ABSTRACT
Recently both business strategies and public-service thinking have stressed the need for organisations, governments and communities to evolve models of innovation that go beyond the closed expert process of the literate-industrial era. YouTube allows everyone to perform their own ‘bardic function’. With other social network enterprises, both commercial and community-based, it is a practical experiment in what a ‘bottom-up’ model of a ‘bardic’ system might look like in a technologically enabled culture. Human language is the primary model for this dynamic process of individuated productivity and action within an open complex system. The models that the network and scientists are coming up with look like language-models: a system in which nodes and relationships interconnect in an open complex network, coordinated by relatively few major hubs or ‘institutions of language’ including media organisations. When modelled mathematically, culture emerges not in structured opposition to economics but as part of the same coordinated network. YouTube is one such network.
