Right to Information and Privacy

Although it may not be spelled out in the Constitution as such, I believe that the right to information is vital for the functioning of a society that wishes to truly call itself free. For people to truly be able to act freely, make decisions on their own and really be independent human beings, they must have access to the information that allows them to do these things.

What about human beings in general, though, outside of governmental structure? Is access to information a fundamental human right? I still believe it is. After all, most of the ways information is restricted from people (censorship, private economic benefit, etc.) are constructions made either by humans or the government. We are only cutting ourselves or others off from information – there is nothing inherent in our being or in nature to say we shouldn’t have access to as much information as we want.

It is also true that with the flood of information we have these days that privacy seems to be slipping away. For a number of reasons, I think that individual privacy is something that people simply expect themselves to have less of today than they used to. I think this is a worrying trend. It may take more effort, and we may well have to take more of the responsibility of it into our own hands, but I think that every individual still has a right to privacy that should be maintained and respected. To put it bluntly, just because our ethics haven’t caught up to our technology doesn’t mean we should give up on privacy altogether.

Copyright

Copyright is a concept that, on a surface level, doesn’t seem all that difficult to deal with. Someone creates something and then they own it. Simple, right?

Not so much, unfortunately.

The primary issues with copyright stem from when one person tries to use another’s creations or ideas in his or her own work. It’s fairly easy to see that many of the best creative works come from building upon or using in some way someone else’s ideas. Therefore, if you have any respect for artistic freedom anyway, it’s fairly easy to agree that the use of other’s creations should be allowed, at least to some extent.

The problem comes from trying to define that extent. Essentially, creating laws regarding content use is trying to regulate creativity, which is obviously kind of difficult as every case will be somewhat different. This is not to say that I think regulating copyright is entirely bad, as it is certainly possible to rip off another work too heavily and there needs to be some control for that.

My personal stance on copyright laws is that they need to be fairly lax. Creativity needs to have freedom in order to create the best artistic product. While some control is needed, the law shouldn’t get in the way of artistic creation. Art in this work faces enough problems as it is. Unfortunately, with the huge influence large money-hungry corporations have on politics these days, I see money becoming the main factor in deciding copyright issues, not art, and this worries me because I think it has serious implications for what will be possible for future creators in this country.

Evil, Terrible, Corrupting Books of Doom

Looking through the list of most frequently challenged books was definitely surprising to me. Some of those listed are more obvious than others, but some I never even thought would be a problem to anyone. I’ve read quite a few of them myself, as well.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic controversial book because of some of the issues it deals with, but I don’t think that it’s anything that is too dangerous for today’s children (at least at a certain age) to deal with, as long as the context is explained and the book is discussed. It may be controversial, but it’s definitely a classic.

The fact that the Harry Potter series is on the list just makes absolutely no sense to me. There’s no logical reason whatsoever that the books should be banned based on their subject matter, save for the fact that some parts in the later books may be a bit scary or sad.

I was completely addicted to the Goosebumps series as a kid and I seem to have turned out all right. I had shelves of those things. Again, I don’t see what the problem is; they were simply mystery stories with a hint of the paranormal – nothing dangerous or even really controversial.

I’ve read others on the lists (A Wrinkle in Time, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, among others) and there are some that I haven’t but know about, but there are very few that I think have any reason to be on there (I will admit that I don’t think I’d want my children reading Sex by Madonna or Private Parts by Howard Stern).

The vast majority of these books don’t belong on this list and some are absolute classics that should be read by all children, not kept from them. Even the few that actually do contain subjects children shouldn’t see need to be kept from them by their parents, not by banning the books in the libraries, preventing anyone at all from reading them. Trying to get a book banned in a library is an extreme and unnecessary reaction. What these people should really be doing is either education parents or taking more responsibility for their own parenting.

Information as a Product

The economics behind information itself is something I had never really stopped to consider until reading this chapter, which is kind of strange considering how interested I am in technology - the Internet in particular. The two concepts do seem to fit together pretty well.

Obviously there has to be an economy for producing new information and there is an economy for putting the information in containers and selling those, but forming an economy around the information alone still seems somewhat foreign to me.

