What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
What Dyson predicts is nothing short of the ultimate triumph of
process over product—though it is a triumph few of us are willing
to embrace or perhaps can even understand. As Dyson's work makes
clear, however, nowhere has the electronic revolution posed more
difficult questions than in issues regarding ownership. And where
ownership is concerned, it currently matters a very great deal,
especially to commercial interests, who writes and who reads—
because what is currently up for grabs—seriously and completely
up for grabs, in my opinion—is what "who" will mean, how this
"who" will be legally and institutionally construed, and how rights
to property and hence to monetary gain will be resolved. Even as we
speak, folks are out there trying to patent and copyright
everything imaginable, from genetic tissue to rain forest plants to
computer monitoring devices that will issue charges for each use of
information. In the same issue of Wired, for example, a new
"digital watermark" is described, a code that can be inserted
invisibly into images, hence "signing" them and making them
susceptible to tracing if and when they are pirated and sold or
given away. Some years ago, the noted anthropologist Clifford
Geertz noted that "something is happening to the way we think about
the way we think." Geertz was clearly accurate in his observation.
And it seems no less clear today that something is happening to the
way we put value on what we value. If the locus of authority and
value and honor and reward is not to be the romantic, singular
"author" or "author construct" or "author function"—what then?
In Dyson's world, the value shifts to "services, to the selection
of content, to the presence of other people, and to the assurance
of... reliable information.... In short, intellectual assets and
property depreciate while intellectual processes and services
appreciate" (184). (If she is anywhere near right, we teachers should
note, the need for what we tend to call critical literacy--the
ability to discriminate among vast amounts of data, to sort through
specious information, to test knowledge claims, and to do
high-level critical thinking--will be a crucial element of
success.) Now if you would like to take a crash course in the
debates surrounding these issues, just sign on for a while to the
bulletin board CNI/COPYRlGHT.
Next *
Previous
Postmodern (un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions