Steal ThisBlog

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

French Post-Impressionist painter (1848 - 1903)

 

Two things happened this week that birthed a thought churning in my gut. First, tragically a few days ago Baudrillard died of cancer. In many ways, he and Umberto Eco framed my first thoughts on the place of copies and originals in reality. Exposure to his thinking influenced my ideas of the real and the hyperreal. Thinking about him again helped me to discover a flaw in my thinking. A few posts ago I asked who gets to determine reality. That was the wrong question. The right question didn't occur to me until a professor Wayne State University brought up Boswell and his dictionary. It made me think of the arguments that Boswell had with ????? about the evolution of language. I realized then that increasingly an assumption is being made, an assumption that "information wants to be free". This assumption is at the heart of documents like the Bellagio Declaration. Scores of bloggers like Laura at Laurablog and the entire team at Stay Free! serve to document the gradual awakening of Western Society to this fact. Although this statement can be heard more and more frequently, few understand its implications. Information has always found a way to make itself free. No matter the obstacle or the condition Information always finds ways of replicating and evolving. This isn't idealism or wishful thinking. It is an observation of history. When print is nonexistent oral traditions spring up. When the transmission of information is suppressed, it is smuggled like the art of Florence before Savranola or schoolbooks in the slave quarters of the antebellum south. It transforms itself like the navigation codes disguised as spirituals sung in the plantations of the south. Other examples are easily seen if you choose to look. Another truism is that past patterns are the best indicators of future performance. For further confirmation read the two page article in Wired in Jan 1994. In this article Rebecca E. Zorach points out some of the parallels between modern techy society and that of the Medieval monastic society. Whether the holders of the information be analog or digital, western or eastern, monastic or hedonist information always spreads and always evolves.