Pathways Project

Contributions

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:57:09 Z

Contributions

This section of the Pathways Project site is intended as a forum for brief contributions that in some fashion treat its central focus on OT-IT connections and analogies. Users are welcome to add their observations, which will be filtered for suitability.

Potential contributions are best sent via e-mail to
pathwaysproject@missouri.edu

Presently available contributions are listed below:
Décima and the Internet

EWords

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:44:52 Z

eWords

This node is presently under construction.

URL, other codes (AI)

For Book Readers Only

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:38:37 Z

For Book Readers Only

Disclaimer

This node was created to serve as the introduction to Pathways of the Mind, the book associated with the Pathways Project. For that purpose it was entitled “Culture Shock” to emphasize the disorientation of abandoning the default medium of the book in order to grasp the dynamics of alternate media—specifically OT and IT. I include it here, renamed as “For Book Readers Only,” as an example of tAgora-speak that doesn’t and can’t translate to the eAgora.

The book in your hands

You’ve picked up this book, gently cradling it in your hands as you’ve done so many times throughout your life in so many different situations. It’s a cozy, familiar action, essentially a reflex, as you prepare to set sail through the smooth, silent seas of letters, words, lines, paragraphs, pages, and chapters. Everything lies before you in expectable sequence, reassuringly formatted and configured. Even the artifact itself comes complete with trusty features – a title embedded in an eye-catching design; back-cover blurbs that tend toward hyperbole; the smooth, cool feel of the pages as you turn them one by one. In ways that you don’t consciously register, the book provides a powerful and uniquely welcome frame of reference. You’re ensconced on the sofa, the light’s adjusted, the cup of tea’s in place, peace reigns. You’re about to re-enter a world apart, a world you’ve visited before and long to revisit.

Comfortable, then? Well, caveat lector: let the reader beware! This particular book doesn’t fit the mold; in fact, it seeks to expose the mold as an ideology we’ve adopted, a tacit compromise we’ve made with a messier and more complex reality. For that reason it’s a book more likely to ennervate than entertain, at least until you get used to how it works. Instead of the dependable calm that dependably proceeds from opening the dependably put-together artifact, what awaits you is, frankly, an unsettling experience. You may undergo a kind of culture shock, not so different from the disorientation we feel when we’re suddenly immersed in a foreign society with language and customs far from our own. And no apologies: Pathways of the Mind is intended to generate just that kind of disquiet.

Why? Because we’ll be doing nothing less fundamental than challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that they entail. We’ll be addressing the very nature of text and asking whether that’s all there is to communication. Worse yet, perhaps, we’ll be finding that there is indeed much, much more that we’ve made a cultural habit of ignoring. We’ll learn that there are large, complex, wholly viable, alternative worlds of media-technology out there – if only we’re willing to explore, to think outside the usual, culturally constructed categories. We’ll learn that oral tradition and internet technology support thinking and creating and communicating in ways that books can’t match. And we’ll find that OT and IT work in strikingly similar fashion, offering us networks to navigate, webs to potentials that we will be a position to activate. And that won’t be a comfortable experience, at least initially. Not at all.

A way out… if you want one

Too much to ask? Well, there’s a way out, of course, a strategy to avoid the discomfort. We can simply choose not to think outside the book – not to jump off the dock – and thus avoid the reshuffling of our cognitive categories that the Pathways Project demands. The sun will still rise in the east and set in the west, the twin illusions of object and stasis will remain (artificially) in force, and our hard-won and desperately held convictions about the certainty, permanence, and primacy of the book and page will rest undisturbed. And perhaps there’s a reasonable argument for doing just that. Having labored since Gutenberg to convert knowledge, art, and ideas to an item-based economy, are we now to throw away centuries of hard-won victories? Now that we’ve developed this marvelous prosthesis to help us manage the slippage that threatens to undo communication at every turn, are we now to discard it in favor of a broader view we can’t yet appreciate and may not be able to control? Maybe, given all that texts have meant and continue to mean to myriad readers, including you and me, that’s an irresponsible and indefensible act. Maybe we should remain on the dock. Maybe we should just close this book and return it to the shelf.

Opportunities ahead

But that would be a mistake, and a missed opportunity. For the process ahead also promises to be exciting and rewarding, as long as we’re willing to honestly confront some basic, unexamined assumptions and preconceived notions. That’s the catch, of course: in order to make our way through the ideas housed within this book and networked within the Pathways Project in general, we’re going to have to jump off the end of that proverbial dock and learn how to swim in a new and different environment. Only by relinquishing the relative safety of the ideology of the text can we start to understand how major media-types – oral tradition, internet technology, and, yes, the book as well – really function. Only then can we then reorient ourselves and see how human communication actually works from a pluralistic, informed perspective. Only by first letting go can we recalibrate our thinking.

Culture shock can lead to acculturation.

If you’re ready to proceed, please turn the page – or click on Welcome to the Pathways Project – and start your journey.

Home Page

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:54:42 Z

Welcome to the Pathways Project

The major purpose of the Pathways Project is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the internet.

Despite superficial differences, both technologies are radically alike in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes, not on “What?” but on “How do I get there?” In contrast to the fixed spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral tradition and the internet mime the way we think by processing along pathways within a network. In both media it’s pathways – not things – that matter.

The Pathways Project consists of a website and a freestanding book, Pathways of the Mind: Oral Tradition and the Internet. The website serves as the focal point for a suite of media that will include a network of linked topics (or nodes), suggested reading-routes through those nodes (linkmaps), audio and video eCompanions, multimedia eEditions, a research data-base, and a moderated forum for user contributions.

Getting Started

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:18:11 Z

Getting started: How to Surf the Pathways Project

The multimedia project

What you’re scrolling through on your desktop or holding in your hands is in some ways a text, but it’s also a great deal more than that. The Pathways Project departs from a stand-alone, linear text in two radical ways.

First, the online version of the Pathways Project consists of a network of linked nodes that presents the contents of the book and adds many items and opportunities that books just can’t support.

Second, even the brick-and-mortar book, entitled Pathways of the Mind, is not simply a conventional text. It’s a morphing book, capable of being read in innumerable ways.

In other words, you can surf the online facility or you can “read” the book or, but in either case your experience will differ from the usual text-consuming scenario. More about those two options in a moment, but first a word about the general thesis of the Pathways Project.

The homology

The goal of the Project is to explain and illustrate a central thesis—namely, that humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies, oral tradition and the internet (abbreviated here as OT and IT), are fundamentally alike. Hardly identical, of course, but surprisingly similar in their structure and dynamics.

And how are they alike? Both media depend not on static products but on continuous processes, not on stationary points but on vectors with direction and magnitude, not on “What?” but on
“How do I get there?” In contrast to the fixed, spatial linearity of the conventional page and the book, the twin technologies of OT and IT mime the way we think—by navigating along pathways within an interactive network.

In both cases, then, it’s pathways—and not things—that matter. OT and IT don’t operate by spatializing, sequencing, or objectifying. They don’t fossilize ideas into free-standing museum exhibits, as books typically do. Instead, they invite active participation and support a rich diversity of individual, one-time-only experiences. In place of the single, predetermined route typical of texts, they offer myriad different routes for exploration by engaging each user in nothing less than co-creating his or her own reality.

This built-in, rule-governed variability marks the crucial difference between the closed arena of a textual script—what we’ll be calling the tAgora—and the open, multiform environment of oral tradition and the electronic world of the internet—the oAgora and eAgora, respectively. Because of their inherent dynamics, both OT and IT are always in flux; they remain open, emergent, and forever under construction rather than closed, discrete, and complete.

Surfing the wiki

Instead of wrestling with the built-in barriers of book technology and the tAgora, the online facility allows you to fashion a unique experience of its assets by choosing among practically innumerable sets of pathways. Instead of interpreting a monolithic text, you yourself mold the wiki’s malleable contents into a co-created reality. You are an active participant in charge of a process: you set the agenda and prescribe the itinerary. And your experience happens—actually takes living shape—even as you click through the network.

Options

Here are four ways you can proceed:

1. Via the default method: “straight through”
The Pathways Project wiki can be read straight through, so to speak, by following the order given in the Full Table of Contents in the righthand menu-bar. Mirroring the page-turning sequence of Pathways of the Mind (itself only one choice among many), this order amounts to merely one of many potential routes through the network.

