2005-04-27
The bell tower
A few summers back, when my wife turned a good round number of years, I commemorated the occasion by building her a tower in a cow pasture on the island of Gotland. The tower, which is approximately 10 meters tall supports a bevy of wind chimes, weighing together several hundred kilos. The chimes which are iron piping tuned to the intervals of a C major 9 chord, hang from the tower top suspended on chains and wires.
Our summer house that looks out over my wife’s birthday present happens to be situated in one of the windiest areas of Sweden; inevitably some hours of my vacation must be reserved for countering the effects of winter storms on dislodged pieces of both tower and house.
I was shopping for some replacement parts at the local hardware store recently, and I asked how many kilos a particular gauge of wire would hold for.
Oh it will hold for a great deal, said the salesperson.
Yeah I’m sure, but isn’t there some system of measurement which states how strong these different wires are. Cows walk under our tower and I really want to be on the safe side.
I see, you are looking for a tested wire – you are looking for wire that costs 4 times more than these here. But we don’t carry them – no one bothers with that sort of thing – the're not worth the extra cost.
I don’t want to pay four times more either – if you can just give me some indication of how strong these wires are and what they will hold for...
These are strong wires. How heavy are your chimes? ... No problem these will do just fine.
Now, If you were to wander about on the farms of this Baltic island you would see wires put to all kinds of uses; binding things together, holding things up, tying things down. What wire, rope or chain to use in what situation, is the kind of tacit knowledge that abounds in agricultural communities: There is a way to do things – the normal way to do things, honed and sharpened by generations of farmers and adjusted here and there for changes in materials and circumstances. an evolutionary collective judgement of reliability and performance: a reputational system.
This knowledge of the normal way to do things has two depths. Firstly, there is the direct solution to a specific problem, and then there is the knowledge that there is a normal way of doing something, and, well, if I don’t know – one of my neighbours will. “In this sort of situation we normally use this type of wire, which we normally buy at Norby’s hardware store, where they normally sell reliable products.”
The everyday this-is-what-we-use wire and the high-priced tested&guaranteed wire represent social capital working in two different ways; one, a formal network of legally enforced responsibility and liability, and two, a loose, unwritten reputation-based pool of common knowledge. Both influence each other and sometimes the boundaries between them might not always be clear.
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