Questioning Information Freedom
3readings total
Total of 2 pages.
Please write a brief summary of what the readings are about for each of them, so I could know what the readings are talking about. And also write an analysis for each of them. Thank you!
There is also description of the course, so you could have a better understanding if what this course is about.
There are three readings, one is the attached pdf, the other two are links below.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/26/the-free-speech-panic-censorship-how-the-right-concocted-a-crisis
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/NotCensorshipButSelection
Below is an example of how to do this, please follow, thank you!
Reading one
Anderson, J. (2010) I. Introduction and II. Examples of Misuses of Traditional Knowledge. Indigenous/Tradition Knowledge and Intellectual Property (Issues Paper). Durham, N.C.: Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke University School of Law. (pp. 1-15 only).
Summary
This book looks at the indigenous/traditional understanding and intellectual property law are intertwined in this article, and it’s a challenging issue for lawyers today. Intellectual property law has never had to deal with anything like the challenges raised by indigenous knowledge safeguarding considerations.
Analysis
Maintaining, controlling, protecting, and developing indigenous cultural heritage is a fundamental right of indigenous peoples, along with their scientific and technological achievements, as well as the fruits of their labors, such as human and inherited genetic resources, plant seeds and medicines, knowledge of natural phenomena, oral traditions, literature and artistic creations such as sports and traditional games (Anderson, 2010). Indigenous knowledge and traditional cultural manifestations are all part of the cultural legacy that these countries are entitled to safeguard and preserve.
Course Goal:
This course prepares
students from diverse scholarly and professional backgrounds to investigate, analyze and critique the social,
political and cultural tensions surrounding contemporary information practices.
Students will critically engage with the theoretical approaches, ethical groundings, methodological
frameworks and technical skills utilized by information professionals.
Course Objectives:
Upon completion of this course students will be able to:
1.Identify and analyze information-
related problems of a community or organization
2.Frame and articulate information resources, services and systems that can address the information-
related problems of a community or organization
3.Describe influences on individual and institutional information practices
4.Assess the implications of a contemporary information issue for an information organization
5.Apply knowledge of information technologies and resources to a real world situation, taking into
account the perspectives of institutional and community stakeholders
6.Articulate ideas and concepts in a variety of communication modes including oral, written and
multimedia
7.Provide direction and feedback within a team or small group setting
8.Synthesize scholarship from information studies and related fields, along with media accounts
9.Apply knowledge from existing scholarship to real-world information problems
10.Describe principles and ethics of the information professions
11.Critically evaluate the role of the information professions in societies
12.Describe the contributions of the information professions
13.Participate meaningfully in professional development opportunities
Course Topics:
●Contemporary Theory
●Technology and Information Infrastructures
●Intellectual Property and Copyright
●Questioning Information Freedom
●Privacy
●Data and Bias
●Repair and Care Work
●Practicing Anti-Racism in Information Spaces
●Legacies of Colonialism in Libraries, Archives and Museums
●Library Labour Required and Recommended Reading: Material from books, journals, videos,
podcasts and websites will constitute required reading. These will be listed in the course learning
management system (i.e. Canvas) and will be available directly through links or through Library
(e.g., electronic and/or print formats).
Topic Briefing
The major assignment is a Topic Briefing Paper on a topic of your choice. Examples will be provided
on Canvas. A topic briefing document is a short, formatted document, outlining the key issues and
literatures on a topic, in order to provide information for an organization about making a decision,
moving forward with a policy, or creating a new program (for example). Topic Briefings often present
findings from literature in an easily accessible way, using graphics or images, and offer concise and
clear recommendations for an organization.
This assignment has 5 parts:
A.Topic Briefing Proposal:
You will submit a one-page proposal providing the following required information: the topic selected;
at least 4 relevant references; your motivation for choosing the topic; potential audience(s); initial
ideas concerning how you will explore the topic; and
B.Topic Briefing Draft:
You will submit a full draft of the Topic Briefing
C.Topic Briefing Peer Feedback:
You will provide peer reviews of 2 of your colleagues Topic Briefing Drafts.
D.Topic Briefing Final:
This is the final 4 page professionally formatted version of your topic briefing. This must have at
least 10 references.
E.Topic Briefing Pitch:
You will submit a slide deck of 3 slides maximum and present a 2 minute “pitch” of your Topic Briefing.
International
Journal of Communication 6 (2012), 2870–2893 1932–8036/20120005
Copyright © 2012 (Kimberly Christen). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial
No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.
Does Information Really Want to be Free?
Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness
KIMBERLY CHRISTEN1
Washington State University
The “information wants to be free” meme was born some 20 years ago from the free
and open source software development community. In the ensuing decades, information
freedom has merged with debates over open access, digital rights management, and
intellectual property rights. More recently, as digital heritage has become a common
resource, scholars, activists, technologists, and local source communities have
generated critiques about the extent of information freedom. This article injects both the
histories of collecting and the politics of information circulation in relation to indigenous
knowledge into this debate by looking closely at the history of the meme and its cultural
and legal underpinnings. This approach allows us to unpack the meme’s normalized
assumptions and gauge whether it is applicable across a broad range of materials and
cultural variances.
Post on Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
Subject line: “Aboriginal archive uses new DRM”
Submitted by: ianare on Tuesday, January 29, 2008, @ 02:57PM
1
I’d like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that have
strengthened this article. This article has been a work in progress for several years as the Mukurtu
platform grew and took shape. During that time, I was lucky enough to be in conversation with
wonderfully thought-provoking colleagues who pushed me to think about the politics of openness and
access, including Jason Jackson, Chris Kelty, Tara McPherson, Craig Dietrich, Paul Dourish, Ramesh
Srinivasan, Robin Boast, Gabriella Coleman, Rosemary Coombe, Matt Cohen, Jane Anderson, Kate
Hennessy, and Robert Leopold. No amount of thanks is enough for Mukurtu’s Director of Development,
Michael Ashley, who took Mukurtu CMS from its alpha version to a 1.0 release in record time, all the while
reminding me not to let perfect be the enemy of good enough. My biggest debt of gratitude goes to the
indigenous peoples who have worked with Mukurtu CMS to help create a platform that reflects their
diverse needs.
