TEXTUAL POACHING:
Spare a thought for copyright lawyers; they're valiantly fighting a losing battle. Ever since the digitalisation and networking of our interpersonal and mass media made information transmission and duplication effortless and instantaneous, they've been trying to come up with ways to uphold and enforce concepts of copyright which are fundamentally linked to information as bound to physical objects (artifacts, books, CDs, etc.), as Barlow has demonstrated so clearly in "Selling Wine without Bottles". He writes that "copyright worked well because, Gutenberg notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book. ... Books had material surfaces to which one could attach copyright notices, publisher's marques, and price tags". If you could control the physical media which were used to transmit information (paper, books, audio and video tapes, as well as radio and TV sets, or access to cable systems), you could control who made copies when and where, and at what price. This only worked as long as the technology to make copies was similarly scarce, though: as soon as most people learnt to write, or as faxes and photocopiers became cheaper, the only real copyright protection books had was the effort that would have to be spent to copy them.
TEXTEUAL POACHING
I just cut and pasted this half of a page because I can due it and not get in trouble. On the internet there is no such thing as copyrights. You can steal anything you want to and you will not be prosecuted for it no matter what you take from someone else. |
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COMMUNITY:
"Instead of people talking to machines, computer networks are being used to connect people to people (Wellman, et al. 1996). In cyberspace the economies of interaction, communication, and coordination are different than when people meet face-to-face. These shifts make the creation of thousands of spaces to house conversations and exchanges between far-flung groups of people practical and convenient. Using network interaction media like email, chat, and conferencing systems like the Usenet, people have formed thousands of groups to discuss a range of topics, play games, entertain one another, and even work on a range of complex collective projects. These are not only communication media they are group media, sustaining and supporting many to many interactions (Licklider 1978; Harasim 1993)."
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT WHEN SOMEONE ASKS YOU WHAT A COMMUNITY IS?
A community to me is a group of people who have come together for the same interests and ideas. As I have learned this semester a community can be anywhere, it does not matter if it is done face to face or over the internet.
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