- Title
- Inventions are networks: fostering the liminal play of ideas
- Creator
- Lowry, Sean
- Relation
- Ecologies of Invention p. 138-146
- Relation
- http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/sup/9781743323571
- Publisher
- Sydney University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- It is not simply that networks enable invention. Inventions are in themselves networks. Inventions do not arrive in the world autonomously and fully realised. By contrast, novel devices, methods, concepts, compositions and processes are invariably formed as contextually dependent adaptations, improvements or hybrid manifestations of pre-existing webs of devices, methods, concepts, compositions and processes. Moreover, the meaningful recognition of any invention's value is also contingent upon pre-existing networks of contextual relations. Consequently, this double state of dependency upon networks implies that all inventiveness is at least indirectly collaborative. This collaborative spirit of inventiveness roundly encapsulates the human ability to take existing objects and ideas and combine or re purpose them in new ways. Given that this process can occur in both geographically distant real time and across historically asynchronous moments, digital networks are clearly capable of radically accelerating the mating of ideas. Our urge to participate and collaborate within and across networks is being fundamentally reinvented within an ethos of the digital. This chapter will discuss various ways in which global networks are liminally expanding and re-choreographing the irresolvable yet productive tensions between individual and collective interests that underpin cultural change, and therefore, by extension, drive invention.
- Subject
- networks; inventions; ideas
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1341002
- Identifier
- uon:28632
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781743323571
- Language
- eng
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