Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons

Cognition is thinking, and the product of thinking is knowledge. Our species’ unique capacity for language empowered us to “mind-read” one another’s thoughts, creating and curating knowledge jointly through distributed, interactive cognition. The first and greatest cognitive revolution – the birth of language itself – took place about 300,000 years ago and created the Oral Tradition. Writing was the second revolution, 6000 years ago, creating the Written Record; print was the third, 600 years ago, creating the Published Archive. The fourth cognitive revolution is ongoing in our own era. With the invention of the Internet and the Web, humankind is on the verge of creating a Cognitive Commons – a global collaborative medium in which knowledge can be created and communicated at the speed of thought. Well, in the PostGutenberg era, even publishing one’s findings for those users whose institutions can afford to access them via subscription is no longer enough. Perhaps the best way to encapsulate contributions to the creation and curation of the Cognitive Commons is to have helped extend the Gutenberg era’s “publish or perish” mandate to the PostGutenberg era of “self-archive to flourish.”

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