OPEN REFLECTIONS

Tag: Information wants to be free

  • Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing

    “But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be…

  • Encore! More Free Playing

    The story around Free continues (talking about a nice marketing strategy). A review from Malcolm Gladwell (yes, the Blink and Tipping Point guy) in The New Yorker elicited a response from Anderson on his blog, causing another Internet aficionado, Seth Godin, to again take sides (Anderson’s side that is). Seems like a dinosaur fight (though…

  • The Land of Free

    Looking forward to reading Free, the long awaited book by WIRED main man and digital prophet Chris Anderson, author of the book with the already institutionalized title ‘The Long Tail’. In The Long Tail Anderson argued that the Internet will offer a new future (and bright business opportunities) for all those precious backlist titles and…

  • 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…

  • Open Your Mind

    In previous blog posts I mentioned the rise of video surfing and the development of the Internet from a text based medium to one based on remixed mediality, increasingly dominated by an image based culture. This YouTubification of the Internet is seen by some people as a bad development which can be detrimental to our…

  • An ontology of free – or: is there such a thing as freedom of knowledge?

      The last couple of days I have started thinking about what the concept of free knowledge exactly entails. I want to dedicate a few future posts to this subject, in order to explore the idea to its fullest and to give it a proper categorization (at least I will try to). This can be…