Nobel Laureate Cries Freedom
Posted on July 4, 2006
Filed Under Insights |
I was in Dublin yesterday at the monthly SEED art-science salon. Harry Kroto - noble prize winner and chemist - gave a talk to about twenty five of us on how his interest in art led to scientific discovery and the Nobel prize. It may not be immediately obvious why that is important to the content world.
First Kroto is a deeply modest individual. Asked for his views on the origins of creativity he mumbled a few things but essentially said: Freedom.
Freedom is not a concept that the builders of knowledge systems understand. It’s always been a bugbear of mine that they end of producing silos and straight jackets when what we all need is more snooze time. OK that’s a bit facetious but Kroto was makig the point that inspiration emerges from interest.
As we move towards a creative society we need to think more about our relationship with information systems. One of the happiest developments of recent years is the tag cloud, or simply weighted aggregates of keywords that people believe describe their documents. Much better than old Dublin core and other rigid document descriptions.
We still operate by and large in the old computing domain where the bulk of our efforts are exended on making sure exceptional events are coded out of a system. The highly structured world we enter when we turn on a PC does nothing for the real business of invention.
Happily people in networks now sit on top of these rigid structures and they do the most absurd things like watching IPTV outakes of a girl putting her socks on. That’s more like it.
We need a better appreciation of how ideas can better translate into action in the creative future but it also helps to understand that we are in denial about freedom. We don’t say what we think or what we want to and we don’t switch the inner dialogue onto idle often enough.
At least that’s the wisdom I brought away from Harry’s talk.
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