Kimberly Christen: kachristen@wsu.edu
Date submitted: 2012-04-04
mailto:kachristen@wsu.edu
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2871
“A new method of digital rights management which relies on a user’s profile has been pioneered
by Aboriginal Australians for a multimedia archive. The need to create profiles based on a user’s
name, age, sex and standing within their community come from traditions over what can and
cannot be seen. For example, men cannot view women’s rituals, and people from one
community
cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the
deceased cannot be viewed by their families. This threw up issues surrounding how the material
could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a
traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their gender, their
relationship to other people and where they were situated.” (Slashdot, n.d., para 1)
Comment #2
Subject line: How is this DRM?
Submitted by: Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2008, @07:13PM
“This doesn’t sound like DRM. It sounds like access control.”
Comment #182
Subject line: DRM/Censorship is ALWAYS bad!
Submitted by Auldclootie on Wednesday January 30 2008, @09:11AM
“No one elected some anthropologist and gave him/her the Godlike power to decide
which aspects of Aboriginal culture are rigidly enforced. Culture is a dynamic process. It
should not be fossilized with rigidly enforced rules about what is and is not permissible.
Are Aboriginals not to be allowed to dissent? To be non-conformist? This kind of
DRM/censorship should be thrown on the scrapheap with all the rest. It disenfranchises
the ordinary people and puts their welfare into the hands of some supposedly benign
protector. Total bullshit! Of course the Aboriginal elders support this – they are
conservatives and resist change – what about the rising new generation? I worked with
Aboriginal people in the 90’s in central Australia – it’s about time this kind of paternalist
crap was consigned to the trash…”
2
Slashdot
On January 29, 2008, about five months after several Warumungu people and I installed the
Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari community digital archive in the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in the
remote Central Australian town of Tennant Creek, we had our fifteen minutes of Internet fame, as the
archive was debated on forums from Slashdot to the BBC.
3
As far as I can piece together from the e-
traces of the above Slashdot commentary, it began with a post I made to my blog on January 6, 2008,
2
Original Slashdot comments archived at http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/01/29/2253239/Aboriginal-
Archive-Uses-New-DRM; see also Dietrich and Bell (2011, pp. 208–209).
3
See Christen (2007, 2008, 2009). Slashdot online discussion archived at
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/01/29/2253239/Aboriginal-Archive-Uses-New-DRM; see also
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7214240.stm
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/01/29/2253239/Aboriginal-Archive-Uses-New-DRM
2872 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
announcing the launch of an online demo of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive.
4
Less than a week
later, on January 11, Wendy Seltzer, an intellectual property lawyer, wrote a post on her blog lauding the
archive as an example of “digital restrictions done right” (Seltzer, 2008, emphasis mine). The BBC’s Bill
Thompson read Wendy’s post and told his colleagues from Digital Planet about our project. Digital Planet’s
focus is on “reporting the human side of technology from around the world” (Titherington, 2011). On
January 15, I received an e-mail inviting me to be on the show. I gladly accepted. The next week, I went
to the local NPR station and recorded a 40-some minute interview with Gareth Mitchell, the host of Digital
Planet.
On January 29, the edited segment aired, and a podcast was made available via the BBC website.
Host Gareth Mitchell opened the segment framing the story this way: “A remote and ancient Aboriginal
community in the Australian Outback has become the unlikely setting for a digital archive that’s turned
received wisdom about digital rights management or DRM on its head.” As I sat listening to the show, the
cultural anthropologist in me cringed at the “ancient” qualifier (how could a group of people living today
be ancient?), and the digital humanist in me was less convinced by the invocation of DRM as a
counterpoint to the cultural protocols built into the archive. However, by the end of the program I was
quite pleased with the way the producers had edited the piece together, highlighting the community-
focused, ground-up production of the system based on Warumungu cultural protocols. I appreciated the
commentary at the end of the show from Bill Thompson, who discussed the system as one based on trust.
I made the point, and Bill echoed it in his comments, that the system could give us a way to think about
control and access in ways that didn’t have to mean an abuse of power or “locked down” culture.
5
The same day the radio program aired, the BBC Online ran an article entitled “Aboriginal Archive
Offers New DRM” (BBC, 2008), and Bill Thompson included the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive in his
article, “Locking Down Open Computing” (Thompson, 2008), in the technology section of the BBC Online.
In contrast to the radio program segment, which covered the history of the project and the nuances of the
Warumungu cultural protocols, the two articles made DRM central to the project, when in fact, my
comments on DRM were in response to Mitchell’s query and analogy. They were certainly never central to
the creation of the archive itself, or to my work at the time. Yet, over the course of a few weeks, the
Mukurtu archive—a project with multiple goals and two years in development—became framed around one
of the most controversial contemporary legal, social, and economic debates: digital rights management.
The Slashdot commentary was bookended by equal parts racist diatribe and compassionate romanticism,
with perhaps a third or more of the comments falling somewhere in the middle—not sure that Mukurtu
amounted to DRM, but confident that technology should be put to diverse cultural uses.
In this article, I examine the reach of digital rights management (DRM) and commons talk as
they extend to—and often push up against—indigenous articulations of information management and
knowledge circulation protocols within the digital realm. DRM is a hot-button issue because of high-profile
corporations using digital “locks” to regulate consumer use instead of copyright or other legal tools.
Tarleton Gillespie argues that, after the Napster case in the United States, there has been a “fundamental
4
See http://web.archive.org/web/20080201093247/http://www.kimberlychristen.com
5
See http://web.archive.org/web/20080201093247/http://www.kimberlychristen.com
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2873
shift in strategy, from regulating the use of technology through law to regulating the design of technology
so as to constrain use.” Further, he suggests that:
What we might call “social engineering” has come full circle back to actual engineering,
where the tools and the environment are built to assure the right practices are
facilitated, the wrong are inhibited. These technologies are largely being developed and
deployed below our cultural radar, enamored as we are with the thrill of the “information
revolution,” the faith in progress, and the freedom of individual agency. (2007, p. 6)
Gillespie charts the shift in managing what has been dubbed the “culture industry”—music,
books, movies, video games, and other software—around corporate solutions to murky legal issues. He
rightly points to the general fascination with technology and its associated progressive narratives that
blind us to the reach of technology and its unintended consequences. However, off of Gillespie’s radar are
the other uses for building “control” into systems for purposes that are not mired in greed, consumerism,
and the circulation of commodities. Curation and circulation of indigenous digital cultural heritage
materials are, in fact, activities that undo this neat alignment of control with the abuse of power.
