Household Opera: What Renaissance humanists and Star Trek fans have in common
This week’s readings for my Digital Libraries class turned out to be some of my favorites of the term so far. Favorite #1: “The Social Life of Documents,” by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, an essay that later became part of The Social Life of Information. Here’s the part that caught my interest:
The sociologist Anselm Strauss explored the way new forms of document allowed new forms of community (or as he calls them, “social worlds”) to come into existence. His work predates the proliferation of computers and so provides an interesting view of the way other developing technologies (copiers, faxes, and so forth) supported social relations in new ways. In particular, new media allowed small communities (enthusiasts of exotic breeds of birds or antique motorcycles) to form though their members were often few, and those few spread over large distances.
These groups can look surprisingly like modern equivalents of the scholarly communities that formed throughout the world in the Renaissance. These too were held together by common interests and shared communications. The letters circulating among the Fellows of the Royal Society in England formed the prototype for scientific journals, which still bind intellectual communities together. …cont…

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