Lessig

I think the point of this chapter and how each section relates to each other section is because every point that is covered is something that has significantly changed the lives of the every day, normal citizens.

The first thing Lessig wrote about was, in my opinion, one of the best innovations: photography. He gets to the point early by saying “For the first time in history there exists an authentic visual record of the appearance and activities of the common man […]”. This is huge. A discovery or invention that is finally for the people instead of only professionals that dedicate most of their time to understand skills the “common man” would only dream about. Something I found interesting was during the explanation of photography used in courts, copyright issues come into play. It was decided that permission was not needed to take photos of the world, places, and people. “But in the ordinary case, the image can be captured without clearing the rights to do the capturing.” I find this amazing. In our generation, there has been copyright laws since before we were born and permission to use certain photos, or any other material that hasn’t been created by our own hands, has been instilled in us since the moment we step into school. Over the past few years even UNI has been buckling down by putting plagiarism laws in the syllabus for every class we take. Getting permission for anything is drilled into our minds more often than we would like it to be. It would be truly amazing to live in a world where that, at least for photos, didn’t exist yet.

Another example of things affecting the average joe’s is media and film. Lessig explains that children learn by doing things and goes on to say that “just as kids learn how to write by writing lots of terrible prose, kids learn how to write media by constructing lots of (at least at first) terrible media.” This makes perfect sense. I sure have, and I have a YouTube account to prove it! One thing I really didn’t agree with is when Lessig quotes the words of Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication, saying “people are very surprised about how they are led through a film. [I]t is perfectly constructed to keep you from seeing it, so you have no idea. If a filmmaker succeeds you do not know how you were led.” If you know you were led through a film, the film has failed.” I do not agree with this. It’s this way for many films and probably something that was more difficult to do when film first came out, but there are many films made today that pride themselves on different ways to “lead” a viewer through the story. In our world today, it’s almost considered a form of art to produce a film that doesn’t rest easy with the viewer, mostly done by crafty ways of setting up the film in order to let your audience know they’re being “led” through a story in a way they’ve never been before. Even if it's just simple narration, some of these films are the best films.

Going on to talk about other things that open up many opportunities for commoners is Open Source software. Things like Wikipedia have codes for the web pages that anyone can open and mess with the code. The code is shared and all can see it.