I agree with much of what you're saying, and am amazed at how you have, with such clarity, brought the ideas of these books into focus, especially in 15 minutes :-). I want to be able to reflect like this when I grow up.
On Jenkins, you hit the nail on the head for me: "...Jenkins made sense but didn't resonate with me--I can see it happening, agree that it's interesting in a basic intellectual way, understand that it has ramifications for personal (v. institutional) agency and marketing and communications, and appreciate how the net is revolutionizing the ways we discover, cooperate, teach/learn, affect change, etc.--but I don't necessarily feel drawn into the participatory act." I found that Jenkins caused me to look at much of what is evolving around us in pop culture in a new way, a more analytical, even appreciate way. I would even say he convinced me to see some potentially applicable value in the otherwise seemingly useless collaborative behaviors that I would have completely dismissed before. BUT, he didn't motivate me to participate. And maybe that wasn't his purpose.
My real fascination with your blog, though, is in your thoughts on freedom vs regulation, and by extension, personal vs institutional agency. I love the play yard analogy. So true. My question is, isn't that paragraph ("Playing with that simile, Lessig is saying...") pretty much an accurate description of the rhetorically negotiated society that we call the United States, land of freedom? We depend on technically trained people (elected officials) to hold the property owners (other elected officials) accountable. Sometimes we deal with security breaches (planes flying into buildings and killing people). And sometimes the landlord (political party in power) makes changes without our consent (health care legislation, budget cuts...) and we find ourselves at odds with the regulation. Affecting change is possible, but slow, confusing and expensive.
The bigger point to me, though, is this: show me any form freedom—political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom in personal relationships or expression of taste, freedom as a consumer, religious freedom—and I'll show you the pen. Because freedom, in a society larger than one, will always have boundaries. Always. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that you can't really have freedom without first defining its boundaries. The boundaries are actually a part of the freedom.
When you were watching your 4 year-old play at the park across the street, you probably weren't regulating how she played, what she said, which part of the park she chose to play in. She had a relative amount of freedom in her play, and I'm guessing she felt secure and safe. Why? Because she understood several things 1) I'm in a park which is designed by its architecture to be a safe place to play; 2) I know the rules: don't leave the part, don't talk to strangers, don't jump off the top of the slide.....; and 3) my mom is watching. Freedom is, I think, most enjoyed inside of appropriate boundaries.
Don't get me wrong....I'm really not saying that I think the Net should be locked down and over-regulated. I definitely see the value of personal agency, much as we all would undoubtedly agree that freedom of speech is a good thing. And I recognize that regulation of any kind comes at a price, namely, the loss of some part of freedom. And I definitely think it's worth exploring how the impending regulation (as Lessig seems to believe that it is) is crafted and applied so that freedom and privacy can be maximized. So maybe the question is, how much freedom is enough? How far out can we push the boundaries?
You sum up by asking "What good is the identification and cultivation of personal agency, if we know that underlying all the "surface" possibilities of freedom in the playground is really a controlling force that will have the final say?" And I would ask, how productive can a culture of personal agency really be, and how long can it survive, if we recognize that at any given moment, any person in the chat room with us could be a deranged 'rapist,' and in spite of all of our collective intelligence and freedom, no one really has the power to kick him out?
No comments:
Post a Comment