Highlighting these diverse and situational types of controls gives us another lens through which to view
the notion of digital management of cultural materials and knowledge.
Almost three years after the first interview on February 22, 2011, I was once again on Digital
Planet. This time, Mitchell invited me to participate in a discussion about “openness and ownership” and
our conversation took off from two projects that stemmed directly from the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari
archive: the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal (PPWP) and Mukurtu CMS.
6
These two projects leverage the
backend software of the original archive to build digital platforms for indigenous cultural heritage
management. The PPWP is an online educational portal of Plateau materials co-curated by tribal nations
across the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Mukurtu CMS is a free and open source digital
archive and content management tool aimed at the specific needs of indigenous peoples globally. Whereas
the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive was a stand-alone archive, Mukurtu CMS is a tool that can be
adapted to the local cultural protocols and dynamic intellectual property needs of any indigenous
community.
7
During the interview, Mitchell was once again curious about the potential of these projects to
upend dominant discussions about digital technology’s role in managing and controlling access to culture.
After describing the various ways in which both the PPWP and the scaled-up Mukurtu CMS allow
those using the tools (indigenous communities, museums, libraries, and archives) to manage and
define
access, circulation, and licensing at granular levels, Ray Corrigan from Open University turned back to the
general notion of DRM, critiquing it as a corporate “digital lock” put on by producers aiming to shut out
6
See http://www.mukurtu.org and http://plateauportal.wsulibs.wsu.edu
7
In Warumungu, “Mukurtu” translates to “dilly bag,” but was adapted by elders in the community to mean
“a safe keeping place.” Wumpurrarni-kari means “belonging to the Warumungu people.” Elders gave
permission in 2009 for the word Mukurtu to be used for the software platform. Production of Mukurtu CMS
was funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, as well
as an Institute for Museum and Library Studies National Leadership Grant.
http://plateauportal.wsulibs.wsu.edu/
2874 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
consumers. He remarked, however, that “the interesting thing about Mukurtu is it turns that control stuff
on its head, so it now gives the access control switches to the users” (Digital Planet, 2011). Exactly. And
yet, this point is oftentimes lost in the cacophony calling for openness at any and all costs. The celebration
of openness, something that began as a reaction to corporate greed and the legal straightjacketing of
creative works, has resulted in a limited vocabulary with which to discuss the ethical and cultural
parameters of information circulation and access in the digital realm. We are stuck thinking about open or
closed, free or proprietary, public or private, and so on, even though in such common online experiences
as using social media platforms Facebook and Twitter, or when reading through legal parameters for the
use and reuse of digital information, these binaries rarely exist. These are not zero-sum games, and
information sociality and creativity is more porous than these choices allow us to imagine.
In the remainder of this article, I address the contentious issues of access to knowledge and
information freedom as they play out through assertions of control over digital materials, clarion calls for a
more robust public domain, and expansive definitions of open access. I begin by exploring the narrative
field of openness and access on which indigenous claims and practices are mapped, and then I move to
examining the production of Mukurtu CMS in order to focus on the tensions produced when archival
platforms and culturally diverse notions of information management, sharing, and privacy rub up against
one another.
8
By highlighting these tensions, I explicitly interrogate entrenched notions of the public
domain, appeals to openness, and the contours of information circulation in order to better understand the
stakes of digital sociality as it is lived, imagined, and performed across cultures and within the messy
spaces where different notions of collaboration, collection, and curation intersect.
Information Wants to be Free
Like all powerful and formative memes, “information wants to be free” has a genealogy that can tell
us something about how supporters conceive of the connections between information, freedom, openness,
and access in relation to digital technologies. Apparently, at the first Hacker conference in 1984, Stewart
Brand suggested that:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right
information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants
to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you
have these two fighting against each other. (Brand, 1984)
Emphasizing the tension between particular types of social and economic practices born from
information circulation, Brand highlighted the seemingly natural give and take between two factionalized
aspects of information. They are “fighting against each other.” Pitting informational relations in an
inherent squabble produces a problem to overcome, a side to choose. One must decide: free or
expensive? Six years later, in 1990, Richard Stallman tweaked this notion and argued that,
8
I use the term “indigenous” in an inclusive manner and follow the United Nations (n.d.) in not creating a
definition that would restrict peoples’ self-definitions.
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2875
I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By “free” I am not referring
to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own
uses. . . . When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity
wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving. (Denning, 1990,
pp. 653–654,
emphasis mine)
Here, Stallman emphasizes the benefits of information freedom as social freedom. Information
that is “generally useful” is something that should be adaptable, open, and accessible. Reuse, in this
formulation, is a form of social good. Stallman does not address—nor, perhaps, did his audience of
software designers wonder—how one decides which information is generally useful, nor did he imagine the
possibility that some information might, in fact, not be useful or beneficial in the hands of just anyone.
That is, Stallman’s “humanity” seems to erase the cultural logics of many groups who view improper reuse
and redistribution of their materials as possibly damaging to their cultural practices or traditional
knowledge systems. In many indigenous communities, cultural knowledge is conferred and transferred
based on systems of obligation and reciprocity that, while they need not be romanticized as somehow
more natural than their non-indigenous counterparts, should nonetheless be respected and merged into a
pluralistic understanding of information’s circulation routes (Chander & Sunder, 2004; Leach, 2005;
Myers, 2005; Srinivasan, Boast, Becvar, & Enote, 2010). Stallman’s usage prompted an ideological shift
within the debate about digital technology, cultural production, and remix, a shift whereby technology
producers, users, and activists reimagined information in social and moral, rather than economic, terms.
A few years later, while cyber-utopist John Perry Barlow was busy declaring the “independence of
cyberspace” (1994), he produced a laundry list of things that information wanted, including “to be free.”
His bumper-sticker version of the tension-filled statements that preceded it became the tag line for a
generation of individuals invested in defying corporate and legal attempts to control content and
technology. “Information wants to be free” became a battle cry and rallying point for legal pundits, social
activists, and academics against the rising regulation of “information,” whether through technological locks
or expansive intellectual property rights laws. High profile legal cases pitted industry giants and
corporations against media consumers and small-time creators, providing the ingredients for a David vs.
Goliath-style drama to play out across mainstream news media and more marginal networks alike (Lessig,
2004; Gillespie 2007). Brand recognized the power of the meme, noting its reach beyond his first
utterance. In April 1997, Wired magazine’s Jon Katz called it “the single dominant ethic in this
community.”