2. Via the three principal media environments
Another way surf the wiki is to focus on one of the three principal media environments—the oAgora, tAgora, and eAgora—that lie at the heart of the OT-IT thesis and at the foundation of the Pathways Project as a whole.

The oAgora is the word-marketplace for oral tradition, the “place” where OT is performed for audiences. It is, as demonstrated elsewhere, humankind’s oldest and most pervasive communications technology. The tAgora, next in historical succession, names the communications technology that involves the creation of texts as cognitive prostheses for thinking and exchanging ideas. The eAgora, or electronic marketplace, is of course the virtual world of the internet and digital media. Today these technologies co-exist in a complex array of media channels, a situation that the Pathways Project aims to represent as well as explain.

After starting with one or more of these three major ideas, you can then proceed from a basic frame of reference to any other part of the wiki. (One radical advantage of this eTool is that you’re offered numerous opportunities to explore related links at any and all points in your “reading”.) Note that links to the three principal media environments are continuously available in the top menu-bar as you surf.

3. Via linkmaps
Linkmaps amount to suggested routes through the wiki network, particular sequences of ePathways that I have clicked through and found illuminating in one way or another. An example is the eWorld, a linkmap of nodes that leads from “Leapfrogging the text” to “The Museum of Verbal Art” to “The Irony of Proteus” to “Resynchronizing the event” to “Systems versus things.” En route the surfer will have an opportunity to think about a textless world, the new-media landscape for literature and oral tradition, an ancient Greek myth of transformation, the re-creation of performance events, and communication without “things.” What’s more, the entire itinerary revolves around the core OT/IT thesis of the Pathways Project.

Potential surfers may opt to follow this or some other predesignated pattern (any of which they can always exit at any point, of course). Or they may choose to strike out on their own, fashioning their own experiences at every juncture—effectively creating their own linkmaps as they go. The freedom to explore and to construe is nearly absolute, and all we ask in return is that surfers consider the option of contributing their newly discovered itineraries to the Pathways Project archive of linkmaps as possible “guidebooks” for future users.

4. Via branches
All topic nodes contain multiple branches, links that allow navigation to other nodes related in some fashion to the particular idea under under discussion. As with other aspects of the online facility, the choice rests with the surfer, who may decide to keep on reading past the branch or to “depart” the present topic node for another destination. Of course, the whole point of the online digital configuration is to erase the tAgora notion of departure and to image the pathways of OT and IT.

“Reading” the morphing book

Contents

The contents of Pathways of the Mind, the brick-and-mortar aspect of the Pathways Project, consists of items that are eligible for exchange within the tAgora, plus a few unusual options. The book contains all of the node-texts that composed and posted as of its date of issue, its copyright date. Of course, it cannot house any subsequent additions unless it proceeds to a second edition, which would in turn involve a sequel sort of limitation. Books can’t remain open-ended or under construction (as OT and IT can and must).

Options

Unlike conventional books, Pathways of the Mind is built and intended to be “read” in multiple, alternate ways. Of course, a book is not a website. But to the limited degree that the medium allows, you will be able to “sort” your experience according to facsimiles of the four reading strategies available in the online wiki:

1. Via the default method: “straight through”

You can opt to march straight through from the opening page to the last, like a novel-reader tracking the story as it unfolds according to a singular, fixed blueprint. This is basically the default logic of the tAgora, but without the customary hierarchy of chapters, sections, and other book-matrices that act as cognitive and rhetorical support for the reading process. As in the wiki, the “straight through” order is merely alphabetical, and is probably best likened to reading page after page of definitions in a dictionary. Each of the parts is (hopefully) interesting and helpful, but their assembly into a coherent whole is in large part the reader’s responsibility.

2. Via the three principal media environments

Or you can read according to any of the three principal media environments—the oAgora, tAgora, or eAgora—by using the page numbers that appear like a print menu-bar on every page of the book. Once you reach your chosen agora, more options await you within that section. You’ll need to flip back and forth in uncustomary (because non-linear) ways, but you will be able to manufacture a reasonable facsimile of what the wiki offers along these lines. It’s an awkward repurposing of tAgora technology, but that very awkwardness exposes the fundamental assumptions of the book-and-page medium.

3. Via linkmaps

You can decide to use one or more of the linkmaps that are also available in the volume’s opening pages, a set of predesignated itineraries that are offered as alternate viable routes from through the Pathways Project contents. Of course, you won’t be able to exit and re-enter the prescribed sequences as easily as in the wiki, but such is the nature of oAgora strategies deployed non-natively within the tAgora. There aren’t any “back” buttons and clickable links in the book.

4. Via branches

You can exercise any of myriad options to explore the branches that are contained within each node, but here the book really struggles to morph acceptably. It’s inconvenient to interrupt the linear page-to-page logic too often if you can’t immediately return to your point of departure with a click. More tellingly, all those branches that lead to external media-rich sites are dead; audio, video, and the like can’t be forced between two covers. You can explore branches with a mouse in one hand and the paperback in the other, of course, but there are limits to how far the book itself can morph to imitate eAgora (and oAgora) technology.

Experimental limitations

Naturally, the inter-agora experiment can go only so far. We can’t wholly retool book technology and force it to become something it isn’t. Pages, paragraphs, chapters, and other dimensions of order-by-sequence constitute a cognitive rhetoric seated deep in our text-disposed psyches, so deep that it functions as automatically and invisibly as a computer’s operating system, well below the level of conscious awareness. Like it or not, our thinking and communication process has been defaulted—tDefaulted, in fact.

But to the extent that the medium of texts can support more than the usual slate of textual activities—and that’s precisely the experiment we’re conducting with Pathways of the Mind —you can “click through” this morphing book, charting your own idiosyncratic route as you go. No “hard” text can ever entirely simulate OT or IT, of course; it may morph to an extent, but it’s still a book. If suggestively constructed, however, it can accomplish two related goals. It can remind us how those non-linear, participatory technologies work even as it reveals the inherent conditions of exchange within the tAgora marketplace.

Linkmaps

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:05:00 Z

This node is presently under construction.

Audience Critique

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:50:17 Z

Audience critique

Most of our elite contemporary forms of performance—drama, classical music concerts, ballet, opera, formal poetry readings, and so on—call for polite, narrowly defined participation by audiences. We are encouraged to applaud, and perhaps allowed to quietly express our disapproval, only after the performance has finished. To interrupt an ongoing event with audible comments or visible responses is considered rude and inappropriate; in the context of that kind of performance arena, such actions are unidiomatic.

The protocol is often radically different in the oAgora. Of course there are some forms of OT that demand rapt silence and careful observance of ritual protocols, but there are also a great many varieties that license or even require real-time contribution and intervention.

Working together

One case in point is slam poetry, which fosters a continuous, usually positive interaction between performing poets and their audiences as part of the ongoing event. Another is Basque bertsolaritza, a form of contest poetry in which mass audiences who know the rules for extemporaneous composition actually sing the last few lines of never-before-composed oral poems along with their composers. In a vital sense both OT groups are collectively surfing the pathways of a living network, co-creating the performed poem. The interactions are positive and mutually reinforcing. Everyone is playing by the accepted rules of the oAgora.

Disapproval

But what about the negative side of things—criticism? What about the equivalent of the morning-after reviews of Broadway plays that mercilessly pan the production? Or critics’ scathing indictments of an opera, ballet, or symphony performance? Is there any outlet in the oAgora for audiences to disapprove or at least to query what the performer or group is doing?

One answer comes from Matija Murko, a Slovenian scholar and fieldworker who studied then-thriving South Slavic oral epic traditions in the early decades of the twentieth century and offers us this amusing firsthand report:

The audience listens to the singer with maximum attention, interest, and sympathy for the heroes, and is sometimes extremely moved by the whole of a poem or by certain episodes. During pauses for rest, the members of the audience make various remarks, question the singer, and critique him, to which criticism he does not fail to respond. One time I reproached a singer for having given a favorite Moslem hero, Hrnjica Mujo, four brothers instead of the two he is credited with elsewhere; he retorted in a bitter tone: “That’s how another told it to me; I wasn’t there when they were born!” There is one mode of criticism that does not lack originality: when the singer is absent during a pause for rest, someone greases the strings and the bow of his instrument with tallow, which makes it impossible for him to continue¹.

It’s one thing to feel the sting of a bad review, quite another to have your string greased!

Footnote

¹ Matija Murko, “The Singers and their Epic Songs,” trans. John Miles Foley, Oral Tradition, 5 (1990): 122.

