Blogger Book Club: Dude, Where's Your Laptop?

On higher education: I would guess that institutions of higher education will change their curriculum and methods to meet any shift rather than let themselves become obsolete. (At least those institutions whose endowments aren't sufficiently large to regard the market for students with amusement.) The question would then be how that affects the universities' collective role as at least this country's de facto research and development department—including, as a research category, the arts.

This great observation leads to another important, and totally under-addressed point (unaddressed by a lot of the technology-centric copyright critics and thus often left to copyright expansionists to take on). Many of the critics manage to be critical of copyright without necessarily criticizing anything about the material social order .. or maybe a better way to put it is that their critiques could be met without really altering the material social order, and with no major changes expected except in pretty vague "marketplace of ideas" sorts of ways.

This is one of my difficulties with the whole "digital natives" argument as well. Both Lessig and Palfrey (and lots of Berkman center peoples)'s arguments focus on "our kids" growing up and not being understood by the powers that be due to the kids' close relationship with technology. That lack of understanding could lead to "our kids" facing difficulties in school or society. But the difficulties "our kids" face usually are not put in any context of the difficulties anybody else faces in school or society, except that they use the same kinds of rights/civil liberties arguments to highlight the injustice "our kids" face... I asked Palfrey whether the copyright changes he wants made on behalf of digital natives would have any implications for any other people who have historically faced difficulty in higher education, and he basically said he hadn't thought about it. sigh.

(just found your blog, btw.. so I should say I'm generally wayyyy over on the critical (c) side, especially being a dj and all)