Maybe this can be explained by the fact that since I grew up with computers and the Internet, the idea of information as something freely available and easily sharable is somewhat ingrained into my way of thinking. Treating information, which is something intangible, the same as a product you’d buy off the shelf of a store (the details are different, obviously, but just as a general idea) seems not only unusual to me, but also perhaps kind of wrong.

With just a simple search term in Google you can find out just about anything you could want to know. The Internet, one of the only mediums that makes selling information outside of a container even possible, also renders the idea pretty much unnecessary by its very nature.

If you include intellectual property in your definition of information, then there are some decent examples of models selling information without a container. For instance, consider Apple and its iTunes store which sells music without any type of container and also includes protection (at least on most of its content for the time being) to keep the content exclusive to that service.

So, just because it seems strange and has never really occurred to me before doesn’t mean the idea can’t work, apparently.

Information Professions

When you think of the “traditional” information professions, such as curators, records managers, librarians, etc., the images that immediately comes to mind is probably that of an old man or woman working in solitude, obsessing over their collections of physical containers of information (such as books). It is easy to see how such professions could be regarded as outdated in today’s digital society.

In reality, however, these clichés of information professions are inaccurate and misleading. Jobs such as these may be shifting in their roles and definitions, but their functions are perhaps more important than ever. As more and more information becomes accessible through the Internet, in addition to the physical sources that still remain relevant, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage it all. With the rise of digital libraries, databases, etc., it is important to have people who can keep up with the amount of material and help make it easily accessible and usable by others.

Add to this the other information professions whose jobs include sorting through the information and making use of it for various purposes and it becomes clear that information professions are not fading in relevance. After all, anyone who has used Google to search for some rare bit of elusive information can tell you that there are still some things that only a human can do.

Digital Libraries, Storage, and More

Computers, along with the Internet and the world wide web, have truly revolutionized the storage and transfer of information. It is important to remember, however, that these changes bring both positives and negatives.

For instance, consider the very design of web pages and they have changed over the years. Early web pages were very simple, containing few images and consisting mostly of text. Today’s websites have animations, photos, videos, sophisticated layouts, etc. Obviously, the multimedia enhanced web of today is more pleasing to the eye and the visual information contained in websites today can certainly be useful, but does it help with the transmission or understanding of information? That is debatable. It could easily be debated that many websites these days bury the truly useful information in their fancy layout, whereas the older sites tended to be simpler to navigate and much more direct in their presentation.

Another topic to consider is how digital libraries and databases are bringing new ways to store and access information. They are not replacing traditional methods, just bringing alternatives. Computer databases can store amounts of information that would be prohibitive in physical form and make it easily accessible to many people over the Internet. The same is true of digital libraries. They can store many books in a form that anybody with an Internet connection can access any time they want.

These solutions are not perfect, however. There is no guarantee they will be around for a great length of time and this seriously affects their potential use as a method of preservation. If the company holding the computers disappears and doesn’t hand the data over to someone else, that information is gone. The end result is users may not be able to rely on Internet-based information methods as much as they would more traditional methods.

Obviously no method of information storage is perfect, and these new technological methods are no exception. It is important to take into account both sides of what they bring to the information landscape.

Week 4- Lascaux and Ephemeral Culture

The cave paintings of Lascaux are a great example of how difficult it is to interpret the symbols of another culture without any context as to what that society was like to give us a starting point. There are certainly things that seem like obvious assumptions about the society by looking at them, such as that hunting was a very large part of their existence and that they probably had a lot of experience dealing with animals such as horses and bison, but even these are questionable and don’t tell us much in depth.

Trying to determine the purpose of the drawings or what they meant to the people who made and viewed them is almost futile. They could be stories or myths transcribed so they could be passed down through generations, they could have been descriptions of events, they could have been part of a ritual, they could have simply been art, or they could have been many other things.

What it demonstrates to me is the ephemeral nature of such cultural icons and symbols. Some of the things we take for granted in today’s society could be in pretty much the same position as these cave drawings in the distant future. Maybe future researchers will be able to piece together clues and figure out what get out of them today, or maybe they will be far off of the mark. The cave paintings are a great example of how important cultural context is for interpreting the symbols that are important to a culture. Just like the hobo symbols we looked at last week or the storytelling discussed in the lecture, their real significance (and the key to understanding how they were made in the first place) is in what the culture they were produced for gets out of them and this is extremely difficult to piece together so far after the fact with so few clues to work with.