[(Open Source Democracy: How Online Communication is Changing Offline Politics)] [Author: Douglas Rushkoff] published on

by Douglas Rushkoff

An Excerpt from the book-Chapter 1 From Moses to demystifying the storytelling and taking controlWe are living in a world of stories. We can't help but use narrativesto understand the events that occur around us. The unpredictability ofnature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships ledhuman beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives thatdescribed the patterns underlying the movements of these forces.Although we like to believe that primitive people actually believedthe myths they created about everything, from the weather to theafterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding thatearly religions were understood much more metaphorically than weunderstand religion today. As Karen Armstrong explains in A History ofGod1, and countless other religious historians and philosophers fromMaimonides to Freud have begged us to understand, the ancients didn'tbelieve that the wind or rain were gods. They invented characterswhose personalities reflected the properties of these elements. Thecharacters and their stories served more as ways of remembering thatit would be cold for four months before spring returns than asgenuinely accepted explanations for nature's changes. The people wereactively, and quite self-consciously, anthropomorphizing the forces ofnature.

Genres: Politics

Paperback

First published October 6, 2003

About the author

Douglas Rushkoff is a New York-based writer, columnist and lecturer on technology, media and popular culture.

Reviews

[Dayal · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very nice little book that takes you for a stroll through history leading to today's (or maybe tomorrow's) open source democracy. I advise it to all!

A note for mathematicians (and those that are bothered by approximative\inaccurate popular science):
As a mathematician, I was frustrated, as always, by the many wrong claims made when trying to use mathematical notions as a comparison\example. This always happens, but surely could be avoided if authors stuck to what they know, or if they found\had a friendly mathematician to talk to.

[LaanSiBB]

This book is more like a poem written in the early internet age, in which scientific analyses are loose with a lot of leftist reflections. Though, still an interesting read to compare with current digital governance movement, where state power has already started adopting technology and emerge with democratic need.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Available for free via Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10753

[Rahenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book shows how new type of flat organisation can emerge by referring to how software developers created the open source movement