A Little Mouse and A Little Bird

Classes continue. In my Information Culture - Digital Economy class, a nominal focus of this blog, we're reading Lessig's book Free Culture (which you can buy here or, um, get here for free). What a terribly exciting document. Did you know that Big Media is inexorably buying up *every possible means* of cultural expression? And that pretty soon every type of culture will be copy-protected by those same big conglomerate corporations? (Full disclosure: I am currently entertaining a buyout offer from Bertelsmann A.G. I'll lay all the cards on the table: it's in the scores of dollars. I mean, you try to withstand these people, but it's a losing game, OK? At some point we all have to grow up and take the offer that's given to us. And maybe now they'll call off their Random House goons--that Cormac McCarthy scares me...and I don't know if it's him or Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie who keeps calling and not saying anything when I pick up, but I get the message, all right? I'm getting on board.)

In short, my friends, as 2003 dawns upon us it looks like we may be in for some grim times indeed.

Oh, wait! It's not 2003 at all, is it?!? Whew. Now we have the whole relevant-search thing and easy ways of posting stuff online, don't we? Go hack your iPod, kids.

Lessig's argument is, in essence, that copyright and intellectual property rights are currently being overextended to the detriment of cultural production as a whole. He advanced this argument in the Mickey Mouse case before the Supreme Court. He is broadly right, I think, in that there's something more than a little unsavory about tiny groups of greedheads convincing government to abandon its stated principles (everyone expected a conservative Court to throw out copyright extensions) and pass blatantly favorable special-interest laws. But at some level, I have to ask "So what?" So the Mouse gets protected for another twenty years--so what? Think up your own damn character, people. And stop buying the videos and toys and clothes and "theme park experiences" and other associated crap for your kids. (It has also come to my attention that there are actually adults who spend vacation money on Disney. [No, you don't get a link.] Quite simply, this is a totally indefensible act of cultural pollution--and is so ridiculous and sad that it makes my knees wobble in despair. Go here. Or here. And do adult stuff.)

Does lack of access to Mickey Mouse stifle cultural creativity? Not in any significant way, far's I can see. In fact, his success seems to have encouraged a great flowering of animated creativity--even now, the trope of a sly or funny animal being the star of a cartoon is so deeply ingrained that it seems it was always this way...but it didn't have to be, you know. And you can't trademark that sort of thing.

In fact, we might even want to increase copyright control. This might stem the tidal wave of crappy remakes and limp "remixes" that have essentially destroyed American pop. I'm not going to link to any examples of that either. But I'm calling you out, Rhianna. (God. Even her *name* is a remix, or re-Nicks.)

In short, Lessig's book already seems a little dated (and sometimes a lot dated): with the sort of vertiginous swoop that will happen more and more often in the next few decades, the world (which will become increasingly synonymous with the Internet) has moved on. Too easy to find stuff, too easy to post stuff, no real way to stomp out a million copyright infringements (::cough::), the increasing irrelevance of a lot of Big Media anyway. Mickey and friends are priced on scarcity--they're priced as if they're the only game in town, which made a lot more sense even a decade ago--and that's just not as valuable as it used to be. There are too many options, and most of them aren't options Lessig has heard of. In one particular howler, he bemoans the increasing scarcity of independent television producers--now the networks run most production companies. On the face of it, this looks terrible--all those presumably interesting and fresh perspectives throttled in the cradle like the little princes. On the other hand, this is the intellectual equivalent of worrying that American children aren't getting enough bacon in their diets. Feed them something else.

Which brings us to the real danger--which I will call "red-state syndrome" in the sort of offhanded slur that the Internet is great for. I think that Lessig's grim future of corporate-controlled content and restricted creativity may in fact come to pass, just in states that (coincidentally. Really) are red on the political map. In other words, just as people in the flyover states are the ones buying processed foods and bake mixes and stuff in cans--all the crap in the middle of the grocery store--they seem to be the ones scarfing up the processed Disney culture, the carefully-constructed pop sensations, and so forth. Of course the country's deliciously crispy crust is helping--pop is pop because it's popular--but there's a lot of additional options that the kid in Kansas just never sees. Until he flees the farm for a life of danger in the big city. But that's another problem.

In other news, a weekly response paper was returned with the comments "Entertaining--but not, perhaps, substantive." I reread the paper. This was in fact true. Sorry, Kathryn. In fact, that "perhaps" was a kindness I did not deserve. I'd meant to make a point about the articles on searching we'd read--that the mere juxtaposition of information often makes us see significance where there isn't any, necessarily, or not the significance we see, and that in turn has some real implications for modeling information gathering and search behavior. Instead I got carried off by my metaphor. Not that that ever happens to me. You can read the paper here. And, yes, there's a Solomonic connection to hoopoes.