by: Stephen Weber

I cannot take credit for the title of this commentary.  The word was coined by a man (whose name I have forgotten) who spoke in a seminar at Urbana this year.  His seminar was on reaching the (post)modern world.

Many of us have heard at one time or another, the expression “Your life is an open book.”  Some people have thought of our lives as greatly affected by the world around us.  Similar to a published work, our lives were (and by some still are) considered open books written by someone else: society, God, whoever.

Today we have a new kind of publication on the writing scene: the Wiki.  A Wiki is an area where anyone can write.  It is not about what someone else has contributed, but about what you can contribute.  This model is all about us as individuals being able to publish our own content.

“You life is an open Wiki.”   Instead of our lives being written by someone else, under the rules and/or guidance of a higher (editorial) power, we now find ourselves “masters of our own destiny.”  We are the authors and the editors, we make the rules.

What does it look like when we make the rules?  Well, we will quickly find that our contributions go only to ourselves and are unheeded by others.  With each one editing their lives as they go, we begin to find inconsistencies.  We begin to find that while I may have written that God created, the next person may not have written a definition for God at all.  Communication breaks down, and it is up to me to restore it if I want others to know the truth.

WikiWorld resists the concept of ‘truth’.  I can write on my own Wiki, thank you very much.  We must first understand the way the other person is thinking before we can show them that their system is flawed and inconsistent.  Since each one is different, we must get to them on a personal level to communicate.  We cannot ‘mass witness’.

Some call it relativism.  Some call it the death of conscience.  Whatever we call it, our society and our witness take place within WikiWorld.  We must understand and identify with the individuals it creates.