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July 10, 2005
The Adelaide Festival of Ideas is taking place this weekend. As I noted at junk for code yesterday, very little of the Festival material is online; even though the activist ethos of the festival is all about the public discussion of ideas that help make Australia a better place. In 2003, the conservative response, as expressd by Tim Blair, was to sneer at the social democratic ethos. The Festival has become caught up in the culture wars.
Suprisingly, very little of the discussion at the Festival appears to be devoted to the new digital world disclosed by the internet. Or to the importance of intellectual property rights, fair use of ideas and images, the creative commons, the public domain or sphere, and the public conversation of citizens in a liberal democracy.
John Quiggin is the honourable exception. He is talking about these issues at the Festival. I'm sure whether he took the step to digital democracy.
I'm suprised by the lack of the connection of the ethos of public discussion of ideas and informed debate to the flaws of liberal democracy. It is as if the intellectual property aspect of the US Free Trade Agreement with Australia has been forgotten. There were some big negatives there beyond the FTA being not such a sweet deal for Australia.
It is as if the way that the corporate media is moving to close down public access (subscription only) to their content and commentary is irrelevant to the public discussion of ideas; or seen as not being important for the informed debate amongst citizens
I'm suprised by this blindness given the number of academics. They would realize that most of the academic material is closed behind the walls of subscription only journals, inaccessible and the domain of the privileged. They would be aware that few of the little magazines that sustained the civic conversation in the past have palced their archived material online. And they would know the critical edge of the Senate has been blunted. So Australia's democratic deficit is going to worsen.
Should not the face-to-face public discussion of ideas that matter in the Festival be linked to the newly forming digital world, given the Festival's ethos of a general open community of people who can agree to civilly disagree about important issues?
What the 2005 Festival of Ideas discloses is that it has not stepped into, let alone embraced, our digital world. It is suprising because people in Adelaide now have access to genuine high speed broadband, way beyond what Telstra is willing or prepared to offer us consumers. Those festival talks should be online for people to read and to comment on.
The pre-digital world of the village townhall, with its face-to-face human contact and personal human interactions can be contrasted with the digital world of the bloggers who work from online material that is accesssible to all those with an internet connection. When you've gone digital, and live in that world and think about in terms of the public discussion of ideas, then you start to notice what is now happening behind your back. Let me describe this by pulling out some comments I made here:
Copyright protection and the public interest are seen to be diametrically opposed. That is the consequence of thinking the public domain in terms of a bundle of individual property rights. Standard academic convention is no longer acceptable. You pay or else with the new IP copy right laws the US is imposing on all it cuts a deal with. The "public's" interests should be subordinated to the private interests of the US companies. What has happened is the public commons is being squeezed and the idea of fair use is being removed.
As the bloggers break new ground in the digital world we realize that this world is overwhelmingly driven by the natural marketplace desire to make a money profit, not the desire to enhance democracy.
Cameron Riley observed here that the bloggers need to keep pushing the boundaries. He says:
It is my opinion some of the more trafficked Auian blog sites should make the transition from blog to community site; such as LP, Catallaxy, troppo, surfdom etc. Blogging software has its own limitations, and scoop is the next step from blog to community.
That is probably right as the blogs tend to develop their own little community groupings of readers and commentators. Those little electronic communities represent the public discussion of ideas in the digital world. The blogs can be seen as the innovative use of information technologies by people to educate and empower themselves and so foster the civic conversation upon which the strength of the democracy depends.
The digital flaw with the Adelaide Festival of Ideas highlights the pressing need for public information, ideas and discussions to go online and make them the raw material for the public conversation in the digital world. Without that you get very narrow debates about a narrow set of issues as is happening over at Quiggin's blog
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I like to think of it as the tension between scarcity and abundance. The irony being that capitalism is a system which reduces scarcity through commoditization; hence promoting abundance. The internet and software are the historical equivalents to Galileo seeing a pock-marked moon through his telescope.
Since quantum physics knocked reductionism on the head, we have known for a while that we are under-going a human rationality change, but no-one is sure where it will end up. The prefix eco- was a candidate, then e-; but I suspect it will be a post-scarcity rationality. An abundance era. This will ultimately change our culture, our education, our interaction in society, our economic system and force inevitable changes to our forms of government.