Siva Vaidhyanathan
AFTERWORD: CRITICAL INFORMATION STUDIES
A bibliographic manifesto
* regulation of info through commerce, creativity and human affairs
* the great potential of Cultural Studies lies in its political commitment and its interdisciplinarity
* CIS takes into consideration: electronic voting, the state of libraries, the preservation of ancient cultural traditions, or markets for sheet music
4 fields of debate:
* the abilities and liberties to use, revise, criticize, and manipulate cultural texts, images, ideas, and information;
* the rights and abilities of users (or consumers or citizens) to alter the means and techniques through which cultural texts and information are rendered, displayed, and distributed;
* the relationship among information control, property rights, technologies, and social norms; and
* the cultural, political, social, and economic ramifications of global flows of culture and information
Swarhmore:
* memos distributed on sites, cease and desists letters followed, copyright laws challenged: "ck: to file a suit accusing the accuser of misrepresenting their
copyright claims." p5
* memos deemed important to public debate
Critical Theory:
* Critical Theory resists naked empiricism and positivism, and favors considerations of ‘flows’, ‘flux’, and‘process’ to explain human phenomena.
* an engagement with the empirical, the commercial, technical, and scientific
* CIS different but inspired CT
* Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
* difficulty in linking academia to real life concerns
* Benkler's ‘Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm’ (2002) - wide reaching on web and in print
Interogations:
* the commitment to moving beyond negative liberty and to promotion of semiotic democracy
* negative liberty: technology, democracy, and culture
* focus on users' rights: the legal space to use and re-use cultural material and information
* privacy - limits to personal expression
* positive liberty - scholarly; ‘open source’ software
* open journals - getting scholars to be more familiar with copyright laws and politics - retaining some of their rights and publishing under a cc license instead of trad. route