As in: Thinking

Someone on Writing and the Digital Life recently made the suggestion that the early conception of cyberspace was much like the early conception of the American West, and its settlement was not unlike the Gold Rush. Following that analogy, I said:

A key emergence, for me anyhow, of digital culture is the "creative commons" movement. Perhaps the Manifest Destiny metaphor applies to the digital world in this context as well. To whit: as the American West was settled, divided, and deeded, people began to realize that despite its size, the resources of North America were not limitless. Those who enjoyed the open, wild spaces of 'nature' began to work to solidify protections for that wild space. The national park system emerged. Similarly, as the digital realm has been 'settled' and deeded, people began to realize that a resource formerly taken for granted (the public domain) was being eroded by the expanded copyright protections brought into law as part of the digital age (see Lessig's FREE CULTURE for a careful delination of this history). In response, the GNU public license and the creative commons movement each work to secure a space in which the public can still enjoy the 'natural wildness' of the digital age. I'm certainly romanticising the National Parks system, but the analogy works for me.

I like this analogy a lot--it encapsulates, for me, the relationship between corporate use of digital spaces and the resultant legal tomfoolery regarding things like copyright. At the same time, I dislike this analogy because I dislike the idea of the public domain being in the position of the Parks system, which we have seen only survives as long as it's actively protected. What would the digital analogue of exploratory drilling in Alaska be? The re-sale of public-domain copyrights to private corporations? Ugh.

Posted by briley at June 29, 2005 7:41 AM