Total Legal Relevance

I’m on a bus heading to a conference that is about access to knowledge (“a2k,” for those who enjoy hip-sounding acronyms), and that bus is stuck in heavy traffic (of the sort that occurs when they close the right two lanes of I-95), so I reckon I should take this chance to figure out what access to knowledge is. And by “figure out,” I mean come up with a totally provisional definition based on a set of examples or activities that, in my bus-addled mind, *seem like* they should fall under the framework of access to knowledge.

First of all, let’s stipulate that access to knowledge is a clunky term. “Access” sounds too passive, as if all we care about is ensuring that people have the ability to view something, rather than really work with its raw materials and read/write/remix its elements into something new, interesting, and immediate. The preposition “to” makes it sound like there’s something out there already, and we just have to point people in the right direction and they’ll find it (“go to that knowledge, Lassie, and bring me back some of it!”). Even “knowledge” carries connotations of experts and academics imparting their wisdom from on high in neatly packaged bundles.

When I hear the words “access to knowledge,” then, the image that comes to mind is quite *boring*, and not worth repeating, not even on a blog. It’s too final, it’s too authoritative, and it ignores the extent to which know-how, narrative shortcuts, mnemonics, stylistic moves, inventions, and the other valuable things that make up “knowledge” within our networked information society emerge not as finished products but instead through the conversations and interactions we have with ourselves and others. Knowledge is the means by which we reconstitute ourselves and generally keep things fresh in the different kinds of language-games we play on a daily basis. Knowledge frees us from the past, and misleads us in all kinds of interesting ways. Knowledge is fun, not boring — not that calling something “fun” makes it any less powerful, but “fun” is a more useful way of thinking through a2k because it shows us how hard it is to plan for knowledge and how easy it is for knowledge to sneak up on us and catch us unaware.