Book of the Week: Liberating Voices (2): the Public Domain

Book: Douglas Schuler. Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution. MIT Press, 2008

We continue and conclude our treatment of the book about patterns for social liberation, with a second excerpt on Public Domain Characters, provided by the author Douglas Schuler.

Douglas Schuler:

“Public Domain Characters (John Thomas and Douglas Schuler) is discussed in terms of a shared project. It builds on some of the insights of David Bollier’s pattern, by asserting that certain core factors of humankind’s legacy should not be killed off by unchecked “market forces.” Insofar as our stories represent aspects of our real and imagined selves, from all epochs and regions, when our characters go extinct — or are commandeered by corporations, parts of our collective soul becomes extinct as well. Again, as with the other patterns, this pattern begins with its number, title, introductory graphic (not required), and problem statement.

Problem:

Stories are an ancient and still powerful technique for people to create and share knowledge across temporal and geographical boundaries. Stories may be conceptualized as having three major dimensions: character, plot, and environment. Traditionally societies have used and shared all of these dimensions. Today, in an effort to make the rich and powerful yet richer and more powerful, the natural processes of creating, sharing, and building on stories have been subverted into a process of claiming the world of stories as private property. This limits artistic creativity and stunts the growth of collective wisdom.

The problem statement and context statement are followed by a discussion which offers suggestions and examples:

Civil society should establish a repository of characters who are available to all without charge. This could contain characters from our precorporate past as well as those of more recent vintage, such as Cat-Man (shown in the introductory graphic above), who was raised in Burma by a tigress but abandoned by the corporation that spawned him. Ultimately it could even include those now embargoed behind commercial contracts. Novelists could legally allow the inhabitants of the universes they created to be enlisted in others. Cartoonists such as Matt Groening could donate Homer Simpson or a new type of American everyman complete with voices and descriptions of where he lived and what he liked to do. Frustrated novelists could supply names and descriptions that their colleagues could borrow for their own work. However, it is not only artists and writers who benefit from having access to stories and the characters who inhabit them. Characters can serve as sources of inspiration for all; they can give us hope in dire times and serve as models for ethical, effective, or clever behavior. One use of characters is to serve as a kind of “board of directors” that we can use imaginatively to help look at our problems and proposed solutions from various perspectives. (See “IBM Research: Knowledge Socialization” undated.)

The Disney corporation may be the most prolific borrower of stories (including Aladdin, Atlantis, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Davy Crockett, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Hercules, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Jungle Book, Oliver Twist, Pinocchio, Pocahontas, Robin Hood, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Three Musketeers, Treasure Island, and the Wind in the Willows) from the public domain. The number of stories Disney has added to the humankind’s commonwealth is still at zero (thanks in part to U.S. legislation that granted Mickey Mouse another seventy-five years of service to the corporation).

The solution statement (not presented here) restates the importance of the issue and how the pattern can help solve the problems discussed.

Conclusion and appeal by the author:

Over the next few months we hope to learn how the patterns are being used by people and organizations. This should help us see how to improve the process of using the patterns, via online and offline, facilitated and non-facilitated approaches. We are also transforming the web site to allow people and groups to develop their own pattern languages using existing as well as new patterns and to be able to supplement the patterns with examples and experiences.

We welcome your participation. We’d especially like to see the addition of new patterns that reflect your insights with respect to distributed creativity.

This book concentrates on communication as a crucial arena in the battle for equality and justice. Communication is key to any collective enterprise, and it is for that reason that we invite you to the communication revolution that is already yours to win. Our only request is that you acknowledge and take seriously your role as an active participant. This is a diffuse and distributed movement. It needs leaders and followers, and people in this work frequently shift in and out of both roles. Everybody is needed in this struggle as we work to liberate the voices, and the thoughts and actions, of people around the world as humankind lurches warily and ill prepared into the uncertainties of the century that has just begun.”

References and Links

Alexander, Christoper Ishikawa, Sara and Silverstein, Murray (1977). A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Knowledge Socialization (Undated). Prototypes. http://www.research.ibm.com/knowsoc/prototypes_index.html Schuler, Douglas (2008). Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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