Open Source OT

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:38:22 Z

Open-Source OT

Your grandmother’s desk?

It wasn’t so long ago that oral tradition was understood as a static inheritance, something like your grandmother’s desk that traversed the generations relatively inert until it reached you. Your task was then to preserve it: to maintain the beloved inheritance in the best shape possible for handing on to the next generation. “Tradition” in this sense was a monolith, an item whose value derived from its (perceived) immutability, its capacity for resisting change, its essential thing-ness.

Although this notion comfortably fits our cultural fantasy of absolute objectivity and stasis, applying it to oral tradition amounts to “bookifying” a bookless phenomenon. After all, OT depends for its very existence and continued viability not on fossilization but on the restless dynamic of rule-governed change. That is, OT continuity and sustainability stem not from fixation but from its polar opposite: innovation within a system available in the public domain. In this sense tradition means, first and foremost, a generative mix of pliability and pattern. It means a process rather than a product, a living and evolving entity rather than your grandmother’s desk – however precious and irreplaceable that family-honored antique might be.

To illustrate this reality of continuity-via-innovation, and to provide another perspective on the OT-IT congruence that is the fundamental subject of the Pathways Project in general, let me propose an IT-to-OT “translation.” In the present node I’ll be attempting to convert an eAgora charter document – the Open Source Definition of software (OSD) – into the cognate language of the oAgora. In what follows we’ll be considering how the ten guidelines of the OSD also speak directly and importantly to the equally Open Source phenomenon of oral tradition.

Hopefully, this translation will help shed light on all three agoras and their importance for understanding the dynamic correspondence among media-technologies.

Two preliminaries

Register = Source code
At the basis of this IT-to-OT translation lies a fundamental parallel between IT source code and OT register. Just as the specialized language of the oAgora is a particular “way of speaking” that supports particular expressive tasks, so software, the specialized language of the eAgora, amounts to a particular “way of programming” that supports specific cyber-tasks. In both cases the register/source code serves as the instrument or vehicle for building myriad possible products. Both vehicles amount to plastic and yet patterned media used by the performer/programmer to create and to innovate. In both cases we are dealing with processes that profit from being open, collective, and amenable to rule-governed change. Registers and source code are alike in being productively protean.

Translating the OSD for OT
The Introduction to the OSD cautions that “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.” In OT terms, we could translate as follows: it isn’t enough simply to expose audiences and other performers to the particular way of speaking, or register, that performers and audiences use to negotiate the performance. Such access is the crucial starting-point, of course, but only that. Other provisions must follow if OT is truly to be regarded as open source. We can derive those provisions by analogy to the ten OSD stipulations, as follows.

1. Free redistribution

The OSD mandates that a software license must not restrict any party from transferring software to any other party, without royalty or other fee. The rationale explains that this requirement “eliminate[s] the temptation to throw away many long-term gains in order to make a few short-term dollars,” and that failure to redistribute freely will generate “lots of pressure for cooperators to defect.” The logic is plain – conventional IT vending segregates rather than aggregates contributors to the collective software project. It sets innovators competitively against one another and constrains joint creativity by diminishing the energy of the larger group and foreclosing on its time for development. And all for the sake of a short-term result that can never achieve the long-term gain and stability that open source innovation fosters.

Correspondingly, and here our translation begins, OT depends for its viability on free distribution among its creative constituency (subject to the constraints of individual cultural patterns, of course). If there are commercial or other barriers erected to impede the flow and continuity of the innovative process, then the T effectively disappears from OT: it may be oral, but the continuity and ongoingness of tradition will fade.

Examples of the crucial importance of free distribution abound. Xhosa and Zulu praise-poets from South Africa must be able to draw on the living resource of their tradition as they construct individually tailored “résumés” for tribal chiefs.[1] Kaqchikel-speaking storytellers from Guatemala must be able to pass their tales along a continuous human chain that stretches from the distant past through the present and into the future.[2] Mongolian epic singers must be able to narrate the particular cycle-chapter they happen to be performing on this occasion, and at the same time to imply other characters, stories, and events from the hugely larger Gesar and Janggar oral epic repositories.[3]

Without this kind of free distribution – from one performer to the next, between performers and audiences, and over centuries and myriad different locales – OT becomes (at best) an item, an artifact. Singular and self-contained, perhaps, but an evolutionary dead-end. What once were pathways become cul-de-sacs.

2. Source code

The OSD calls for all programs to be distributed “in source code as well as compiled form” in order to facilitate modification, to empower users to innovate as they wish and need to do (and to foster subsequent acts of innovation by others).

Compare the distribution of OT via the face-to-face, emergent situation of actual performance (that is, in source code) versus its transmission as a reduced, fossilized record in a published anthology or other paper edition (the compiled form). As the static, spatialized texts with which we’re so familiar and comfortable, paper editions present a digestible tAgora version of OT. Ready to go and ready to use, this version unquestionably “works,” at least according to the built-in expectations associated with the our default agora. But can the compiled form of OT – the book – foster exchange, modification, and innovation among its users? Is it truly open?

Along with its superficial convenience, the (unrealistically) tidy textual edition reveals little or none of its source code: nothing of the living, morphing phenomenon as we know it in the oAgora. We entirely miss the many levels of sound and intonation, rhythm, gesture, vocal and instrumental music, visual signals, audience interaction, and other codes that make up the OT register. From the point of view of OT participants seeking to use and build on the living reality of performance, and here I include both other potential performers and all potential audience members, the way is blocked by their lack of access to the source code. Fluency in the compositional idiom – the ability to make and remake – is an impossible achievement if all we can experience is the superficial, radically reduced reflection we find in the textual edition.

eEditions, whose goal is the resynchronizing of the oral performance by electronically linking audio or video, transcription, translation, and contextual materials in an interactive whole, can’t ever substitute for actually “being there” as a member of the original audience. But at least they can offer access to some of the source code, representing the performance not as a finite series of static pages (the compiled form) but as the multidimensional, emergent phenomenon it once was and, to a degree, still can be.

3. Derived works

According to the OSD, a software license “must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.” That is, the IT license that accompanies the program must explicitly permit retooling by users to foster values central to the open source movement: “independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection.”

Although the OT license in question is implicit rather than explicit (though no less binding because it hasn’t been formalized in tAgora terms), oral tradition certainly follows this same model for “derived works.” The key feature here is to avoid any and all barriers to recomposition and reperformance, to insure that transmission through evolution doesn’t reach a dead-end, and thus to guarantee as far as possible that multiple generations of OTs will be born, thrive, and engender subsequent generations.

By analogy to the OSD, every OT performance amounts to one individual’s independent peer review of previous performances. Likewise, every performance is peer-reviewed by each of the audience members—sometimes with not-so-subtle results. Anything less than completely unfettered evaluation and remaking, followed by free distribution of the “derivative” performance on the same terms as its predecessors, will hinder “rapid evolution” in the oAgora. In the cases of both OT and IT, we should add, evolution will not be limited to a single direction or outcome but will organically proceed in many different directions with correspondingly diverse outcomes. Multiple pathways inherently mean multiple realizations. While natural selection may accord special prominence to a particular performer or story, for example, the overall, long-term ecology of OT will be healthiest when it’s most diverse and most open to rule-governed morphing.

4. Integrity of the author’s source code

Some features of this guideline pertain only to IT, with software authors and users being required to identify themselves and acknowledge responsibility and rights. But one regulation applies importantly to OT: “the license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code.”

Understanding as above that the OT “license” is implicit in the social act of performance and transmission, this regulation would allow for modified versions of the register – both dialectal (regional) and idiolectal (single-person) – to serve as the basis of future performances. Again the emphasis is on meshing individually driven innovation with collective tradition.

To illustrate, consider the case of an oral epic singer from a particular geographical area who learns most of his or her “source code” from the other performers in that region, and perhaps especially from a close relative. Every performance that such a singer gives will reflect the regional form of the OT prevalent in that area (the dialect), as well as the individual language of his or her relative (the idiolect).[4] Just as surely as a child raised in south Boston in the U.S. state of Massachusetts will speak a certain dialect of English, performers will use an OT source code that is in some respects typical of their home region. And just as surely as that same child will also reflect the pronunciation and vocabulary used by immediate family and peers (who may have lived elsewhere), performers will echo the individualized compositional register of the performers who taught them.