Grounding their stance in information’s assumed natural inclination toward freedom, Internet
enthusiasts and intellectual property rights critics easily connected openness, the public domain, and the
commons, creating a well-defined (and seemingly neutral) platform for information’s circulation routes—
particularly digital information. The “cultural commons” was, thus, easily defined as “the vast store of
unowned ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich”
(Hyde, 2010, p. 18). Conjuring a sense of information passed down through generations easily washes
over other, more dubious ways that “we have inherited from the past,” making the process seem both
2876 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
natural and necessary without tainting it with colonial conquests or racist research agendas that pushed
scientific exploration and collection practices. In this framing, it is easy to forget the following:
Many cultural and historical artifacts of indigenous life are spread across the collections
of museums and private holdings. Such holdings may be viewed on site or, increasing,
electronically through virtual museums. Still, many indigenous people have limited
access to their own cultural heritage and may be excluded also from interpreting these
objects even when publicly displayed. (Resta, Roy, De Montano, & Christal, 2002, p.
1482)
Although the “information wants to be free” meme emerged from 25 years of digital celebration,
it was also successfully linked back to the nation’s beginnings to weave a narrative of information freedom
as a bedrock of national freedom. In their quest for a benign and balanced intellectual property rights
system, legal scholars and Internet freedom advocates delight in quoting founding father Thomas
Jefferson as he inscribed the natural state of information:
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and
mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been
peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in
which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or
exclusive appropriation. (Boyle, 2002, p. 15)
“Like the air we breathe,” Jefferson’s poetic framing of information’s natural state, has worked
just as well when considered in light of digital bits and bytes as it did for early 19th-century analogue
information. In 1918, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis used Jefferson’s words to pen a
dissenting opinion suggesting the following: “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human
productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary
communication to others, free as the air to common use” (Boyle, 2002, p. 15, emphasis mine). Jefferson
and Brandeis, along with a handful of other early American thinkers, are routinely marshaled in support of
a “balanced” intellectual property regime that takes as its main focus the maintenance of a public domain
where ideas move freely, creating an information commons. While freedom is made paramount in these
discussions, the first half of Brandeis’ quote is downplayed: after voluntary communication to others. In
relation to Western intellectual property laws, this half of the sentence, if discussed at all, is viewed as a
creator’s right to disseminate his or her works commercially or otherwise. What is not generally discussed
is the vast store of materials in Western museums, archives, libraries, and personal collections that were
not voluntarily given, and would not generally meet the standards of prior informed consent. The colonial
collecting history of Western nations is comfortably forgotten in the celebration of freedom and openness
that would give “us” a storehouse of materials for the common good. In fact, the commons was never a
place of inclusion, nor was it ever unregulated or uncontrolled. In his study of the commons as an idea
and as practiced, Lewis Hyde shows quite clearly that, “the simple fact is that the commons were a form
of property that served their communities for centuries because there were strict limits on the use rights.
The commons were not open; they were stinted” (2010, p. 34, emphasis mine). That is, commons have
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2877
always been regulated and exclusive; they work precisely because they function within a system defined
by many options for use. Commons were never free, nor did they promote an unregulated notion of
freedom.
The power and appeal of information freedom comes, then, at least in part, from its connection to
deeply emotive and ideological American narratives. In the 21st century, such bids for information
freedom in the commons appear in tandem with the claim that digital technology and digital information
have created a “revolution.” Overt claims of a “digital revolution” now appear in everything from
marketing materials to the nightly news, to academic conferences. Digital utopianism slowed with the first
dot-com bust, but it has seen a pronounced resurgence with the rise of social networking sites and the
recent spate of political upheavals in the Arab world. From Tehran to Tunisia, revolutionaries employed
and deployed social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to aid their practice and serve their cause.
While CNN branded the Tunisian uprising a “Twitter Revolution,” digital skeptics like Malcolm Gladwell
decried social media for producing slactivism, as opposed to the real activism taking place on the ground.
The least compelling question about any of these revolutions and their intersection with, and use of, social
media is the cause-and-effect type of query posed by some bloggers: “Is Tunisia the First Twitter
Revolution?” What is striking about these claims in relation to technology is their reliance on revolution as
the framing narrative device. Revolution is not just what is happening on the ground; it is embedded in
technology itself. These platforms and tools do not just provide logistical support for revolutionaries; in
these celebratory narratives, social media are anthropomorphized and become agents themselves within
the revolution. Human agency is muted, and technology becomes the revolutionary figure.
Information freedom and digital revolution dovetail neatly with pre-existing American discourses
about the primacy of individual liberties and the necessity of information circulation. Without inspection
and divorced from their historical moorings, however, these dominant couplings tend to create a flat
debate and produce a false choice between freedom and sociality on the one hand, and oppression and
privacy on the other. At the same time, revolution’s pull and freedom’s appeal may lead us to both
misunderstand the ethics of openness and de-historicize the public domain, where sociality is always
already a matter of well-established power relations and historical relationships between nations,
institutions, and the many publics that engage with each other as they circulate, create, and use
information. The “information wants to be free” meme does a disservice to the task of understanding the
ethics of information circulation, both within the digital realm and in a post-colonial world order where we
cannot so neatly carve out the digital from the political and the historical.
Openness, Access, and the Public Domain
Openness is valued in Western societies. We teach our kids to be open—share and share alike.
We want our significant others to be open with us. We demand openness from our politicians and pundits.
The expansion of digital technologies (and specifically the Internet) into their current collective place as an
everyday part of social and political life, serving as media for information circulation, has increased
attention to the practice and goal of openness within the digital ecology. Open access (OA) is not just an
idea, but a movement.
2878 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open
the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of
research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of
science and society. Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely
accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum
around the world as research funders and policy makers throw their weight behind it.
(Scholar Works, n.d., para. 1)
For the OA movement, the goal appears to be making information—partitioned off as research—
free to everyone, everywhere, with the assumption that information freedom will be a social and political
benefit in all cases. In fact, open access is routinely marshaled in support of new models for scholarly
publishing, commercial publishing, open source software production and licensing, music distribution,
pharmaceutical production and distribution, intellectual property rights, traditional knowledge, traditional
cultural expressions, academic research, commercial research, and so on. The crowdedness under the
banner of open access should give us pause. It distracts from the specificity and historical context of
various calls for, and definitions of, openness. In these vast calls, openness and unfettered access define
the boundaries of information sharing; neither is questioned as a political stance or historical assumption.
Instead, they are treated as de facto positive, beneficial aspects of knowledge circulation.
In his dissection of Google and its place in the social landscape, Siva Vaidhyanathan argues that
we have a collective blind faith in Google that keeps us from looking critically at Google’s practices and the
effects (intended or not) the company has on society. He argues that, “[b]ecause we focus on the miracles
of Google we are too blind to the ways in which Google exerts control over its domain” (2011, p. 14).
Similarly, I suggest that OA and public domain advocates have been guilty of a cultural blindness around
the contours of access and openness in relation to varied types of information resources. These advocates’
faith in openness as an end in and of itself has distracted them from seeing the possibilities of alternative
access regimes that are neither oppressive nor controlling, but based on divergent social and ethical
systems and ways of imagining information and its movement between various groups of people.
The ease with which openness and access are celebrated and linked to revolution and freedom—
and deemed a public good with little qualification—signals the lack of an adequate historical context within
which to anchor these systems. The universal goal of “unrestricted sharing” defines a terrain where any
type of access control or differing notions of sharing are incompatible and must be overcome. The friction
in these debates is concerned with both access (who gets it, who doesn’t) and alternative perspectives
about knowledge as either 1) something up for grabs by anyone, or 2) assemblages of dynamic modes of
making sense of the world that are embedded in cultural, social, and political systems. The first
perspective derives from the impulse to understand knowledge as a non-rivalrous good. The second
perspective is more anthropologically rooted; it considers the diverse systems of meaning produced by
human beings throughout time and space. The first moves toward the universal, the second toward the
local. The general and universal appeals to knowledge anchors open access movements in too-rigid
understandings of the public domain, as well as in a limiting perception of the “public good.” Critiquing the
popular notions of the public domain, Julie Cohen argues that, “the uncritical assumption that information
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2879
is available because it is ‘out there’ is one of the central failings of the mainstream economic model and
the associated public lands/stewardship model of the public domain” (Cohen, 2006, p. 154).
This framing of the digital landscape promotes a type of historical amnesia about how the public
domain was initially populated. In the United States, the rise of public domain talk is linked to Westward
expansion and the displacement of indigenous peoples; the use of this discourse signals an erasure of the
destructive effects of colonization and obscures its ideological underpinnings (Chander & Sunder, 2004;
Cohen, 2006; Sherman & Wiseman, 2006). Lewis Hyde documents the conflicting invocations of the
commons in early America:
To solve the “Indian problem,” the Dawes Act began the process of breaking up tribal
holdings and giving individual Indians deeds to private plots of land. . . . Thus did the
founders’ vision of a nation of small freehold farms settle, a century later, over the
Indian lands, a civilizing enclosure of a once native commons. (Hyde, 2010, p. 169)
Similarly, in her discussion of the legal and discursive frameworks of intellectual property rights, Boatema
Boateng shows the inequitable power structures defined through the public domain:
The position of Third World nations has often been that their access to industrial
property must be facilitated in order to achieve the technology transfer necessary for
industrialization. On the other hand, much cultural production that Third World nations
and indigenous peoples seek to protect is deemed by mainstream intellectual property
law to reside in the public domain and therefore is legitimately open to exploitation by
all and sundry. These positions are related to deep-seated differences over the terms by
which the world’s resources should be distributed. Rather than being absolute and
universal, therefore, the basic premises of intellectual property law have emerged in a
process of struggle between different positions and through the reiteration and
reinforcement of those positions that win out in the process. (2005, pp. 65–66,
emphasis mine)
Boateng highlights the creation of the public domain as a beneficial category for Western nations
wanting to produce their own resources (and then limit the resources’ use) by building on indigenous
resources without acknowledgment or redress. Further, Jane Anderson suggests that there are “a range of
reasons why indigenous knowledge issues cannot always be accommodated” within discussions about the
public domain. In her view, “contests over access to knowledge arise because of the historical conditions
that meant that indigenous people lost control over how and what knowledge was to be circulated.”
Anderson marks the public domain as a space that exacerbates indigenous peoples’ prior claims to their
materials and knowledge, and where indigenous concerns about “culturally appropriate conditions for
access” continue to be erased (2010, pp. 25–26). Anthony Seeger puts the matter more bluntly: “We are
faced with another case of cultural blindness” (2005, p. 83). For many indigenous communities in settler
societies, the public domain and an information commons are just another colonial mash-up where their
cultural materials and knowledge are “open” for the profit and benefit of others, but remain separated
2880 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
from the sociocultural systems in which they were and continue to be used, circulated, and made
meaningful.
These dehistoricized notions of the public domain place privacy and sociality at opposites ends of
the knowledge-circulation spectrum. Privacy is either an individual choice or a national necessity, while
sociality is about “giving up” one’s privacy or opening the national window to others. In these narratives,
governments, corporations, or new technologies “censor” freedoms, and individuals are assumed to
willingly give up their privacy to be social. This tendency to polarize the circulation of ideas obscures the
fact that privacy or secrecy are aspects of sociality that are crucial to the production of knowledge and
materials within the public domain. Legal scholars, such as Pamela Samuelson, argue that the public
domain is ill-defined, having shifted in scale and scope over the course of its history in relation to nation-
building, international alliances, and treaties (2006b). Samuelson reminds us that:
Public domain concepts may have proliferated in recent years because “the public
domain” does not really exist. It is a metaphor, a social-legal construct, that serves an
instrumental purpose—to assist us in thinking of a complex issue, to organize our
thoughts, to serve as a “short cut” to denote a mindset, a view, a perception about the
legal status of different types of information and what can be done with this information.
(2006a, p. 145)
In contrast, then, to commonplace perceptions of the public domain as a neutral space for
creation that benefits all participants equally, a historicized account of the public domain instead
acknowledges a variety of spaces that have violated indigenous peoples’ rights by defining their collective
works as “folklore” and excluding their protection via copyright system (Christen, 2011; Dommann, 2008;
Wendland, 2008). Monika Dommann reminds us of this legislative history:
Developed countries exported goods protected by intellectual property law, while
developing countries exported folklore, falling into the public domain. Whereas
developed countries could benefit commercially from their works, the cultural products
of developing countries remained objects of commercial exploitation by others. (2008, p.
