contradictory and unstable – susceptible to fashion, style and fads, 
• they are inclusive of metaphors and the correct choice of metaphor often taps into or builds shared modes of thinking; 
  
• inclusive of metaphors that use imagery of physical infrastructures. 
• Myths are used in the development of policy,
• they are inseparable from the context within which they have been created, used, interpreted,and they are
  
• imitated and copied between contexts, or from authoritative templates, while also
  
• being repeated in new contexts which depends on institutional contexts, depending on which actors are privileged to speak, and the timing of the speech.   
• The authors introduced Sahlin-Anderson (2008:34) two patterns on how myths are imitated and related to the repetition of myth is the imitation of ideas and practices in different contexts:
  

• 1) imitative behaviour is normalized in goals and technologies which are ambiguous,
  
• 2) interests of international bodies as a source of held beliefs about what uses and technologies are appropriate

The A shared culture video is a classic example of an artifact loaded with myths, and metaphors assembled & designed specifically to meet the CC objectives of changing policies regarding creative content and to make the uptake of this complex idea easy, immitatable, memorable and accessible to ensure it gets repeated. It also seems to contain all the recurrent features listed in the paper.  Jesse Dylan’s video was very clever indeed!  I hope it helps sell the idea and raises some funds for the project.  Myths and metaphors are most persuasive.

Via: hugmacguire.net