Editorial

Abstract

Since the re-branding of Free Software into Open Source in 1998, ‘open’ has become the buzzword for all things progressive on and off the Internet. In every domain, we find initiatives with an ‘open’ in their name: Open Law, Open Hardware, Open Culture, Open Publishing, Open Access or Open Archives are just some of the many concepts which are being retooled to serve the more or less defined public good in the Information Society. Yet despite this new-found openness to the ‘open’ there is very little critical discussion on the expansion of openness as a concept to many different contexts, ranging from the board rooms of global corporations such as IBM to the temporary media centers of the anti-globalization activists. On the level of political theory, the most important formulation of openness remains that of Karl Popper, published over half a century ago, in 1946. Popper had a very clear idea what makes a society ‘open’ – an institutional mechanism to detect, discuss, and rectify its own inevitable errors. The billionaire financier George Soros popularized Popper’s notion of the ‘open society’ in the late 20th century. A more common source of conceptual heft for validating open is the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who juxtaposed the concept of a rhizomatic openness to the closure of branching and hierarchical structures. They were careful, however, to remind their readers that this was not a simple aesthetic or ethical choice. Yet, today the meaning of open’ is usually taken to be self-explanatory. In the same seemingly obvious way, ‘open’ always assumed to be a positive modifier, used indiscriminately and uncritically. With this issue of Media/Culture, we want to challenge the assumptions underlying the contemporary use of ‘open’ in technical, social and political discourse. Many of the seven essays in this issue take the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement as their point of reference but address questions of far more general nature. What is the impulse behind this sudden explosion of ‘openness’? What makes a community ‘open’? Is open really always better or does openness imply its own set of dangers and its own particular forms of exploitation? What are the aesthetics of openness? Together with the authors of the essays, we hope that this issue open m/c will start a more critical discussion of the concept of ‘openness’, so that we can assess its real potential without being sucked into yet another cycle of hype and disappointment. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stalder, Felix & Wark, McKenzie. "Editorial: Open" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/01_Editorial.php>. APA Style Stalder, F. & Wark, M. (2004, Jul1). Editorial: Open. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/01_Editorial.php>