12)
This lesser-talked-about construction of the public domain must be incorporated into our larger
conversations about the future of access, openness, and the circulation of information within the public
domain—and outside it.
Can the imagination and technological prowess that promoted open access publishing, open
source software, and Creative Commons licenses exist side-by-side with those alternative systems of
knowledge production that rely instead on social relations maintained and forged through negotiated
interdependencies, which have as their goal the mutual gain between stakeholders in social, economic,
and cultural terms? Can we imagine a digital landscape of social media that provides access controls but
does not simultaneously invoke individualistic notions of privacy or abusive systems of censorship?
Examining indigenous systems of knowledge circulation and indigenous mobilizations of digital
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2881
technologies widens the frame of digital analysis, re-defines the contours of digital sociality, and loosens
the stranglehold of open access models on the way we imagine information circulation.
Indigenous peoples, historically shut out of national public spaces and civic life, are collaborating
on a variety of projects that highlight alternative ways of imagining information creation, circulation, and
the practices of access. Off the grid, Latin American and Australian indigenous peoples have used pirate
satellites and radio programming to connect politically, socially, and culturally between dispersed
communities. They have widely adapted and reworked geographic information system technologies to
fight for land rights and mineral resources. Using GIS technologies to map and visualize their lands,
indigenous peoples have brought social relations back to place-based mapping practices. Inserting their
local knowledge and histories, they have provided GIS with a human face to incorporate into traditional
geographic practices. Indigenous peoples’ concerns for the repatriation of their ancestors’ remains and
cultural materials have led to innovative content management systems and archival databases, such as
the Reciprocal Research Network and the Ara Iritija archive, that privilege indigenous knowledge while
also promoting sharing between communities and institutions.
9
Indigenous peoples’ creation, use, and
reuse of digital technologies and platforms provides the framework necessary for a new vocabulary that
understands the historical and ethical dimensions of digital technology and information circulation
(Christen, 2009; Ginsburg, 2008; Hennessy, 2009; Hunter et al., 2004; Johnson, 2003; Verran et al.,
2007).
Mukurtu: A New Vocabulary for Openness
After the launch of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive in 2007, my collaborators and I
consulted with and presented the archive’s capabilities to many groups: indigenous communities,
archivists, librarians, and museum scholars. As I met with and received e-mails from indigenous
communities interested in the archive, I encountered similar ethical systems of accountability in which
access is determined by particular sets of relationships or knowledge systems. We soon recognized that
indigenous communities across the globe share similar sets of archival, cultural heritage, and content
management needs. The Squamish Nation in Canada wanted an archive whose protocols could
accommodate their intricate clan and family system; the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma wanted a
digital archive that could ground use and access within the 47 families to which all community members
belong; in New Zealand, some Maori archivists wanted a system that could deal with extensive kin-based
social networks; the Zuni libraries wanted to be able to exchange content and metadata with the Library
of Congress through their own cultural-based standards; and in Kenya, the Maasai wanted a system that
would allow them to differentiate materials meant for commercial purposes from those meant only for
internal circulation through intellectual property management tools. Alongside these specific cultural and
social needs was the general consensus that any widely adaptable tool must confront the low levels of
literacy and computer literacy found within indigenous communities, as well as the necessity of
accommodating various infrastructural needs—from a system that could be totally offline to a cloud
solution for those communities without any technical support or server capacity. The alpha-version of the
software followed a “two-click mantra” I had instilled in the developers, knowing that a user-friendly
9
See their respective websites at http://www.irititja.com and http://moa.ubc.ca/renewal/rnn.php
2882 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
interface must include a workflow process that took only two or fewer clicks to accomplish any task. The
two-click mantra recognized that neither literacy nor computer literacy could be taken for granted within
this system. Unlike the approaches underpinned by utopian narratives of total access that flow neatly from
the “information wants to be free” meme, we recognized that large portions of the world not only don’t
have access to the Internet or digital tools; they also don’t have the skills to implement them if they do
have access (Ginsburg, 2008). To address this access and education need, each iteration of Mukurtu CMS
has had educational and community empowerment (train the trainer) components embedded into every
step of the process. Access cannot just be about providing hardware and software, otherwise we rehearse
the technologically deterministic arguments of those who would champion the idea of a laptop on every
desk without determining the human needs, desires, and attitudes of the people who will inhabit and bring
the technology to life. Mukurtu CMS began as a grassroots effort to address specific cultural, social, and
technological needs, and it continues as a community-driven platform.
Without digital tools, content management systems, and archival platforms that address their
specific needs, many indigenous communities and their collaborators have produced expensive one-off
projects to accommodate their own informational needs. These systems address specific needs, but they
also lend themselves to obsolescence more quickly and are less sustainable without a community of users
to continually adapt and update the software. We knew from the lessons of the open source software
movement that producing an adaptable tool could be a powerful way to accommodate multiple use-case
needs and thereby allow the communities to have ownership over their own archiving systems. Although
many in the open source software movement are grounded in the axiomatic “information wants to be free”
meme, they also, at the same time, provide a solid model for participatory creation and software
development that relies on communities of users all contributing to a larger project. Rather than focus on
one-off projects, then, we set out to produce a platform that could be adaptable to multiple indigenous
contexts. Key to our success in producing just such a tool was our decision early on to build Mukurtu on
top of the free and open source Drupal 7 content management platform.
10
Mukurtu CMS can be thought of
as a system with three layers: Drupal 7 is the bottom layer providing the scaffolding; in the middle, there
is Mukurtu CMS providing the protocol-driven, sociocultural access levels; and on top, there is the specific
community’s content.
10
See http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0
http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2883
Figure 1. Mukurtu CMS platform layers.
On December 20, 2010, more than three years after the original Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari
archive was installed in Tennant Creek, my collaborators and I launched Mukurtu CMS: an open source,
free, standards-based community archive and content management system aimed at the specific needs of
indigenous peoples globally (http://www.mukurtu.org). Mukurtu translates directly to “dilly bag” in the
Warumungu language. However, the Warumungu elders I worked with in Tennant Creek redefined the
term as a “safe keeping place.” That is, the platform, like the dilly bag, is meant to protect and preserve
cultural materials while also circulating and sharing them. Elders and novices must interact: The system
does not work if knowledge or cultural materials are closed off or hidden from all. Knowledge can (and
does) die if it is not used. But it also needs to be used and circulated properly within an articulated ethical
system. The original version of the archive, created as a stand-alone browser-based system for the
Warumungu community in Tennant Creek, provides both the technical framework and the ideological
structure that underpin all of the technological decisions, design choices, and functionality that define
Mukurtu CMS.
