This weekend I finally started Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. It is a great look into our copyright laws and ideas to make it reasonable again in the world of “read/write” culture. I am not that far into it, but I had to share a great quote on page 79. He is discussing Japanese children and how their media culture encourages kids to engage in recombinant and user-driven content at a very early age. Here he compares with US culture:
American kids have it different. The focus is not: “Here’s something, do something with it.” The focus is instead: “Here’s something, buy it.” “The U.S. has a stronger cultural investment in the idea of childhood innocence,” Ito explains, “and it also has a more protectionist view with respect to media content.” And this “protectionism” extends into schooling as well.” “Entertainment” is separate from “education.” So any skill learned in this “remix culture” is “constructed oppositionally to academic achievement.” Thus, while “remix culture” flourishes with adult-oriented media in the United States, “there’s still a lot of resistance to media that are coded as children’s media being really fully [integrated] into that space.”
I am still letting that sink in. Are our students passive consumers of knowledge as he suggests? Part of me wants to think that is the traditional approach to education in a nutshell. It seems things are changing though. MLTI has brought so many different creative possibilities to the learning process of Maine kids. Now if we could just encourage the next step; creating a amenable legal environment that encouraged students to create new culture out of old. Yeah, I am talking to you congress.