Extrapolate out a few generations of OT performers, and you can see that everyone will soon be working with a “modified source code” of one type or another. Broad similarities will exist alongside specific differences. Until the central, federalized, tAgora regulation made possible by print and static recordings arises, OT will evolve in many different directions, creating a scenario that once again fosters innovation by evolution. The truth is that Proteus never really stops morphing until you take drastic measures to try to hold him still. And even then what appears to be absolute stasis can turn out to be a tAgora illusion.

A mid-translation reminder

Let’s take a moment to sum up what we’ve uncovered so far. Up to this point we’ve noticed that the specialized, dedicated languages of OT and IT resemble one another in fundamental ways – that the source code that supports internet innovation corresponds to the register that supports the process of (re-)composition in oral tradition. The open-source concept applies, in other words, to OT’s “way of speaking” as well as to IT’s “way of programming.” This is one more way in which the three agoras align themselves: the oAgora and eAgora dovetail, while the tAgora stands apart.

5. No discrimination against persons or groups

The OSD mandates that “the maximum diversity of persons and groups should be equally eligible to contribute to open sources.” Here we glimpse a bedrock correspondence between OT and IT, one that stems from their shared core dynamic of navigating public-domain pathways. Unlike the tAgora, the two bookless media actually nurture creativity through sharing rather than through ownership. Because they don’t operate by fixing and copyrighting, they encourage broad, democratic participation, everything else being equal. They draw from the collective strength of their users, rather than sequester a fossilized product behind the locked and bolted door of proprietary, legalized vendorship.

Of course, certain varieties of oral tradition may seem to discriminate against some potential user/performers, whether by gender, age, ethnic affiliation, or some other index. Viewed in context, however, this exception merely proves the “no discrimination” rule. If a particular Navajo group mandates tribal membership or a specific time of year as a prerequisite for performance of a story, they are still licensing all eligible members to deploy the tale-telling register, to use the source code in a timely manner.[5] If the South Slavic village tradition of magical charms requires that “conjurers” (bajalice) be female and pre-pubertal when they learn the spells and post-menopausal when they practice them, this restriction simply identifies the broad-based membership among whom there can be no discrimination (though of course there may be individual competition or further focusing via inheritance patterns).[6]

This kind of limitation on eligibility is no categorical departure from the OSD definition, anymore than an analogous type of focusing would constitute discrimination in the IT sphere. Depending on its range of usefulness and its availability, a piece of software will always select a user-group much smaller and more focused than the entire eAgora population as the specific membership among whom there can be no discrimination.

The rule of thumb here – as in most IT and OT matters – is to respect the variety of the different situations and avoid committing blindly to a false (text-reflective) uniformity. Some open source software will involve smaller groups, some larger. Medical records or tax preparation software will no doubt attract more potential sharers than high energy physics or foreign language instruction programs. Likewise, the oral contest poetry of the Basque oral contest poetry⁷ may well involve a much wider and more diverse group of participants than the Navajo and South Slavic traditions mentioned above, simply because it is more public and less restrictive in its rules about performers and performance. Perhaps most significantly, oral stories pass freely across national and even linguistic barriers via bilingual speakers – for example, bilingual epic singers who were preliterate in both Albanian and South Slavic were able to fluently manage the oral epic registers of both languages.[8] The key is that within the relevant, culturally defined group there is a free, unrestricted flow of rule-governed creativity. People and groups cooperate and share.

6. No discrimination against fields of endeavor

Any license for open source software “must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.” The OSD argues that the same programming instrument should theoretically be as usable in business as in genetic research, for example.

Correspondingly, OT thrives precisely by being transferable to any performance situation and, by being deployable, within culturally approved rules, for many different purposes by users involved in different “fields of endeavor.”

For one thing, the performance arena – the recurrent, essentially virtual venue for the performance of any given OT activity (Note with def – STP) – takes myriad different forms that vary over time and place. Different performers and audiences participate at various times and places, all with roughly congruent assumptions about what’s transpiring in the arena. When they attend – whoever they are and wherever and whenever they participate in the particular instance – they do so by speaking and hearing fluently within the register, just as IT adapters of open source software work fluently within a shared source code. In broad perspective the goal isn’t a static, book-like item, but movement within an ongoing process.

Beyond the innumerable unique instances of any generalized performance arena lies another level of adaptability. An OT genre – complete with its register, implications, and idiomatic force – may migrate to a starkly new use, as when the source code of South Slavic oral epic was pressed into service to chronicle the exploits of Tito and the Yugoslav resistance fighters during World War II. These “partisan songs,” as they’re known, invoke the epic apparatus current in oral tradition from at least the fourteenth century in order to portray the heroism of twentieth-century guerilla warriors. (Note to HROP / search web for info) Or consider the South African praise-poets mentioned above, who have adapted their résumé-building oral poetry, originally composed to “publish” the reputations of tribal chieftains in the non-textual medium, in order to celebrate or denigrate contemporary political figures. (Note to Opland; Mandela article; orig blog link) This kind of evolutionary adaptation is another way in which OT avoids discrimination against particular fields of endeavor.

7. Distribution of license

The OSD stipulates that “the rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.”

In oAgora language, the corresponding regulation would call for the implied license attached to the register (OT source code) to extend automatically to all who seek to employ that register in performance or any other venue. In both IT and OT this requirement really amounts to attaching a smaller codicil to a more globally oriented will. Here’s the comparison. Barring discrimination against members of IT groups or fields of endeavor means extension of the original license to all subsequent users of the designated software and its source code. Barring discrimination against members of OT constituencies and against extension to new fields also means that the license to perform – and to serve as a fluent audience – cannot be required anew in each case (for each individual or performance). In a sense, the implied license for OT is a fundamental aspect of the overall speech-act: every performance assumes (and operates under) its open-ended governance.

8. License must not be specific to a product

Correspondingly, the OSD mandates that “the rights attached to the program must not depend on the program’s being part of a particular software distribution.” In other words, each single program within a larger conglomerate should be available and approved for sharing on its own, without the necessity of transferring the entire conglomerate.

The analogous situation in OT might involve a cycle of stories about a particular character that are learned from a single individual – a small collection of Native American Coyote tales (Note/link from orig), for example, that a person might hear from an older family member. The implied license to perform any one of these stories doesn’t depend on a license for that cycle or any other. Instead, each story is individually licensed for performance and reception, even though one tale may implicitly refer to another within the tradition. OTs aren’t explicitly defined and delimited items, but rather implicitly linked, pathways-enabled patterns.

This is a bit of a slippery distinction, especially for those of us accustomed to thinking and interacting by creating and exchanging texts in a sort of potlatch ritual (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch . True enough: oral stories, for example, are in one sense complete in themselves, quite intelligible as isolated events. On the other hand – as with language itself, of which OT is but a special case – the fluent audience will be able to bring a great deal of idiomatic meaning to the isolated tale. They will “fill it out” with their background knowledge of the tradition, the character(s), the location(s), and the storytelling patterns that underlie what may otherwise seem a novel, even unprecedented plot. They’ve transacted business in the oAgora before, and they have context.oD
Tell one, two, or more Coyote tales as you please; each one is both its own story, licensed for distribution on its own terms, and by extension and implication a part of something much larger and more comprehensive. Nothing need stand in the way of telling and receiving the isolated tale, but it’s conventionally told (and meant for reception) within an implied, immanent context. The individual story works like a hot link in hypertext, providing built-in connections to other pathways. Click on the individual tale and its context comes up on your oDesktop.

[add Marko tales example]

9. License must not restrict other software

According to the OSD, “the license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software.” In a sense this is the obverse of the preceding regulation: just as the whole cannot limit its parts, so the parts cannot limit one another.

We find an analogue in the real-world ecology of OTs, the cultural system of various OTs that operate cooperatively but by different rules, very much like a naturally occurring ecosystem with a diversity of species. Even though each of the OT forms is open-source, with its register or code available to all whom the genre selects as eligible practitioners, their diverse dynamics involve different performers and variant audiences. Rules for one species do not necessarily coincide with rules for others. One size doesn’t fit all.

Within the South Slavic ecosystem, (Note/link) for example, oral traditions are organized by gender, age, and social function. As we observed during fieldwork in Orashats, Serbia, women perform magical charms, lyric songs, and funeral laments (all in eight-syllable poetic lines), while men perform epics and genealogies (both in ten-syllable poetic lines). Magical charms and genealogies were primarily the province of senior women and men, while the other genres were age-independent. The actual function of the oral poetry – whether to cure ill humans and animals, to celebrate or criticize love and marriage, to mourn the dead, to affirm ethnic and historical identity, or to preserve the family tree – is a third axis for differentiation within the ecology of forms.

