From the Republic of Letters to the Commonwealth of Information

1. commonwealth of information 1 thumb up

A generic term for the vast resources of information democratically available in the digital, social networked and crowd sourced era.

"Wikis are an example of interactive databases made possible by the commonwealth of information."

by chetmo

The Commonwealth of Information is an idea I came up with, to describe how information is being organized in our digital era. It came to me because I was reading the book; Re-Inventing Knowledge : From Alexandria to the Internet by Wolverton & McNeely. In it, they described the creation and consequences of the Republic of Letters. I was especially captured by the use of the term "Republic" in this sense...

"Republic" implies representation. In this case, representatives of knowledge, chosen by a process of education and made legitimate by degrees documenting their authority on the matter. It's from the time of the 'natural philosophers' to the doctorates in the sciences. One particular exemplar has special implications...

Alexander von Humboldt was a fellow of the 'Republic of Letters' that utilized the social network created by the 'Republic' to amass and organize information. Not any specific information, but a gathering of various details that made up the environment of the Earth. He accomplished this by crowd sourcing the work to individuals he had contact with, in the right locations, and asking them to record the same data sets from the same sets of instruments. No one individual involved with the collection of data would necessarily know the whole of what was amassed, until it was processed (if it ever would be..). Because of this type of data collection, patterns began to become apparent. Such as Isobar charts, detailing weather and climate information barely known before. Does Humboldt's methodology sound vaguely familiar?

What do you know of wikis? You, no doubt, are quite familiar with the omnipresent Wikipedia, but do you know who Ward Cunningham is? The idea of crowd sourcing information collection is not very new, as we have seen. Yet, the difference is that, for a wiki, we are not necessarily reliant upon an authority with a degree to collect and decide it's nature. It is more democratically represented. And also prone to abuses of it's system. The idea was that, a perfectly created wiki would be self-monitoring, as errors or abuses in definitions would be discovered and corrected by future users and contributors.

But, there is a sense of arrogance that all would be perfectly executed, and cynicism in the concept of documenting all pertinent knowledge. Indeed, a satire of Wikipedia (Encyclopedia Dramitica) was created to lampoon the sense of mission that Wikipedia contributors have. And there are the media reports of how Wikipedia entries for celebrities and pop culture are more often longer than what is considered 'real information'.

It is this movement from a system reliant upon authoritative, documented authority to a catch all, democratically level field of participation that I refer to when I say society is traveling from the Republic of Letters to the Commonwealth of Information..