2884 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
Figure 2. Mukurtu CMS homepage.
Building from the original project, Mukurtu CMS allows indigenous communities, libraries,
archives, and museums to archive, preserve, and circulate their cultural materials and knowledge in ways
that reinforce their own systems of knowledge management without denying the dynamism and flux of all
such systems. The framework provides a flexible template that allows cultural protocols to change over
time and in varied situations. Five components of Mukurtu CMS set it apart from proprietary commercial-
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2885
off-the-shelf and open source content management systems: 1) cultural protocols for content
management, 2) granular level access parameters based on community protocols, 3) multiple and flexible
licensing options, 4) extensive metadata fields to account for indigenous knowledge, and 5) built-in
options for exchanging materials and metadata with other communities or institutions while maintaining
community cultural protocols.
The crux of Mukurtu CMS is its emphasis on cultural protocols, both at a core level of its
architecture and in all areas of its functionality. Working against either an open or closed option or the
simple open-by-default framework found in most content management systems, Mukurtu CMS recognizes
the granular level and socially malleable protocols that drive both access to and the circulation of cultural
materials. That is, access based either on expansive parameters such as whether users are “friends,” or
merely an on or off option for access cannot handle the mire of fine-grained and overlapping types of
relationships that predicate access. For example, in the alpha version of the software, the Warumungu
community managers at the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre where the system was housed set
out protocols based on family and place-based relations, followed by community status defined by
peoples’ relations to both one another and traditional community knowledge. In practice, what this meant
was that individuals self-identified within the system’s users database, and then the software pulled
content that was matched to the person’s profile. A person could be a woman, from the Jones family, with
relations to both the Patta and Parrta country. In the system, this person would be able to access only the
content that was tagged with these same affiliations. These protocols flowed from the set of preexisting
social norms concerning the creation, reproduction, and distribution of knowledge within the community.
I first encountered these protocols when some Warumungu community members and I visited
the National Archives in Darwin to look at both their online and paper collections. While everyone was
elated to find documents and images of relatives, there was anguish over the violation of cultural
protocols observed by Warumungu people in the distribution, circulation, and reproduction of cultural
materials and knowledge. For example, images of people who were deceased were catalogued with no
warnings; pictures of sacred sites were divulged with no connection to the ancestors who cared for those
places; and ritual objects were disconnected from the practices, people, and places that they need to be
efficacious. Protocols are not rigid; they assume change, they accept negotiation, and they are inherently
social—not given, neutral, or natural. As we sat down with Warumungu community members and
sketched out how information travels, cataloged types of access, and imagined scenarios for changes
within the system, it became clear that what we needed was a flexible system that accounted for the
significance of the cultural protocols driving current sets of relations and types of informational flow. By
linking extensive user profiles to a set of protocols attached directly to the content, we were able to define
the parameters of access through social and cultural values, while also embedding the possibility for
change within the system. This system worked very well for this one local community as they set out to
manage their digital cultural heritage through their own knowledge and relationship systems. But in order
to meet the needs of multiple communities around the world who had a similar need but divergent sets of
protocols and management frameworks, we looked to create a software platform that was adaptable
enough to manage these heterogeneous systems without losing the flexibility and specificity of the
protocol-driven needs.
2886 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
Scaling up the original system meant creating an adaptable, features-based platform that would
allow any community to define and redefine their own access and circulation protocols based on their own
cultural norms and priorities. Using interviews, face-to-face meetings, and case studies, we produced a set
of community-driven narratives defined as “users stories” that drove our development.
11
Table 1. User Story Narratives for Community Agile Development of Mukurtu CMS.
As a . . . I want to . . . So that . . .
Tribal administrator Define my own cultural protocols for the
content uploaded into the archive
The content I upload is linked to
parameters for access by members
of the community, such as gender,
clan, family group, elder, etc.
Tribal administrator Link cultural protocols to groups in the
community
Content that I upload is accessible
by only the tribal members who
have the matching user profile tags
Tribal administrator Set up parameters for access to content
in the archive
When individuals enter information
about themselves, it matches with
cultural protocols
Tribal administrator Define access parameters for various
types of users and groups
When I assign someone a status
such as “tribal member,” it is clear
what permissions they have
Tribal administrator Set up pages for individual tribal
member in each of the families of the
tribe
Each person can have a
genealogical page where they can
upload information about
themselves and link content
Tribal administrator Set up “collections” Individual content can be grouped
and viewed
Tribal administrator Set licensing options Each piece of content or collection
is licensed either with traditional
copyright, Creative Commons
license, or a traditional license we
define
11
We used an “agile” software development method (http://www.agile-process.org/) and adopted it to our
specific needs, reworking it as a “community agile development model.” We defined this as a process of
designing, building, testing, implementation, and updating that emphasizes active community participation
and feedback throughout the entire development period by engaging in short, clearly defined “sprints” of
work.
http://www.agile-process.org/
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2887
These narratives form the basis for Mukurtu’s architecture. That is, we began from a radically
different place than most content management systems or digital archive solutions. Instead of assuming
that information wanted to or should be open, free, and available to “anyone with an Internet connection,”
our development process emphasized the underlying sociality of information and its reliance on, and
embeddedness within, ethical systems of relation and action in which people negotiate the creation,
reproduction, and distribution of knowledge based on multiple and interrelated factors and situations.
Beginning with the social life of information and the competing or overlapping circulation routes in which it
moves, we sought to define and build a flexible tool whereby users would not have to give up on or erase
their own knowledge systems in order to preserve, share, and manage their cultural heritage materials.
At its core, Mukurtu CMS allows for and is driven by relationships: community, individual,
familial, clan, ancestral, etc. That is, the system takes as its philosophical and architectural starting points
the already-existing social systems and information circulation routes of any given community. Mukurtu
CMS allows users—from small community archives to tribal museums, to individual or family users—to
infuse their voices, their cultural concerns, and their notions of sociality and historicity into the system.