The implied license to perform any one of these genres applies to all practitioners of that particular oral tradition but does not extend to other forms. Within the set of conjurers, for example, there is freedom to share, learn, and perform according to pertinent societal practices (charms are passed only from grandmother to grand-daughter). But that freedom does not extend to men or non-kin, nor can the charms be voiced in the men’s ten-syllable meter or enlisted to serve another social function. Although open-source, each of the ecosystem’s species plays by its own rules.

10. License must be technology-neutral

The OSD requires that “no provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.” Much of the language describing this regulation is specific and technical, but its general thrust is to avoid limiting transmission of software to and within GUI (graphical user interface) environments and to allow for sharing “over non-web channels that do not support click-wrapping of the download” (those check-boxes you find at the end of contractual agreements formulated by proprietary software manufacturers).

In regard to the implied license underlying the use of OT’s source code or register, this means that the tradition and its code must be able to be shared outside the foundational technology in which they arose. In other words, an OT register must be transferable to – and functional within – other communicative media, without the user’s having to seek a separate implied license.

How would this work with an actual OT? Consider the case of Petar II Njegosh, a nineteenth-century Montenegrin bishop who grew up in a village, mastered the local method of composing oral epic poetry, and eventually became a learned, highly literate and text-centric official.(link/note) His “textual” poetry – written and published in books for readers – used the source code of oral epic to express his ideas on current political topics as well as traditional heroic mythology. He was employing OT source code to create a text. Or how about Elias Loennrot, the Finnish physician who scoured the Karelian countryside for what he posited were remnants of a once-expansive oral epic, the Kalevala? (Link/node; orig link < blog) Although highly literate, he learned the register of that oral poetry well enough that he was able to compose “missing” passages to cement these collected shards and re-create his envisioned national epic – which he then published as a book. (Note to L Honko’s 3 %) For both Njegosh and Loennrot, the implied license to perform oral tradition transferred to a new medium, in this case that of the authored, published text. They managed a repurposing of oAgora source code for the tAgora venue.

Coda

The OSD prescribes the rules by which the IT community can share software and its source code in an open, contributory manner. Each of the ten tenets distinguishes open source philosophy and practice from proprietary, vendor-driven philosophy and practice, under the assumption that continuous, shared development is the most productive and sustainable way to foster innovation and create an inclusive constituency.

Our translation of the OSD from eAgorese to oAgorese suggests a kindred dynamic in another media-technology. Instead of depending on individual authors of individual texts, which are then packaged and sold as the concrete items they are, OT thrives on sharing among a collective. Discrimination among people, groups, or media is discouraged. Stories and other forms remain open and malleable; even the source code that underlies them is freely distributed. Historically, the result has been that OT “software” travels widely and easily across continents and eras – the Gesar epic (Note/link) is known across the face of central Asia, and ancient Homeric laments (Note/link) have descendant forms alive today in the Greek islands. Books and manuscripts – even in the form of digitized fossils – are far too brittle and user-unfriendly a medium to support the kind of generative sharing and sequel innovation that is the lifeblood of OT as an open source phenomenon.

In this way as in so many others, the eWorld mirrors the oWorld, while both are “worlds
apart” from the tWorld.

Notes

1. On South African praise poets in general, see Opland 1983 and Kaschula 2000. Also of interest are Xhosa praises of Nelson Mandele and creativity and innovation within the Zulu genre.

2. On the oral tradition of Brother Peter tales, told in both Kaqchikel (a Mayan language) and Spanish, see Canales and Morrissey 1996.

3. Overviews of Mongolian epic are available in Chao 1997 and Heissig 1996. For other perspectives, see also Nekljudov 1996, Chao 2001, and Rinchindorji 2001.

4. For examples of OT dialects and idiolects, see Foley 1990: 288-312, 312-24.

5. On the fascinating history of one person’s investigation of Navajo storytelling, see, in chronological sequence, Toelken 1969, 1987, 2004, and Toelken and Scott 1981.

6. On South Slavic charms (bajanje), see Foley 1995: 99-135, 2002: 190-95; also an audio performance.

7. On the Basque oral poetry called bertsolaritza, see Garzia et al. 2001, as well as the special issue of Oral Tradition devoted to that subject: volume 22 (2007), issue 2. A description of the 2005 national championships, with photos, is available online.

8. On oral poets who can compose epics in both languages, see Kolsti 1990 and Dushi 2003.

~Bibliography

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:24:17 Z

Bibliography

Dushi, Arbnora. 2003. “The Albanian Oral Tradition in Kosova.” Elore, 1. Available online.

Foley, John Miles. 1990. Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rpt. 1993.

—1991. Immanent Art: From Structure to Aesthetics in Traditional Oral Epic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

—1995. The Singer of Tales in Performance. Bloominton: Indiana University Press.

—1998a. Ed., Teaching Oral Traditions. New York: Modern Language Association.

—1998b. “The Impossibility of Canon.” In Foley 1998a: 13-33.

—1999. Homer’s Traditional Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

—2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. With eCompanion.

—2004a. Ed. and trans., The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey as Performed by Halil Bajgorić. Folklore Fellows Communications, 283. Helsinki: Academic Scientiarum Fennica. eEdition at http://oraltradition.org/zbm.

—2004b. “Epic as Genre.” In Fowler 2004: 171-87.

—2005a. Ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic. Oxford: Blackwell.

—2005b. “Analogues: Modern Oral Epics.” In Foley 2005a: 196-212.

Fowler, Robert. 2004. Ed., The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harris, Joseph C. 1998. “The Icelandic Sagas.” In Foley 1998a: 382-90.

Jaffee, Martin S. 1998. “The Hebrew Scriptures.” In Foley 1998a: 321-29.

Kelber, Werner H. 1998. “New Testament Texts: Rhetoric and Discourse.” In Foley 1998a: 330-38.

Kolsti, John. 1990. The Bilingual Singer: A Study in Albanian and Serbo-Croatian Oral Epic Traditions. New York: Garland.

Lindahl, Carl. “Chaucer.” In Foley 1998a: 359-64.

Martin, Richard P. 1998. “Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.” In Foley 1998a: 339-50.

Toelken, Barre. 1969. “The ‘Pretty Language’ of Yellowman: Genre, Mode, and Texture in Navaho Coyote Performances.” Genre, 2: 211-35.

—1987. “Life and Death in the Navaho Coyote Tales.” In Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 388-401.

—2004. “Beauty Behind Me; Beauty Before.” Journal of American Folklore, 117: 441-45. Also available online.

—and Tacheeni Scott. 1981. “Poetic Retranslation and the ‘Pretty Languages’ of Yellowman.” In Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations, ed. Karl Kroeber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 65-116.

Vitz, Evelyn Birge. 1998. “Old French Literature.” In Foley 1998a: 373-81.

Zemke, John. “General Hispanic Traditions.” In Foley 1998a: 202-15.

Owning Versus Sharing

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:16:08 Z

Owning versus sharing

What does it mean to own something? How do we come into possession of an item or idea, and what are the rules for sharing it with others? There’s probably no hotter issue in today’s digital, internet-enabled world, and yet it’s also an issue that has deep roots in the long history and prehistory of media.

Consider a hypothetical parallel. Imagine a time and place where and when there is no such thing as copyright – either “big C,” Creative Commons licenses, or any other such arrangement. And the reason such instruments wouldn’t exist is that the very concept of ownership of ideas, performances, and works of verbal and musical art wouldn’t exist. Embroiled in a litigious society where patents and copyrights and intellectual property seem more and more the topics of everyday conversation, we would find such an imagined time and place almost unfathomable.

But in fact this is far from a fantasy: it was and is precisely the situation in which oral traditions have long flourished. According to the basic dynamics of exchange, stories circulate widely and freely, with the only universally observed constraints being the capacity to perform and the ability to enlist an audience. (Of course, particular cultures may impose other constraints, such as the gender or age of the teller, the season during which a story may be told, and so forth, but these are localized rules and have little or nothing to do with the conception of the story as an item or thing in our terms.) People can’t “own” oral traditional stories any more than they can individually and exclusively own the everyday languages they speak. Notwithstanding the protestations of the famed Académie Française, no single person or group can prescribe or determine language use, which will always remain a rule-governed free-for-all that operates via natural selection.

