Abstract

By looking at some lesser known writings of Harold Adams Innis - in particular an unpublished speech from 1943 entitled "The Crisis in Public Opinion" - this thesis hopes to bring a few good tools and frameworks to the study of open source, and vice versa. This thesis looks at open source in terms of the tactics and systems - technical and interpersonal - involved, and is premised on the idea that software is a media and communication system. This thesis argues that, according to the open source process, and the writings of political economist and communication theorist Harold Innis, the creative commons is capable of constructing alternatives to "monopolies of knowledge" by protecting conditions for the freedom of thought. Innis spent his academic career mapping economic, political, and communication networks, and throughout his work he makes suggestions about systems (technical and interpersonal) that might intercede against monopoly formation. The communication and collaboration system that is open source is a contemporary manifestation, I think, of the tactics Innis suggests (with his words and actions) for surviving and redirecting our networks' historical tendency toward monopoly and cascading crisis. No One Knows Everything addresses the methods Innis describes for balancing out against monopolies of knowledge, and maps those mechanisms against some of the mechanisms of open source

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