Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 2 Mere Copyists

CH 2: “Mere Copyists”

In photography, photogs are allowed to capture anything in the public space (Copyright:public domain)

"For just as there is a grammar for the written word, so, too, is there one for media. And just as kids learn how to write by writing lots of terrible prose, kids learn how to write media by constructing lots of (at least at first) terrible media... One learns to write by writing and then reflecting upon what one has written. One learns to write with images by making them and then reflecting upon what one has created." (36.) Media Literacy

Elizabeth Daley: 'From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.'

"'Read-only.' Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century" (37). 

"Education, Daley explained, is about giving students a way of “constructing meaning.” To say that that means just writing is like saying teaching writing

is only about teaching kids how to spell" (39).

"[Blogs] are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have. That’s a strong statement. Yet it says as much about our democracy as it does about blogs. This is the part of America that is most difficult for those of us who love America to accept: Our democracy has atrophied" (41). (juries)..."But for most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place for “democratic deliberation” to occur" (42).

Blogs vs. Mainstream media: "This different cycle is possible because the same commercial pressures don’t exist with blogs as with other ventures. Television and newspapers are commercial entities.They must work to keep attention. If they lose readers, they lose revenue. Like sharks, they must move on.
But bloggers don’t have a similar constraint. They can obsess, they can focus, they can get serious. If a particular blogger writes a particularly interesting story, more and more people link to that story. And as
the number of links to a particular story increases, it rises in the ranks of stories. People read what is popular; what is popular has been selected by a very democratic process of peer-generated rankings" (43). "Blog space gives amateurs a way to enter the debate—“amateur” not in the sense of inexperienced, but in the sense of an Olympic athlete, meaning not paid by anyone to give their reports" (44).


"But it affects democracy in another way as well. As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues.... it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy" (45).


"...tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you’re doing in your garage" (46). We used to tinker with our cars, small electronics, alone in our rooms. Now, when we tinker with things like open source code (free software or open-source software (FS/OSS)) we are letting others all over the Net see our work... creating a "community platform."