Yet more thoughts about ideas

THE SPREAD OF IDEAS

Why do writers keep details of their current writing projects under wraps? Some will tell you it is because they know that other unscrupulous writers may steal their ideas and they fear this. But they often keep the details secret even from their friends, too, so they are either saying that their own friends cannot be trusted, or it is something else. Sometimes it will be because they don’t wish to lose the need to tell it through the writing by already having told it through the spoken word and I get that. But just maybe they also know a truth that is not often admitted when writers get all protective about their ideas. Read on.

I have just finished reading a very interesting article called ‘The Economy of Ideas’ by John Perry Barlow. The sub-heading for the article reads: ‘A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)’ It is articulate and intelligent and thoughtful and thought-provoking. I was put in touch with the article by a one-time librarian called Neil – thank you, Neil.

The article is apparently used in University Law courses throughout the US and it raises a lot of questions about where Copyright law is headed with the digital age upon us. Well worth a read, though it is many pages long and covers a lot of material. You can find it here (You can't just tap on the link I have highlighted. You have to copy and paste it into the bar above. I do not have the technical know-how to make it a direct link, sorry.): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas_pr.html

One of the things John Perry Barlow touches on is the nature of ideas. Ideas are viral, the article says. That is their nature and that dictates the way they behave. And thinking of ideas in this way makes a lot of sense. Ideas want to spread, the good ones more than the bad (the strong more than the weak… there’s a whole evolution thing going on with ideas, too.). When my cousin was growing up, David Bowie and Marc Bolan were new and big on the scene. I favoured the Marc Bolan look… a sort of glamorised hippy… but my cousin favoured the Bowie look (all that Ziggy androgynous thingy). I did find the Bowie look interesting, but not as interesting as my cousin. And he was not alone. He and thousands of others rushed off to the hairdressers to have their hair dyed and cut a la Ziggy and he started wearing make-up and girls’ clothes. The idea was to look like Bowie and he sort of did - he was tall and as thin as sticks... but even the small and the dumpy looked a little like Bowie, too. My cousin and all those others were infected with the Ziggy virus. Only when a cure was found (a new virus fighting off the old) were the girls’ clothes consigned to the bucket, and the girls’ make-up, too.

The point is that Bowie’s idea to dress and look in a certain way was contagious. Once it was ‘out there’ the idea spread and very quickly others were using his idea. That is the way of ideas. It maybe explains, amongst other things, why we have had a rash of teen vampire books and films recently – not just the exploitative nature of those industries but the infectious nature of a successful or good idea.

I went to see ‘Inception’ the other day. I thought it was brilliant and very clever. The specials were only marginally spoiled by having been so big a part of the trailer and thereby having lost a little of their wow factor when actually seeing them in the context of the film. The guy who made the film is being hailed as a highly original mind, and there is a lot about the film that is exciting and ‘new’. But there is equally stuff we have seen before. It is like the film has been infected with ideas from elsewhere. A train suddenly driving up a city-street; an eroding cliff-face, but the cliff is made of old and decaying buildings; the military style storming of a snow-bound bunker-style fortress – all of these, I think, I have seen before… but maybe the film is being cleverer than we think… because these things in the film are part of the dream sub-conscious of one of the characters… and we would expect these ‘outside’ ideas to have infected his way of dreaming in precisely this way and maybe that is what the film-maker is showing us: that ideas creep into our head from everywhere else and we can’t help that because it is done at the level of our sub-conscious as well as our conscious thinking.

And maybe writers know this at some level, and maybe they keep the details of their new writing projects secret for fear of infecting other creative minds and those other writers then writing something that explores the same ideas, those other writers (which includes friends) being unconscious in their use of the infecting idea, or if conscious then unable to not write about the same idea because it now infects all their thinking. Ideas are viral, and their nature cannot be legislated against - UK copyright law accepts this when it says that the order of words cannot be copied, but the idea can. They spread, that is what ideas do, that is what they thrive on... they want to be copied... and the only way you can stop them spreading is through isolation - keep them entirely to yourself... because once they are out there, they are beyond control.