Boyle asks you to think back 17 years and imagine that you knew nothing of the World Wide Web or its many applications and services. If you saw the major arguments pro and con, would you have green-lighted the open web, open source software, or Wikipedia?
In each case, the open option does not simply sound less plausible. It sounds – or it would have sounded 17 years ago – completely delusional....
My point is simple. We have a bias, a cognitive filter, that causes us to underestimate the benefits and overestimate the dangers of openness – call it cultural agoraphobia.
It is not that openness is always right. It is not. Often we need strong intellectual property rights, privacy controls, networks that demand authentication. Rather it is that we need a balance between open and closed, owned and free and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong....
And herein lies the lesson for the Obama administration. Think about the policy choices of the future by applying our assumptions to the choices of our past.
The web succeeded too quickly to be controlled. It conquered skepticism by existing....It spread too fast to think of taming it into the more mature, sedate “National Information Infrastructure” that the Clinton administration imagined....
Whenever throughout history we have opened a communications network or the franchise or literacy, reasonable people have worried about the consequences....
[While] openness is not always right...our prior experience seems to be that we are systematically better at seeing its dangers than its benefits....
Comment. This is a real phenomenon and "cultural agoraphobia" is a good term for it. I run across this systematic cognitive bias every day, in myself and others, even after 17 years of experience with the open web. Of course not every objection to openness is an example of cognitive bias. So the term will be more useful for anthropologists studying our culture, or historians looking back, than for advocates and activists. We still have to answer objections, not just explain them. But Boyle points out an important use for advocates and activists. If we understand cultural agoraphobia, we can warn policy-makers, the citizens who watch them, and ourselves, against its effects.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/07/2009 03:49:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
