Lessig

As I was reading through the previous blog posts, a few things hit me that I wanted to touch on. There were some really great thoughts thrown out.

One of the main points of Lessig's chapter was to try to get the audience to think critically about all of the shared information out there. From images to blogging, there is an information overload, as pointed out by Reid. While I concur that this freeflow of information has, overall, a positive impact on our society and its growth in terms of technological and intellectual development, there are downfalls. Lessig, for the most part, fails to address these shortcomings.

The main point I would like to focus on is photography because it is a passion of mine. Kacie mentioned that you can take photos anywhere you please, and that's a great thing about it. While that is, largely, true, there are more stipulations to photography than that. Sometimes it's not legal to take a photograph - and, sometimes, it's just not ethical. Kevin Carter won a Pulitizer Prize for "The Vulture and the Baby," which I have attached to this posting. However, he was plagued by criticisms from people claiming that he was just another version of a vulture in Africa for not helping the girl in the photo. He ended up killing himself at the age of 33.

Kacie also stated that there is one way to interpret a photograph, and I will have to disagree with that, just as Ryan did. Ryan touched on digital manipulation as a way for people to view photos differently, but I would like to expand on that. There is no manipulation required for people to view the exact same photo as completely different, based on their perspectives. If I were to view a photo of Hitler, I would truly be repulsed knowing what that man did in his lifetime. If another person, having no knowledge of WWII or Hitler, were to view the second photo that I've attached to this blog, I am guessing that they might have the opposite feelings of what I have. Photo credit http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2007/301207.html

Keeping with the photography theme ... we never know what someone else will do with our work. Because I am a proponent of sharing information (whether that be writing, images, video, etc.), I choose to give the photos that I take on a CD to the client. They are then free to do with them as they wish; this includes printing them at a business of their choosing, sharing them on Facebook, etc. There is the stipulation that I still retain the right to use my photos. Recently, a bride took my edited photos that I gave her and put a lot of them through the free site Picnik. She put hot pink and teal sayings over all of the photos, cropped the images, and so on. In my opinion, the photos looked terrible after she finished with them. This is dangerous ground. If someone sees these photos and wants to know who did her wedding photography, they may think that the work that she has posted on Facebook is mine. I don't want that representing my business. On the other hand, I gave her the photos, so she is technically free to do what she wants with them. Because I have such a strong belief that people should be able to use their photos as they see fit, I will continue releasing photos on CDs to clients, but it's still not an ideal situation for me.

This brings me to my last point - as Heather nicely summarized, when something is open source, it's free for the public to consume and also enhance or change. While the "greater good" may be allowing information to be open source, it's also a slippery slope that I feel we have just begun and haven't fully realized the implications and consequences of sharing these works. Lessig was a little shortsighted to not touch more upon this in the chapter.