Oral traditions that function without support from text-based media show that this kind of open sharing – as opposed to our default concept of owning – isn’t just grudgingly or tacitly permitted: it’s absolutely the lifeblood of the continuing tradition. Unless stories are free to flow across a culture without hindrance from a centralized authority, the tradition will simply die. The tradition belongs to the people who make and re-make it.

So where does that meddling authority come from? First, it’s resident in the ideology of the idea or work of verbal or musical art as a thing, a commodity, an objectified item that is subject to ownership and therefore to centralized control. Second, that authority can emerge only with the conversion of an idea or work to textualized form (and here we include texts of an audio and video recordings as well as the book and page). This transformation operates under the radar, as it were, via an unexamined, unacknowledged alchemy. Once made tangible by transfer to the book or page, so goes the unstated assumption, the idea or work effectively becomes that book or page – just the same kind of (faulty but similarly ideology-driven) assumption we make when we decide that what appears, spatialized and dead, on the page is language itself, rather than a script for language.

And there’s another step, and accompanying trapdoor. Contrary to what some claim, it’s not simply the introduction of a writing system that makes the difference. Writing systems need the attendant technologies of cheap reproduction (printing and easily available copies) as well as broad literacy and mass readership before centralized authority can emerge and the commodification of ideas and works of verbal or musical art can take place. Thus the medieval European arena, in which authorship was often inchoate and emergent, and in which works were regularly created, copied, and translated without attribution, depended to a significant degree on manuscripts and reading aloud in public forums. No cheap reproductions or mass readerships there. These societies were set up for exo-legalistic sharing rather than owning, and so the advent of ownership and all that it brought with it was to prove gradual, even halting.

In retrospect the shift appears cleaner and neater than it was. But once the idea-to-page conversion was accomplished and became the reflex action of a culture, the way was clear for modern concepts of authorship, publication rights, protection of intellectual property, and other text-dependent forms of ownership to take hold. We’ve chronically ignored the history and continuing importance of this evolution in pursuit of our own agenda, but the truth is that the open sharing that fuels oral tradition did give way to the agreed-upon illusion of legally defined owning. It’s been our conventional practice to foster that illusion.

So perhaps it’s not just serendipity that the hot-button issue of ownership of ideas and works of verbal and musical art is rising to the top of our cultural agenda right now, just as another “thing-less,” non-item-based medium begins to take firm hold. Once again we find ourselves traveling along pathways, this time in the eAgora rather than the oAgora, and once again the medium we’re using exposes the notion of ownership as a convenient but finally baseless ideology. Traveling along pathways means movement in and out of digitized, morphing environments: it’s forever kinetic, emerging, making sense by changing rather than remaining (putatively) static.

The internet and digitization have bluntly put the lie to our comfortable assumption that ideas and works of verbal or musical art can ever truly become immutable items, things, or commodities. If this exposure seems enervating to individuals, groups, and corporations, their discomfort is traceable not to the new media, but rather to modern Western culture’s ideological commitment to what’s always been a falsehood. Small wonder that post-Gutenberg societies are essentially alone in locating the idea and the work within the palpable reality of the document. Faced with this dilemma of our own making, we should resist the urge to shoot the media-messenger.

And how do we know for certain that this claim of ownership has always been a falsehood? Because for many millennia – long before writing systems of any kind arose – owning ideas and works of verbal and musical art just wasn’t possible. Ownership was simply not a category. Sharing was the rule.

With this perspective in mind, let’s pose the following topic for a possible future discussion. Could the open-source initiatives now threatening to displace commodified, proprietary software be another symptom of internet-sponsored, digital sharing? Is the open-source movement a manifestation of sharing inspired by the natural ecology of the eAgora?

The Three Agoras

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:52:12 Z

The Three Agoras

Comparisons and Contrast

The following table demonstrates some fundamental similarities between the oAgora and the eAgora—between OT and IT—as well as their mutual differences from the tAgora.

Agora Correspondences and Differences
	oAgora	eAgora	tAgora
realities	virtual emerging	virtual emerging	brick & mortar directed
units	oWords	eWords	tWords
routes	oPathways	ePathways	tPathways
authorship	distributed	distributed	individual
audiences	open	open	selective

Disparate realities

To start with our current cultural default (for the moment, at least), tAgora technology lives and functions not in a virtual but in a brick & mortar world. Books and pages provide tangible vehicles for word-transactions; ideas are inscribed in actual objects you can hold in your hand (or so goes the accepted fiction). Textual exchange then depends on swapping these objects, whether by purchasing, borrowing, photocopying, scanning, or some other means. tAgora reality is also directed, in that all of its rhetorical cues—ordered sequences of words, sentences, paragraphs, numbered pages, chapters, and so forth—serve as ready guides to decipherment. The organization of book contents is not merely an empty convention or ritual gesture; it amounts to a mandate for using those contents in a single-minded, carefully delimited fashion. The book and page don’t support detours because veering off-track would defeat the linear logic of the medium.

oAgora and eAgora technologies, on the other hand, live and function in virtual worlds. Neither OT nor IT has any use for brick & mortar reality. Oral performers surf their intangible traditions, drawing from a large, untextualizable constellation of potentials. eNavigators surf the intangible web, creating, transmitting, and receiving knowledge, art, and ideas without recourse to physical objects. To put it plainly, the non-virtual reality of the tAgora is an inhospitable venue for OT and IT. Its environment is all wrong.

Correspondingly, the reality of the oAgora and eAgora is never predetermined, but always emerging. As performers or clickers work through their networks, they must commit to decisions at every turn. On the OT side, storytellers may need to make several important choices within the first few minutes of their performances: for example, whether to describe the opening scene briefly or in great detail, whether to include an anecdote or not, whether to spin a characterization this way or that. Similarly, net-surfers’ itineraries are always in-the-making, forever under construction until they quit their browsers. In both cases nothing is set in stone because neither kind of performance is a book. Both kinds of events keep on developing even as they’re happening, with no closure available (or even possible) until the surfing sessions stop.

With these correspondences and differences in mind, let’s consider four fundamental aspects of the three agoras: units, routes, authorship, and audiences.

Units

First, then, the deceptively simple matter of the unit or thought-byte employed in each agora. Oral performers and their audiences communicate in a language of oWords, acoustic signs that identify pathways leading to meaning. Naturally, these signs are voiced and heard rather than written and read, but their most salient qualities are their composite structure and highly idiomatic meaning. They just aren’t the same as “our words.”

In many oral traditions the most basic single “word” is at minimum an entire phrase—not one but a group of our textual words. For example, South Slavic epic singers, or guslari, speak of the smallest “word in a song” as a whole ten-syllable line, from two to five or six tWords in length.[1] Such oWords aren’t bounded by white spaces or enshrined in dictionaries; within OT they take the form of integral, indivisible units of utterance and meaning, no matter how large they get. They amount to atoms within the physics of OT communication, if you like.

Such oral performers identify everything from whole poetic lines to entire performances as single “words,” understanding them as the fundamental units that support the OT medium. Though it may seem counterintuitive to cultures that depend heavily on texts, these OT bytes are composite wholes that can’t be subdivided without destroying their meaning. To put it another way, oWords are typically made up of not one but many tWords, and dismembering oWords produces only nonsense oSyllables, component parts that can’t bear meaning by themselves.

eWords are parallel to oWords in a number of ways, most obviously at the level of web addresses, or URLs, which are also made up of several distinct parts joined together. URLs of course make sense only as wholes, and can’t be subdivided without destroying their functionality. Thus http://www.oraltradition.org consists of a protocol (http://) plus the worldwide web designator (www) plus the domain name (oraltradition.org) that itself includes a site label followed by a domain suffix. Each part plays a crucial role, but each one is by itself insufficient to access any ePathway. The composite address, construed as a single, indivisible “word,” is what makes the link work.

Again like oWords, eWords are also densely coded and highly idiomatic. Just as the oWord “green fear” in Homer’s Iliad stands for “supernatural fear” in the specialized language of oral epic tradition, so http://www.43things.com names a social networking site in the specialized language of the web. And notice the special semantics of these mega-words: in neither case does the unit or thought-byte transparently describe what it means. Neither of the two constituent elements of “green fear” has any dictionary-supported connection to supernatural agency, and the “43 things” URL will dependably leave the uninitiated scratching their heads. But both the oWord and the eWord function very effectively once their idiomatic force comes into play, with the designated composite signs standing by convention for more-than-literal meanings.

tWords, on the other hand, are units defined by white space on either side and certified by inclusion in dictionaries. As the lowest common denominators of textual communication, they can theoretically be combined in myriad ways to produce meaning. The sky’s the limit.

