elsewhere, is the function of persuasion.3 It is contingent on the rhetorical situation, with its exigencies, participants, and constraints. For this reason, expertise depends on continuously ongoing rhetorical invention. On a global scale, the invention of expertise has accelerated exponentially in the last three decades, enrolling many of us in the coordinated and contested production of stuff, a term that I take quite seriously and later define in detail. Connected by microelectronic technologies and infrastructures, we produce digital materials and imprints, inventing ourselves as we engage with one another. Thus, while pundits on television may be experts in whatever subject they are asked to comment on, they are not the only ones who constitute their lived experiences as an information resource to define themselves relationally. Many if not most of us do so. An understanding of expertise as the rhetorical invention of everyday hermeneutics recognizes that “expertise” may be used as a critical lens even when no one in the room has used “the e word.” Expertise, in short, is knowledge living its rhetorical life. What, then, is the character of this life in the present moment? What are its outcomes?
This book provides a rhetorical analysis of what it means to know things and to make things in the digital commons, which for my purposes is an active aggregate of three components: humans, networks, and cultural resources. Later in the introduction I explain each of these components, having first introduced the natural and cultural commons for historical and theoretical reference. First, however, I want to drop anchor by noting that the codependence of knowing and making has long been a subject of interest to rhetorical theorists. For the fifth-century Sophist Protagoras, for example, the homo mensura thesis asserts that humans are the measure of all things, and even more fundamentally, that all things that humans recognize as measurable (or, indeed, knowable) are invented in the moment of recognition.4 In this moment, the thing to which the experiencer attributes the experience is made, as is knowledge of it. Similarly, for the Enlightenment thinker Giambattista Vico, the verum factum principle establishes that what is true is invented rather than, as the Cartesians would have it, discovered. The invention itself, according to Vico, produces knowledge that might be called “true.”5 Thus, when we have “knowledge,” we have the substance of our own rhetorical productivity. With a leap from eighteenth-century Naples into the United States of the late 1970s, when the epistemic functions of rhetoric became the center of disciplinary attention, we find a conversation about the productive discourses of knowing that still continues. We recognize, too, looking back at the many years between Vico and Robert L. Scott, that compared to classical and premodern studies of rhetoric, modern theories are in general less emphatic about the connection between knowing and making, or epistemology and invention6—that is, until the discourses of scientific inquiry again become an object of rhetorical analysis. To wit, rhetoricians have long been intrigued by the symbolic activities through which experience becomes knowledge, knowledge gets authenticated as true, and true knowledge bestows authority in a way that might be labeled “expertise.”
As I begin this book with the great theorists of rhetorical epistemology, I am compelled to offer a slightly different point of view as well, one that also informs my thinking. Protagoras and Vico, however potent their theories of productive knowledge, must be read as partial rather than sufficient. As anthropologists and ethnographers know, there are numerous examples from around the world of how knowledge and experiences are created, literally woven into cultural artifacts. They are made into tangible knowledge through creative activity. When a tapestry or a basket tells the story of a people’s struggles and triumphs, this, too, is an iteration of the verum factum and homo mensura theses. Those who weave them have expertise, not only in the procedures of making crafts but also in the subject of their collective history. They make the truth as far as their communities are concerned. I would hardly be the first to call them the people’s historians. Attending to their productivity, their epistemic methods, and their cultural function is imperative for contextualizing networked expertise. With these creators in mind, it becomes possible to ask questions about how, where, and by whom expertise is generated, not far away and long ago but here and now, in the technological paradigm that Manuel Castells calls “informationalism.”7 And it becomes possible to look not only to baskets but also virtual artifacts. My point—which is simply to set the contours for the introduction—is that in the contemporary moment, analyzing the productivity of expertise requires a willingness to consider capaciously not only the scientific and professional but also the amateur and quotidian. I also examine how common(s)-ality is an outcome of networked living and the artifacts that this living generates.
The purpose of this book is to offer the concept of the gifting logos to account for how expertise in the digital commons integrates three rhetorical practices: knowing, making, and gifting. What follows are three case studies: first, a study of the infrastructural commons, specifically the Creative Commons suite of licenses; second, the archival commons, specifically the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine; and third, the “Pirate Party,” which rose to prominence in Sweden in 2006, and which I refer to as the popular commons. Through these case studies I demonstrate that expertise functions as, and indeed is, a gifting logos, and that the gifting logos makes three rhetorical practices inextricable:
• the invention of cultural materials such as text, music, film, photography, software, and computer code;
• the imbuing or encoding of the materials with the creator’s lived experience, interpretations, and knowledge; and
• the constitution and dissemination of the materials as gifts.
These rhetorical processes are arranged sequentially in analog theories of cultural production. For example, someone with extensive knowledge of penguin habitats might make a film about it, then give that film to the Public Broadcasting System. A person with knowledge of computer science might write a program and then give it away in the spirit of open source ethics. From a slightly different angle, we might imagine someone with firsthand knowledge of chronic illness who composes music about the experience, and then, again, gives the music away. What I am proposing with the concept of the gifting logos is to conceive of the three rhetorical processes as one practice. The making, the knowing, and the giving are all constructed by participants in the digital commons as a complex activity, specifically one that is identifiable as expertise, or, more awkwardly, “expertising.”
Digitally networked expertising is different from the sequential models previously mentioned. In those models, expertise is a finished product that is transmitted through channels that keep it intact. The product moves from an expert to laypersons, consumers, clients, or audiences. Continuous productivity is not in focus in these conventional models, nor is the infrastructure that facilitates productivity or the common life of which productivity is a feature. Traditional analog models of expertise are constrained in their ability to understand individual agents in terms of multiple functions, experiences, and investments. They see expertise as distinguishable from ordinary life and everyday habits, and they tend to define expertise almost exclusively as a market commodity aligned with purchasing power. From this point of view, expertise operates through formal binaries: having and not having, being and not being, selling and buying. By contrast, digital expertising places the meaningful aspect of expertise on various knowing activities in the participle form, which is to say as continuous. Rhetorical activities of knowing and making are inseparable from one another, and even though their products may be bought and sold (as in the analog case), they may alternatively be constituted through the logos of gifting. My intention is to illuminate how these activities work rhetorically and what their outcomes are. Put simply, my contention is that there are things about expertise in a digital context that we cannot recognize without considering knowing-making-gifting as integrated, including and especially in the networked life of an emerging commons. The famous gifting theorist Lewis Hyde argues that analyses of scientific collaboration must recognize “the emergence of community through the circulation of knowledge as gift.”8 My ambition is to extend the idea of “knowledge as gift” to include not only the scientific community but also the multitude of active participants in the digital commons. What is at stake in this book is the question of what we might learn about the digital commons if we consider expertise
