CyberOne: Nessons - Fall 2006
From Cyberlaw
CyberOne: LAW IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION
charles and rebecca nesson
cyberspace and self governance
make media make change
be lawyer for the people
engineer
... for WE the PEOPLE
We confront large questions: How can we tell a new story in cyberspace of our relationship to each other, our environment, and our beliefs. How can open access, peer production and free culture relate to global problems of justice, health and peace. How can our ability to produce and distribute message in cyberspace be made to work for developing nations. Our challenge, our opportunity, our responsibility is to govern ourselves. Who are we. How do we express ourselves.
Our study will be as much of medium as of message. Those who participate will engage cyberspace both as a subject to be understood and as context within which to learn and create. Enrollees will be expected to participate actively in a variety of forms of communication, including face to face online and on air interaction. Although familiarity with the Internet and personal computing will be assumed, no previous technical experience is expected, contributed technical proficiency is greatly appreciated.
Our class is neither a prerequisite nor a block to taking Zittrain's Winter Cyberlaw. Indeed you might think of these classes as CyberOne and CyberTwo, with each complementing the other. Neither class is primarily focused on the efforts of courts and legislatures to protect established property and privacy expectations from the disruptive force of the Net. The process and product of law is within the ambit of our study, but as an aspect of the space among other means of governing ourselves.
Social networks and individual expressions are now seeded and propagating in this space. Rapid growth of individual, extra-corporate, and extra-governmental expression of new forms of organization are fulfilling early visions of the Net. The influence of the blogosphere on politics and news media, the influence of independently produced web-based art, video, and music on mainstream entertainment, the influence of open access on research and education, the phenomenon of FlashMobs, are evidence that people have the will and increasingly the means to express themselves by contributing to common good. The advent of the open net permits the growth of new forms of transparent distributed corporate organization capable of balancing and harmonizing with for-profit non-transparent corporate and government power.
We will talk and think about rhetorical information and communication integrated media space, extending to every form of communication among people -internet, radio, telephone, tv, print, face to face meeting, connecting networks of humans with capacity for receiving, processing and sending message. We will seek divinity in the net; collective spirit in us; the core of global citizenry, how do we create a rhetorical environment in which people come to see and feel themselves to be global citizens, even as we honor our nation, tribe, school, family, self. What integrates us as global citizens, what impediments keep us apart. What structures can be built to allow us better to combine our good will and productively contribute our willing energy to creation of common wealth.
We will read aristotle, macluan, shannon, lessig, benkler, zittrain, fisher. Each student will write an essay arguing for a change he or she wants to make in the world, and talk about it with us on the web and community tv.
