Why is that imnpoirtant? When a corporation owns the format in which your document lives, it is effectively gone from you the moment that corporation changes anything, goes broke, anything.
Also, if you have an open document, archival and retrieval processes are far easier and replicable. How many of you know how to deal with a 1995 Wordperfect document? What about a TXT file? Exactly.
The question of Document Freedom has severe repercussions for freedom of choice, competition, markets and the sovereignty of countries and their governments.
Freedom of speech is worthless if you can not open the speech file!
It is interesting to note how our own cultural biases change and sometimes impede the scientific research. That is the case in fertilization, as Emily Martin studied:
In fact, biologists could have figured out a hundred years ago that sperm are weak forward-propulsion units, but it’s hard for men to accept the idea that sperm are best at escaping. The imagery you employ guides you to ask certain questions and to not ask certain others.
Similar cognitive biases arise in other sciences, as can be seen with economists trying to explain everything through a rational agents, and politicians defending its offshoot, the perfect market forces. This bias obscures that which is obvious, and more dangerous, helps create a story, a myth of science, which then is used by our modern civilization to navigate: our current policies are modeled through these myths, and these are informed through our collective ideation of reality - even though it is flawed.
The Glaser one is easiest to grasp, and is obvious when, in a moving economy, the advice reverberates on Sutton, Zimbardo and others: you are what you do and with whom you do it.
The O’Reilly one is more focused in business, yet at the same time goes back to the fundamentals: Why work in this? Why these values? Why now? Why here?
Yes, Virginia, what you do will change your brain and your mind, and the people around will change your life and your spirit: Pursue light! Pursue meaning! The little toxic test is actually easy
It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished.
In a similar manner, is the work exhausting or rewarding? Does carrying this burden all day create energy and ideas? Does it generate satisfaction and growth?
Since everybody and their granma loves twitter, now we have lists and top tens and the like. This, though, caught my attention: why twitter works:
Twitter, on the other hand, by having the deepest personal penetration (mobile phone) combined with the most ease of use (text message), has an effort rating that falls below most people’s natural resistance to participate, and its positive reward ratio is much higher because people are far more likely to respond to a text message than almost anything else.
I like the idea of twitter as a Dunbar destroyer, (from Dunbar number), since I have long stated that the Dunbar limit is valid only on primitive environment where physical displacement is cumbersome and energy intensive. OTOH, twitter (and other social media), allows for a larger contingent: you still have to know them and keep them entertained, but the barriers of knowledge and perception are not constrained by geographical location, but on similarity of interests: Media facilitating the social.
I am re-reading Anansi Boys, that delicious book by Neil Gaiman; the writer describes it as
If you have to classify it, it’s probably a magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic, although that leaves out the detective bits and much of the food.
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The whole story that can be retold as a contemporary political tale, or a cognitive science early myth, one that describes the moment in which stories shift from survival to creative, from procedural to transactional.
That book, though, had however a terrible fault, at least here in a Southern state: you don’t call black grown men “boys”, and since the protagonists are black, and the whole tale revolves around the story of Anansi, any reference to the book was almost forbidden. Was no cultural marketer there to tell Mr. Gaiman about the requirements and restrictions of a large market?
As Skunk Anansie would say, “everything is f***ing political”.
