Tuesday, May 22

open content

I have just read a MACD Dissertaion by Tobias Lee. Titled Copyleft...he traces the origins of copyright laws and presses that The Open Content Model as a from of collective practice is invaluable for sharing ideas and principals for the development of art practice. Tobias is Vj, hacker, and stencil artist and promotes collective and subversive pratices. Currently residing in London.

I have pasted the closing statement of this paper.

"Today, as more and more people are becoming increasingly technologically empowered with micro processors embedded in everything from the mobile phone to the kitchen fridge and more open information is published online, people are increasingly breaking away from traditional houses of learning. For example, with respect to programming, simply watching other programmers at work can be much more rewarding and affordable than the conventional method of attending a computer science course. Each year as university fees increase and grants all but disappear more and more people will opt for this pathway for their education, working collectively on projects and taking a more hands on approach without hierarchy. Learning on the job with full team cooperation and a common goal for all those involved is becoming more and more appealing; essentially what we are seeing is a return to the days of apprenticeships.

This collective effort is the only real chance we have of reclaiming not only the internet and returning it to its original state, that of the public domain, but also of information and its democratic dissemination. It is important to remember that the vast majority of computer networks are private and closed, owned and controlled for financial gain by powerful multi-national companies. Commercial and civil networks did manage to co-exist for many years but the original distributed power structure of the net has slowly but surely been eroded ever since the arrival of Mosaic [ [i] ] in 1993. No sooner was the net able to show its commercial potential as a multimedia platform than the corporations quite simply smelt the money and closed in around it, disregarding its social significance. Add to this the growing digitalization and globalization of many sectors of the world economy and the result is a diminishing public space and the over-regulation of content.

We must innovate and begin to think about how we can regulate rather than be regulated by these big conglomerates, build homes in the ether where we can accommodate and educate the multiplicity of public interests and defend ourselves against the overwhelming influence these corporate players have on our lives."

1 comment:

Luke Munn said...

Interesting article Naomi, particularly the paragraph on programmers 'working' as opposed to 'learning' at a university. I've heard of a few stories of coders developing open source plugins on their own, with the official company/developer eventually noticing and hiring them.

To enhance your post a little, you might want to link to more information on Tobias, include some images, and "tag" your post with some keywords so others can find it later. Thanks for contributing. ;-)