Free Culture

After reading the Intro and first chapter of Lessig, L. (2004). "Free Culture.", I have been trying to understnad exactly what "free culture" means. I can't quite grasp what it is that makes a cultural item susceptible to be revised, re-mixed, and reused. While I wait for additional light on this, this book reminded me of two things: first, Día de muertos and, second, Taylor Swift. 

Back in 2013, Disney tried to trademark the Mexican cultural holiday popularly knows as Día de muertos. Lalo Alcaraz, an American cartoonist from San Diego, CA, responded to Disney's attempt with "Muerto Mouse." The Latino community joined to protest Disney's attempt, and Disney backed out. This led Disney to hire cultural consultants and the result was the movie Coco.

Then, Taylor Swift. She came to mind as an example of how big companies are often trying to protect their own interests and gains, not necesarily the artists'. Taylor started re-recording her old albums in an effort to regain control of her songs. Before she re-recorded these albums, the only possessed the rights to her lyrics and music, but not to the recordings. By doing this, re regained creative and economic control of her art.

Tensions

Tensions have been a theme for me in the last several months, those tensions found their way into some of the conversations we had in class today. I read a chapter about the "Internet Threat" (Chapter 4), and how efforts to protect creative work and innovations from piracy the internet became overprotected and gave place to digital copyright. While creative work and innovations are thus better protected, they also suffer because of the those same protections. 

Could we conceive a world without these tensions? Could protections only protect and cause no harm? Would we be more creative or more innovative without restrictions? Are we maybe more creative and more innovative because of those restrictions? Maybe learning and creativity are enhanced when faced with imposed boundaries that force us to find alternative ways to do things?

Whatever the case, solutions (like copyright) are always partial and temporary in a way; they easily become obsolete, or at least insufficient, and in need to be updated. 

Free vs. Open

 I'm taking a class called "Introduction to Open Education" and what in my mind was a somewhat simple, and very needed, concept of "Education for all!" is becoming a very complex web of interconnected pieces that make Education for all less straightfoward than I was originally conceiving it to be. (Also, yes, I have a tendency to write very long sentences. You can thank Spanish for that.)

While I have very strong feelings and opinions in favor of education that is accessible to everyone, I am still forming my opinions on what Free and Open education mean. Fro my opinions to be respectable, they need to be informed; and I am beginning this journey of learning about what free and/or open education mean. 

Last week, I read Richard Stallman's article "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software." I found it very compelling, especially as someone who loves words and can talk about words and their nuanced meanings for hours (who am I kidding? For days, weeks, even years!) One of Stallman's arguments is that "open" misses the point because it doesn't put the emphasis on freedom. He sees a big disadvantage in people bringing their own ideas, some of them reductive, about what the term "open" is referring to. You can go to the article to read his ideas in detail. I'm not going to do that here. 

The only thing that I'll add to the conversation today is that people bringing their own ideas or preconceptions of what words mean and how they are being used is inevitable. I think it would be naive to expect the systematization of a term of phrase to solve this "problem" once and for all. Languages, and their words, are living things that will constantly change, and evolve (some may even say "devolve") and transform and expand and reduce. We probably will need to establish our working definitions every single time that we use those terms in a new setting. And we need to remain open to keep defining them, and explaining what we mean when we use them, and allowing them to expand and grow as ours worlds expand and grow.