My favourite story as a child was one of Dr Seuss’s stories was The Glunk That Got Thunk. I have been trying and trying to find this and when I noticed a whole swag of Seuss books in the local bookshop, I went on a search to find that story. Thanks to the glory that is the Intarweb, I managed to find out that it’s one of the stories in I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today And Other Stories. It’s one of the ‘Other Stories’.

But what was it about that story that so entranced me as a child. One thing is that the lead character is a female, a very imaginative individual (although the story is narrated by her brother). It’s a story about the power of our imaginations, that we can imagine anything, from friendly little things to a Glunk.

Now the Glunk wasn’t quite that friendly and got up to all sorts of mischief, including long distance calls to his mother to share his recipe for Glunker Stew[1]. Try though she might, the young girl cannot Unthunk the Glunk. Of course, as a story of the 1960’s, the hero of the story is actually the narrator, the brother. He manages to help her finally Unthunk the Glunk.

In my search for this book, I came across a number of different interpretations, one of which was that too much imagination can be a bad thing, but I always believed that it was a story about the Power of Imagination and my reading of it is that there is even more Power in Collective Imagination.

So what does this have to do with New Media?

Well, I’m glad you asked. You see, I do spend quite a bit of time reading lots of stuff on the web[2]. And in many of the stories, there’s this belief that there is power in collaborative endeavours.  One of the most pervasive occurrences of the Internet era is the shifts in process that allow collaboration and sharing. Indeed the foundation upon which the World Wide Web was based is the idea of allowing multiple people access to a shared repository of information (Berners-Lee, 1990).

From this foundation, which is based upon sharing, we can envisage greater collectives.  Not the Borgian style collective of the Star Trek universe, but sharing ideals and ideas (via websites and blogs, no less).  So here we are, with a collective imagination of unforeseen power and it’s being broken.  I think there are people out there actively trying to unthunk the internet.  People like the MPAA and the RIAA (and here in Australia, we have ARIA and MIPI et al).  They want to unthink the sharing capabilities that we possess.  All in the name of protecting copyright.

But there’s a problem with their imaginative abilities.  And I don’t think their unthunking abilities can equal the power of the collective imagination of connected people.  Forget the fact that they don’t want us to place shift nor time shift[3]); what they don’t realise (or maybe they do and dismantling the internet is what they are actually aiming for) is that as soon as we have access to something, there is a copy of it.  We cannot view, listen, read, hear, see, think, click, load, indeed any activity done on a computer as each activity is an act of copying.

Getting back to the Glunk.  The internet (and maybe even the personal computer) is a Glunk in the eyes of the traditional distributors of media (and just try to distribute without copying, oh, but they own the copyright, not the artists, funnily enough).  They are desperately trying to unthink it.  They have achieved an incredible amount towards this goal, (eg the DMCA, Canadian Copyright reforms deforms, the rewriting of Australian copyright, ad nauseum).  They are really trying to break the internet and getting ISPs on board to do their dirty work (see multiple posts at Techdirt tagged under recording industry).

But for the rest of us, I think the traditional distributors are a Glunk that got thunk by artists[4], some of whom still seem to believe it’s a fuzzy friendly thing, not the ravenous beast that it is.  Ironically, it seems to be feeding off the morals of various governments as well as a collective dis-imagining made possible only by a lack of critical foresight.

References

Berners-Lee, T., 1990, Information Management: A Proposal, http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal-msw.html [Accessed: September 3, 2006]

Seuss, D. I can Lick 30 Tigers Today! And Other Stories. Collins, 1969

1. Glunker Stew seems to be a bizarre concoction that only a Glunk could like [↩]
2. otherwise known as faffing around [↩]
3. Place shifting includes putting things on your iPod; Time shifting includes recording things on video (either disk or tape [↩]
4. This may be a huge assumption on my part, but I wasn’t around when it started, so I could be making everything up. [↩]