Does the Information Age have a “Grain”?
Created over time by the persistent transportation of a tree’s nutrients up through the arboreal subderma, wood grain visualizes the habituated directional inclination of the material itself. This fibrous alignment and orientation is what gives wood it’s unique attributes of strength and flexibility. Understanding and respect for a wood’s grain is essential for woodworking craftsmen, resulting in the well known idiom, “working with the grain“.
Social entities also have integral structures that represent and reveal their own habituated directional inclinations. Society has a grain. Subcultures have grain. families have grain. The Information Age has grain.
I caught myself on this little snag of an insight while glancing around The Open Knowledge Foundation’s site. They make a claim that our current copyright and patent structures are literally going against the grain of the Information Age, and that there are much better ways to work with the grain, resulting in higher satisfaction for parties on both sides of the cultural artifact media marketplace checkout counter.
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