In the cultural ecosystem every one of us is a consumer as well as a producer of knowledge and culture. This is as true of a 3rd millenium BCE Sumerian farmer as a 21st century American graduate student. Both may consume knowledge from (religious/academic) authorities, swap jokes and gossip with peers, and pass professional information on to students/children.

The main difference I see between their positions on the cultural/knowledge food chain is that we and our contemporaries have access to more sources and the potential for a larger audience. While the Sumerian farmer probably never had an audience larger than his neighbors and extended family (unless he came up with a great joke or story that eventually passed by word of mouth across the empire), in our day a teen in Quebec can post a video of himself spasmodically waving around a faux light saber and become world famous in days.

Cultural production has always been pyramid-shaped: there are always far more consumers than there are producers of knowledge. At the apex, you have those who generate original content: the Francis Cricks, Madonnas, Judith Butlers, Joseph Stalins, Mohandas Gandhis and William Gibsons of the world. The next tier down builds on or responds to those on the top tier.

The further downstream we go, the more we find people riffing on the content of the primary producers or working in an environment dominated by those on top. Look at physics in the wake of Albert Einstein or our postmodern philosophy, religion, literary criticism and pop-art in the aftermath of Derrida’s deconstruction. You could argue that the Manhattan Project and Hitler’s Final Solution were two of the most influential cultural productions of the 20th century, albeit written in fire and blood instead of ink or paint.

Even in our Web 2.0 society this hierarchy holds true, though the pyramid may be flatter than in the past. Now anyone with access to the Internet has the possibility of connecting to a global audience. Tags, reviews, social networking sites and open source collaboration allow large groups of people to work together to produce influential content in aggregate.

For the most part, however, a handful of people produce the unique content that everyone else builds on and consumes. Blogs seem to occupy the middle spot in the hierarchy–their media reviews, editorializing, commentary, raising awareness for the most part are the simultaneous creation and consumption of culture and information.

This way of looking at the world of information changes the way that I think about my own role as a cultural producer/consumer. I find that I want to produce more and consume less. I want to create original works, or at least unique riffs on significant content. I want to make this world a better place, and I want my main contributions to be my ideas and stories. I am a better communicator and storyteller than I am a laborer, programmer, or volunteer (perhaps even better than I am a father, friend, son, brother, though I won’t abandon my efforts in these roles).

I’m still spinning my wheels on these concepts (expect another post or two on the topic later this week), but I’m alternately inspired by this vision of how I can transform the world and troubled by the elitism that underlies it. What do you all think? Does this description fit your view of culture and knowledge production?