For as Helen Nissenbuam points out in her exhaustive study of privacy, “What people care most about is
not simply restricting the flow of information but ensuring that it flows appropriately” (2010, p. 2).
Perhaps restriction is the wrong word. Instead of making any type of access choice a negative, we might
look at choices about circulation models as reflecting the diversity of peoples around the world—a diversity
not to be celebrated in and of itself, but to be acknowledged within the spectrum of access models.
Copyright in the U.S. context has recently driven much of the dialogue about access, use, and
“fair use.” Copyright is a particular social and legal solution to a tension between content creators, content
consumers, and content distributers; it should not, however, be the benchmark for how we understand
the range of possibilities for managing knowledge circulation (Boyle, 2008, pp. 2–5). Mukurtu CMS takes
an agnostic view toward licensing that accounts for the diverse legal and social needs of indigenous
communities globally as they manage and share their digital cultural heritage and knowledge with third
parties. For any piece of content or collection, one can choose between traditional copyright, Creative
Commons licenses, and our own traditional knowledge (TK) licenses and labels for any materials to be
shared externally.
12
This is key. Mukurtu’s protocols function internally, within the communities who use
Mukurtu based on their shared understandings of circulation. “Shared” does not, however, mean without
deliberation or redefinition. Cultural protocols and practices are always and everywhere provisional and
dynamic, not just within indigenous communities. Mukurtu CMS allows communities (however defined) to
use protocols to decide on pathways for circulation within the system. Importantly, though, the TK license
and label options within Mukurtu aim to answer the grassroots calls of individuals and communities who
want to engage with a range of strategies to manage and maintain their cultural materials as these
materials move out of their own communities to third parties. We developed the TK licenses and labels as
a strategic solution to a very specific issue: the management of already-existing and circulating digital
material, such as photographs, sound-recordings, films, and manuscripts that embody or represent
traditional indigenous knowledge, cultures, and practices (Anderson & Christen, in press).
12
See http://www.youtube.com/user/mukurtu?feature=watch for a short introductory video:
“gather.create.share” about the TK licenses.
http://www.youtube.com/user/mukurtu?feature=watch
2888 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
Importantly, for a large portion of materials that are already in the public domain or owned by
third parties, the TK label option takes the notion of fair use and extends it to illustrate culturally specific
conditions of access and use for materials. In their 2011 book Reclaiming Fair-Use, Patricia Aufderheide
and Peter Jaszi argue that fair-use offers an important component for ameliorating the harsh exclusions of
copyright. It is precisely the built-in flexibility within the concept that allows for multiple interpretations of
what constitutes fair-use to be developed. Further, they suggest that fair-use must, by definition, retain
this flexibility, as social and cultural norms for what constitutes “fair” change over time and are often
made in response to differently situated parties. The TK labels situate community-determined
interpretations of what constitutes fair use at their core. They are adaptable and aim to be an educational
and social “tag” informing people how materials should be used properly. The labels function to provide
additional or missing information, and in doing so, they help users to make a more informed decision
about the best and most appropriate way of using this material. At every step, Mukurtu CMS aims to
integrate and promote not just a new way of archiving and sharing cultural materials, but also a new way
of understanding the diverse modes of knowledge management that exist globally, systems that promote
historically minded and culturally responsive technologies.
Slashdot
Clearly, Mukurtu CMS is not a DRM system in any sense. Contrary to the remarks on Slashdot
that I quoted at the start of this article, the software neither locks anything up, nor closes anyone out.
Mukurtu CMS provides software solutions that allow any community to define their own access parameters
and protocols for sharing. These are all open, in the sense that the platform allows anyone who sets up an
instance of Mukurtu CMS to constantly change, add, delete, and update their protocols, categories, and
communities. In this way, the platform allows users—variously defined and self identified—to customize
and adapt the system to their needs. Social networking sites are championed merely because they allow
individual users to define who sees their posts or choose who can interact with them. Those who celebrate
this functionality because it helps to ensure individual privacy are nonetheless confounded when an
archiving and content management tool aimed at indigenous peoples incorporates access permissions for
members of their own communities. The comments on Slashdot make it clear that the technology was not
in question, but its application to specific communities: Individuals can make choices, but collectives,
communities and groups are somehow suspicious.
Mukurtu CMS was created in response to a set of social, cultural, and political tensions that
manifest in the dearth of digital tools for indigenous libraries, archives, museums, and cultural centers.
While it provides a flexible, extensible, and uniform set of technology tools, it does not produce or strive
for homogeneity. We recognize that indigenous perspectives on managing, protecting, sharing, and
preserving cultural heritage materials and traditional knowledge are anything but uniform (Burri-Nenova,
2008). While it is clear that Western intellectual property regimes are hostile to and dismissive of
indigenous claims and worldviews, it is equally apparent that recent digital tools aimed at sharing and
exchanging cultural information are also ill-equipped to deal with the diverse social structures, cultural
protocols, and histories of exploitation and exclusion of indigenous peoples globally (Anderson, 2010;
Carpenter, 2004; Coombe, 2009).
International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2889
In recent debates about digital technologies, access to the pubic domain, and privacy, there is a
false choice between content creation and passive use; between open systems that promote democratic
participation and closed systems that encourage oppression; between human beings as autonomous
authors or communities as homogenous creators. What these arguments miss, when they move from a
discussion of corporate attempts to control consumers to a consideration of smaller communities
attempting to maintain, preserve, and protect cultural heritage materials, are the histories of exclusion
and the present contexts of marginalization of indigenous peoples. We can recognize corporate greed in
the expansion of copyright law without dismissing indigenous uses of access parameters and cultural
protocols for information management within, between, and outside their dynamic and changing
communities. We can create both movements and tools that allow for an expansive notion of openness
and access, but do so without sacrificing diversity or appealing to universal goals and generalized needs.
Incorporating a wider range of ethical and cultural concerns into our digital tools subverts the
narrow notions of information freedom and the cultural commons that presently characterize our
discussion of the commons. Memes like “information wants to be free” and general calls for “open access”
undo the social bearings of information circulation and deny human agency. Shifting the focus away from
information as bits and bytes or commodified content, indigenous cultural protocols and structures for
information circulation remind us that information neither wants to be free nor wants to be open; human
beings must decide how we want to imagine the world of knowledge-sharing and information management
in ways that are at once ethical and cognizant of the deep histories of engagement and exclusion that
animate this terrain.
2890 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)
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