This post was stimulated when I was asked by Angela to read Fitzpatrick, K. (2011) THE DIGITAL FUTURE OF AUTHORSHIP: RETHINKINGORIGINALITY I spent about 30 minutes on the article. It said a lot to me and probably a lot more
to others who don’t have my slow reading and limited attention span problems. Six pages is about my limit probably
conditioned by my science background (although 6 pages is not too bad: it represents an awful lot of tweets!). I took away some ideas that were important to
me. Here they are; I hope that I have
not misrepresented Fitzpatrick and apologize for not commenting on or
developing many of the other excellent ideas in that paper.
I think one of Fitzpatrick’s key
ideas is that authorship and originality and ownership of ideas expressed in
print or digital media are taking a bit of a battering since all information;
past and present is so accessible online.
But to me this is simply stating what always was in the old pencil,
print and paper era: It has simply
become just that much more so with IT.
The ‘view’ of Newton’s that ‘if I
can see more it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants’ sums it up
well. I take the view that any good idea
that I might express is probably the reworking of others with little if any
working of my own. So, as a poor
facsimile of Newton living in the present digital age I would say “if I
can see just a little more than some, it is because I stand on the shoulders of
a myriad of intellectual midgets”’. Now before anyone wants to bite me on the intellectual
ankle, let me assure you that I am just one of the midget myriad but as such I
am also one of a major interconnected intellectual power: the digital wisdom of the commons.
But I do have a problem with
this. There are now 7000000000 people in
the world of which say 1000000000 can or soon will be adding to the digital
noise emanating from this planet and impinging onto our human non digitized
brains that really are not well adapted to being assaulted in this way. Not only that but these 1000000000 people
are likely to not just add their own digitized thoughts to this digitized
primal slime of ‘information’ bits or tearabits (sic) but they also repeat the
bits of others ‘tweets’ or whatever.
Even more frightening; soon we may well have computer programs that can
themselves, without the aid of humans, search for and rework and synthesise the
existing human digitized thoughts floating around the web to produce ‘author’,
an infinite variety of yet more digitized thought contributions. The ever increasing mass of digitized
verbiage masquerading as original ideas or value added contributions will
rapidly approach unity.
Crazy? No it is already here. The blockbuster book is written to a formula
with very little original human input.
The ‘author’ does need to meld a bit of ‘original’ research,
gathered from a team of out of work BA honours students and as directed by the
publisher, fit the BA hons research and any minimal ideas of the author to the
apparent taste or lust of the client (reader).
Very soon the ‘author’ will be able to dispense
with the BA Honours staff (the computer will provide the research) and also the
publishers advice (computer algorithms will be able to sample the client’s
reading (and perhaps full profile or soul) and establish just what the client
is looking for and thus just what the ‘author’ must write about).
I digress. The answer of course is that I agree with
Fitzpatrick: digital technology is
making us think what authorship is all about.
I go further with asking what profit will there be in endless
proliferation of digitized thoughts, be they human or computer authored? How can we make sense of it all and in
keeping with the prime purpose of this blog spot, Education for World Futures, how
can we use it wisely?
The last question is the
easiest. Our unique job as global
educators right now is to try to selectively capture at least some meaning from
the digital mess of authored information and ideas, add a little wisdom from
our own personal experience and psyches and integrate these two with the
capacities, propensities and experiences of our students to hopefully allow
them and us to think more clearly about our humanity, the world we live in and the
world we would like to have.
