Blog Post 1 - Powerful Rhetoric on Ownership Rights

I wonder, really, how many times will I read "no one thought possible" in relation to today's technology? Just the other day, during Susan Ross's class, she reiterated a story about her friend at her graduate school, MIT, who insisted that someday we'll all have handheld devices that area phone, a post office, a television, and a computer all in one. Ross thought she was brilliant, but insane. Look where we are now; smartphones do all that and more.

Another anecdote in her lecture was her opinion that the internet is completely separate from other technologies. In ways, I can see that as true. My own thought process works in visual, connected charts like a flow chart, or think-web, in which all elements interact and are in some way connected to each other. Internet is relatable to many other technologies, but is all at once separate in how much more it does than a single phone or even a whole library of books.

In another of my classes (see what I mean about connectivity in my thought?) we discuss how arguments, theoretically, could not happen without rhetoric. Can rhetoric happen without argument? In my opinion, every piece of rhetoric can be an argument, and since everything can be rhetoric, rhetoric and argument are co-dependent within everything. Just as the languages discussed in our first reading, which mentioned Morse Code and African drums, are in the context of culture, and culture in the context of language, so the internet is also part of our modern culture, and the culture part of the internet. In context of the interconnectivity of rhetoric, language, and argument, I began to read Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture.

In our recent reading, what I see discussed is the successful use of rhetoric to manipulate change in society within the context of modern technology. The majority's opinion can be used as a means of persuasion and "in the end, the force of what seems 'obvious' to everyone else—the power of 'common sense'—would prevail. Their 'private interest' would not be allowed to defeat an obvious public gain," (Lessig p23). How much more compelled do you feel to do something if everyone else sees it as "normal"? If you doubt others' opinion matters, especially after reading about the Milgram experiment, I hope you are as self aware as you think you are. I thought of this experiment, and subsequently Nazi concentration camps, after reading, "Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle corruption of our political process," (Lessig pg19).


It certainty seems that "the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries," (Lessig 25). On the contrary, protection that originally "guaranteed creators the right to build freely upon their
past, and protected creators and innovators from either state or private control," (Lessig 26) seems to have been lost in our modern interpretation of copyright and the many lawsuits over it. Where, as an artist, I'm offended at the idea of someone taking my ideas, especially my work directly, and trying to pass it off as their own, I wonder, where is the line drawn between stealing ideas and simply being inspired by them? It seems that it does, in fact, come down to how much power that person or enterprise holds in relation to their work. Am I wrong in making this assumption, or are property owners as greedy as ever, and as unsympathetic as Lessig claims? If so, why?

Lessig, Lawrence. "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity." New York: Penguin, 2004. PDF.