OPEN REFLECTIONS

Category: Free Knowledge

  • Monographic Experiments

    For some time now (and more pressing recently) I have been exploring the possible future of the monograph, of the academic book, in the Humanities. The transition of this tangible medium to a digital environment is one that is (necessarily) slow and cumbersome, due to its strong ties to traditions, habits, practices and honor and…

  • RiP, Maecenas and Event

    Brett Gaylor, the director of the Open Source documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, is experimenting with the ‘Maecenas model’ (by others dubbed the ‘pay–as-you-like’ or Radiohead/NIN model) while launching his documentary online as a free download. I have written about RiP before here and since then the (CC licensed) feature length film has only gained…

  • Remix online for free

    Lawrence Lessig has announced the release of the free Creative Commons licensed download version of his book Remix from Bloomsbury Academic on his blog.   Bloomsbury Academic is a new imprint from Bloomsbury (yep, the one from Harry Potter), led by renowned publisher Frances Pinter. I have written about Pinter and the Bloomsbury model before…

  • Business is boring

    Business is boring

     Via RethinkingMedia I came upon this lecture (in Dutch, sorry) by Martijn Aslander from Lifehacking.nl in which he talks about bookhacking. Although his lecture is filled with hip marketing one-liners, he does give a clear overview of how an online business model based on the giving away of free content could work. As he shows,…

  • The Universal Library Revisited

    For those of us who are incessantly scanning the Internet in search of quality material concerning scholarly research and cultural analysis, I am glad to ease your frenzy by drawing your attention to some new online resources that have been launched recently.   First of all, YouTube started an educational channel: YouTube EDU. The campus…

  • Einmal ist Keinmal

     Memory comes when memory’s old I am never the first to know    –        Fever Ray  – Last Tuesday I attended the excellent lecture series The Old Brand New, in the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam. The speakers that evening were the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans and the French dancer/choreographer Boris Charmatz. Their talks were reflections on the evening’s…

  • Schyzophonia. On Remix, Hybridization and Fluidity

    I read Lawrence Lessig’s Remix a few months ago, a great book with a stimulating positive approach to the whole piracy and copyright problema, focusing on finding solutions which cater to the increasingly prevailing remixed and remediated forms of digital art and culture, in which the hybrid has become common ground. Lessig discusses new musical…

  • Open Your Mind and Participate! Or Not…

    The online environment offers limitless possibilities for learning and other ways of thought expansion. Like the before mentioned video lectures on the net, the institutions of higher education are increasingly seeing the benefit (for themselves and society at large) to free education from its brick and mortar constraints. But not only YouTube seems to be…

  • Information Dramatization

      Over the last couple of years (how time flies…) I have come across a fair amount of good movies and clips that try to grasp in one way or another some of the aspects of the information revolution we are and have been witnessing around us. From simply trying to state what is information…

  • Freedom on trial?

    To continue the freedom of knowledge and information debate on a more practical level, as most of you might have heard, bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay (which I have written about before here) is currently on trial. Interesting enough the people behind The Pirate Bay and similar Swedish organizations, like Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge,…

  • In praise of Eleutheria

    ‘Beauty is pregnant with potentiality’ – Bracha Ettinger   Again, delving deeper into the rabbit hole, let’s try to entangle the concepts in the web of free knowledge definitions. In the previous post we mainly discussed the difference between free information and free knowledge. But we were not quite finished. We were still basically stuck…

  • Bits of Freedom

    As promised before, I would like to dig a little deeper into the meaning and complexities of the concept of free information, referring to the well known aphorism ‘information wants to be free’. No better way to start than by throwing in some good old definitions we can all find scattered on the web. So…