But then the process of textualization, the defining activity of the tAgora, enters the scene. Sequencing and fossilizing tWords in particular paragraphs, across particular pages and chapters, and along the one-of-a-kind linear landscape of the book severely limits their inherent possibilities even as it creates a unique and directed communication. tWords now serve not only their singular meanings but also the particular combinatory arrangement in which they are fixed—a pathway-less text. It’s easy to see which of these two masters holds the upper, and determining, hand. Text-making requires the sacrifice of multiple options for the greater (and singular) expressive good.

Mapped tWords are rooted in place. For that reason they can’t recur in coded, idiomatic combinations without repeating, and repetition produces only the tired, empty language of clichés. Not so with recurrent oWords and eWords, which stand as living, emergent signs that OT and IT surfers can click on or not, as they choose. In the oAgora and eAgora, navigating pathways is always an unfolding process that happens in the moment, decision by decision. There’s always and continuously more than a single way to proceed, more than a single reality to engage.

By contrast, tWords do their tAgora work by productively limiting options, by foreclosing on potentials in favor of a prescribed order and sequence. tWords are items for thing-based exchange, not pathways for virtual navigation.

Routes

Within the oAgora and eAgora, words are surfing signals. oWords provide route-markers for oPathways, and eWords for ePathways. In the arena of oral performance, storytellers proceed by clicking on oWords like “Once upon a time” and navigating through the story-web of a Grimm Brothers fairytale. Because they’re surfing through a flexible network of potentials rather than trekking along a sequence-ordered page, their itinerary is anything but fixed. On the contrary, their route they choose remains fluid and ever-evolving, taking shape in present time under the interactive influence of factors like individual creativity, audience reaction, the time and place of the event, and so forth. At its core, the act and art of storytelling is the process of choosing among options, of navigating through narrative hyperlinks. oPathways keep the performer’s options generatively open, allowing the story to emerge as it’s (re-)made.

ePathways work similarly, as any given day’s experience with the internet attests over and over again. We open our browser to a designated start-up page (which we may of course change) by deploying an embedded eWord, the equivalent of invoking an oWord like “Once upon a time.” From that point on, every decision we make immediately reconfigures our options, shifts our frame of reference, and presents us with new options. We can of course choose to “read” the web like a book—plodding along precisely the same sequence of ePathways again and again, day in and day out, flattening the multidimensional network into the equivalent of a printed, unnetworked page. But to do so is to limit eAgora commerce to what can be transacted in the tAgora—although without the dedicated book-and-page medium appropriate for tAgora transactions. To get the most out of each communications technology, we need to recognize what each agora can support and use each set of tools to its greatest advantage.[2]

Part of that recognition means coming to grips with the fact that “tPathways” don’t, and can’t, exist. Texts prescribe one-way routes according to a singular, well-developed plan. They depend on sequences of tWords, pages with numbers, chapters, and so on. Much can be gained by guiding readers in this way, and it would be categorically wrong to diminish the value of texts, which support the tAgora so well. But the one-way highway, for all of its obvious and demonstrated advantages, is distinctly different from the option-driven technologies native to the oAgora and eAgora.

Authorship

European literature from the ancient world onward has always assumed individual authorship. We celebrate the achievements of Homer, Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, happy to be able to affix their names to great works like The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and Hamlet. But there’s more to this unexamined assumption than first meets the eye.

The ideological pressure to identify verbal art as always and everywhere a tAgora phenomenon is extremely strong, so strong that we’ve often created pseudo-authors where no believable evidence exists. Thus the exalted place of Homer at the fountainhead of Western literature, even though Homer seems to be an anthropomorphic legend, a mythic figure who never existed (at least in the form we’ve imagined him).[3] Thus the prominence of the shadowy figures of Caedmon and Cynewulf in discussions of the earliest English poetry. Never mind that Caedmon the cowherd-poet is almost certainly legendary, or that the only evidence for the otherwise unknown Cynewulf is a group of poorly matched runic signatures that could have inserted by anyone.[4] As tAgora citizens we feel compelled to appoint individual authors for all verbal art, no matter what its true origins.

Not so in the marketplaces we’ve called the oAgora and eAgora, where distributed authorship is the empowering rule. OTs, which at their root consist of performance-instances that naturally vary from one to another over time and different performers, just can’t be traced to single authors. Like language itself (as distinct from texts, which are scripts for language), no one person is wholly responsible for their invention or maintenance. And IT creations evolve in cognate ways—open-source software, for example, actively depends upon multiple, distributed authorship for its continuing utility. It simply can’t live and develop in any other way.

If we’re willing to peer behind our comfortable but unexamined assumptions, we’ll soon recognize that even in the tAgora individual authorship is to some extent an ideological conviction rather than a fact. Even verifiably individual authors respond to prior and contemporary authors, creating texts that owe a significant debt to other people and other texts. But in the oAgora and eAgora the picture is much clearer and more categorical: OT and IT are by their very nature collective, distributed enterprises. They represent community activity, the joint work of many hands.

Audiences

Everything else being equal, OT and IT support far more democratic marketplaces than do texts. The oAgora and eAgora involve and engage relatively open audiences, while the tAgora is more selective.

The reasons for this contrast are straightforward. The oAgora places performer and audience on a fundamentally democratic footing, setting them up as interactive partners in an evolving process. In many cases anyone can attend an oral performance, and, given enough time and energy, anyone can learn to navigate the tradition and perform (some more fluently than others; talent does matter). Of course, certain OT genres restrict their audiences and/or potential performers by gender, age, ethnicity, the time or place of the event, or some other factor. But even in the most exclusive scenarios the very ongoingness of tradition—the reality that OTs continue to live and prosper by being shared within a community over time—assures an audience that is open and participatory to a significant degree.

The eAgora operates similarly, by promoting the root dynamic of sharing and thus opening its resources to all surfers. As with OT, IT can constrain that basic democracy in a number of ways—via proprietary software, password-protected sites, and other strategies that diminish universal access for the sake of privacy or of financial or political gain. Nonetheless, the ability to browse through an unprecedented array of interactive resources—far more extensive than any conventional library holdings—represents a media-democracy more radical than any we have known outside the open-access, “online” experience of the oAgora.

The tAgora, on the other hand, selects its audience by configuring its substantial assets in an exclusive, protected environment. At the macro level, books cost money and are controlled by distribution networks. On the micro level, the rhetoric of the page is as restrictive as it is powerful.

Consider the implications. Only if you can afford to join the book-conversation, only if the text-exchange actually includes you, and only if you’ve managed to internalize the operative textual conventions can you hope to succeed in the marketplace of the tAgora. Granted, it’s a very efficient system in its own right, but it’s accessible only if you’ve met the demanding (and for some individuals or even whole cultures, quite impossible) admissions requirements. In short, the tAgora has a double edge: in applying highly selective criteria for membership, it also disenfranchises a whole host of potential users.

Transacting business in the “wrong” agora

It’s proverbial that being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or for the wrong purpose, can lead to serious trouble. Nowhere does this adage prove truer than in the three verbal marketplaces we’ve been describing, where agoraphobia is only too prevalent. OT can’t live and prosper in the tAgora because it can’t be flattened onto a page without changing its fundamental nature, without reducing it to a faint shadow of itself and making it something it isn’t. Nor does IT do well in the tAgora, since its ePathways simply can’t be translated to brick & mortar representation. The nimble non-textuality of Wikipedia, or even the ever-increasing uselessness of hard-copy software manuals, provides evidence enough of this non-fit.

Or think about one of the most celebrated media-related issues of our time: unauthorized file-sharing of musical and video works of art. Ironically, perhaps, this kind of “illicit” traffic reflects the typical and natural flow within the oAgora and eAgora, where sharing constitutes nothing less than each medium’s lifeblood. After all, what’s the modus operandi, even the core ethics, of OT and IT? To transfer freely, to distribute ownership, to treat knowledge, ideas, and art as open-source creations whose value stems in part from community access and the culture of remixing.

That’s the way it always has been and always will be in the oAgora. Subject to specific cultural guidelines, OTs pass unencumbered from one person, group, place, and era to another. They work not like possessable texts but like a common language that can’t be owned, protected, or denied to prospective users. OT traffic closely resembles IT traffic in that respect.

But when precious copyrighted items, such as top 40 hits or blockbuster films, are suddenly thrust into the open-access environment of the eAgora as manipulable digital entities, something cataclysmic happens. Their history as individually authored, legally protected objects is in effect rewritten; their status utterly changes. For better or worse, the rules of the tAgora are suspended and “the work” is exchanged under a new set of rules. Just like OT, it’s now eligible for (or at least vulnerable to) sharing, sampling, and remixing. It’s now a tAgora product living in an eAgora world.[5]

Notes
1. For interviews with oral epic singers on the nature of their “words,” see Foley 2002: 11-21. The same concept of “word” has been explicitly cited in oral traditions in ancient Greek (the term epos), Old English, Mongolian (called a “mouth-word”), Finnish, Estonian, and Sardinian, although the practice is certainly much more widespread.

2. The incongruities that naturally arise from trying to conduct purely textual exchange electronically may explain why readers of eBooks and similar utilities so often complain that they have trouble scrolling through long documents on a computer display (whether Amazon’s Kindle helps resolve such incongruities remains to be seen). The eAgora supports interactive, participatory, emergent exploration extremely well, but it doesn’t handle textual exchange nearly as well as do texts. As Corey Doctorow put it in a 2004 talk, “New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media are good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.”

3. On Homer as a legendary traditional figure, and on parallels in South Slavic, medieval English, and Mongolian OTs, see further Foley 1998.

4. Caedmon is described by the seventh-century historian Bede as owing his ability to create OT poetry to an angel’s visit, while the “identity” of Cynewulf is based on non-matching coded signatures within four Anglo-Saxon poems: The Fates of the Apostles, Juliana, Elene, and Christ II.

5. Digital rights management (DRM) protocols, which represent a response to some of these problems, can only be successful to the degree that they address eAgora realities with eAgora (not tAgora) solutions. Witness the inefficacy of copy-protection software, often no more than an invitation to hacking—where such hacking amounts for some to assertion of eAgora “rights.” On the other hand, the Creative Commons initiative represents an eAgora solution to an eAgora problem. On the cultural and historical implications of eAgora realities, see especially Lessig 2004, 2006; and Tapscott and Williams 2006.

In The Public Domain

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:36:17 Z

In the public domain

Continuity and sustainability through innovation. To the book-bound mentality, such a strategy may appear at best unlikely and counter-intuitive, at worst simply wrong-headed. But as we’ll see in this and the next blog entry, it accurately describes how oral tradition and the internet operate in the public domain, the arena in which each thought-technology thrives most naturally. Despite what our default cultural reflexes encourage us to believe, OT and IT prosper not via the textual program of fixation-through-capture, but via morphing and regeneration. For pathways-based media, it’s rule-governed, ongoing evolution – rather than the dead-end of fossilization – that promises continued usefulness and accessibility.

Two aspects of OT and IT, both of them foreign to the textual world, stand out as especially important reasons underlying this counter-intuitive behavior. The first is a radical openness to change, and I mean “radical” in two senses – fundamental and innovative. The second aspect is an unprivatized community of makers and users, a cyber-democracy if you like. These two qualities make for a creative scenario that favors access, exchange, and diverse contributions over ownership, licensing, and proprietary products. Instead of micro-societal restriction by legal instruments and entrenched resistance to shared innovation, so typical of the régime of the book and page, OT and IT offer an invitation to cooperate and jointly innovate across the broad swath of the macro-society.

OT accomplishes its goals by opening the performance arena to all performers and (let’s not forget) all audiences, subject to individual cultural rules. Likewise, IT’s ever-emerging openness and ever-expanding community are sponsoring more and more “open source” and “open standards” sorts of activities. In short, if OT and IT operate like matched “bookends,” it’s precisely because they flourish by not closing the book on sharing, by conducting their business very much in the public domain.

Let’s consider a few examples of IT behavior along these lines. (In the next entry I will examine ways in which the Open Source Definition of digital creativity and rights can be applied to the dynamics of OT.)

In recent years the so-called “open source” movement has begun what some are already calling a major revolution in software design and development. The trend away from proprietary, vendor-regulated products and toward open source software has meant that innovation of any sort can take place without the usual restrictions of licensing, commercial purchase, and penalties for modification. The source code is open, experimentation is open, and redistribution is open – all across the eAgora.

In the simplest scenario, this initiative fosters adaptation of freely available applications to any subsequent purpose without abridgment of copyright, so that anyone can tailor preexisting “open” software to a particular purpose without monetary impediment or fear of legal repercussions. Would your business function more smoothly if you could tweak a particular application by adding or substituting modules, or even by rewriting basic code? Under open source rules, feel free to go ahead and tweak – no questions asked, no fees incurred, no laws broken. Likewise for the next innovator, and the evolution goes on unhindered.

Complementary to the open source movement is a commitment to open standards, such as the Open Document? standard recently adopted by the state of Massachusetts as a replacement for proprietary, non-conforming productivity applications. By January 1, 2007 all state offices will be required to install software that supports this new standard, which in effect will disqualify any proprietary software that doesn’t do the same. As of that date Microsoft Office is out, as are Word Perfect? and Lotus Notes, none of which support the Open Document? standard. Technophiles and ordinary citizens of the cyber-democracy, on the other hand, will profit from decreased costs and increased access, as will state workers – once they master the new applications that will be required when “open season in Massachusetts” begins. Capitulate to broader, community-based rule or suffer the consequences, the Massachusetts folks are saying to software vendors, even as they warmly welcome makers, users, and workers into an open, seamless eCommunity.

Add to these symptoms of a deeply rooted and growing commitment to sharing – as opposed to owning – another remarkable phenomenon: MIT Open Course Ware?, which makes public and available many hundreds of courses over 34 departments and programs. MIT President Susan Hockfield describes the broadening and leveling of the educational eAgora in this way: “educators and students everywhere can benefit from the academic activities of our faculty and join a global learning community in which knowledge and ideas are shared openly and freely for the benefit of all.” IT opens doors (through pathways), just like OT.

On the eCommerce front, the phenomenon of “market mavericks,” third-party bloggers and screeners who are taking advantage of web democracy to help correct information asymmetry and rebalance the process of informed purchasing. These responsible cyber-citizens provide the consumer community with easily available, independent evaluations of products and buying advice. (Visit the bzzagent website for an example, or consult the Commuri-Radford research
partially sponsored by the Center for eResearch at the University of Missouri-Columbia.)

So. . . the state of Massachusetts, the MIT faculty, market mavericks – what do these three groups have in common? Briefly stated, they’ve decided that the way forward is not to hoard ideas but to distribute them as widely as possible, not to try to corner the market but to trade with everyone else, and on as equal a footing as possible. They see their best opportunity for sustained contribution as members of a radically open community of makers and users – indeed, a community wherein the (essentially proprietary) distinction between “makers” and “users” really doesn’t apply in the default sense. Instead, and again as in OT, all involved become in one way or another participants, actors or doers participating in a process of mutual exchange whose strength derives from morphing and innovation.

That’s what’s meant by a truly public domain – an IT-based community in which ownership has given way to sharing, which is in turn a recognition that ideas just don’t hold still. In such circumstances, is it really any surprise that open source software, open courseware, and third-party cyber-advisers have begun to take center stage? As with OT, people are once again starting to prefer pathways to paper.

Post-“script”
This just in, as the anchor newspeople say! Only a few hours before the present blog entry was posted, Microsoft submitted its Open XML document format technology to the international standards body known as (Ecma). While this action doesn’t meet Massachusetts’ call for an Open Document? standard, it does represent a new direction (dare we say a concession?) on the part of the giant software vendor. It also constitutes one more piece of evidence that the eAgora is moving away from ownership by proprietary fiefdoms and toward sharing across an open community.

Texts Vs IT

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:33:23 Z

Texts versus IT

This node is presently under construction.

EAgora

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:56:56 Z

The eAgora: Electronic networks to surf

An agora is a verbal marketplace, a site for creation and exchange of knowledge, art, and ideas. The Pathways Project recognizes three agoras, or arenas for human communication. This node is devoted to the electronic arena, the eAgora.

This node is presently under construction.

TAgora

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:56:26 Z

The tAgora: Exchanging tangible goods

This node is presently under construction.