{"id":1060,"date":"2009-04-16T12:20:55","date_gmt":"2009-04-16T17:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/16\/lessig-on-the-ecology-of-culture\/"},"modified":"2021-06-10T09:44:13","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T14:44:13","slug":"lessig-on-the-ecology-of-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/16\/lessig-on-the-ecology-of-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessig on the ecology of culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Mediacology<\/a> for sharing this presentation on “Green Culture” by Lawrence Lessig <\/a>from the recent Green Festival in Seattle. Lessig is the guru of the creative commons <\/a>movement, and his talk, on what he calls “cultural environmentalism,” is really on media ecology, i.e. the “ecology” of cultural production and creativity, and especially on the differences between the “read-only culture” of contemporary copyright law and the “read-write” and “remix” cultures that an open and democratic public sphere should be making possible today. But since he’s talking to an audience of environmentalists, he makes some pointed references to global warming and the (non-existent) state of regulatory law surrounding it, as compared to the draconian regulations surrounding copyright. (Although he’s a bit grumpy about it, I love the clip of the “cheat offsetters” who, like carbon offsetters, are developing an emerging market in trading the right to cheat on one’s spouse.)<\/p>\n

The lecture, if we can call it that, is a brilliant example of Lessig’s famous (infamous?) Power Point presentation style (which I’ve tried emulating occasionally, and which is a hell of a lot of work — we need better software for it), and is one of the most entertaining lectures I’ve ever sat through. Interestingly, Lessig posits Aldous Huxley (who I’ve discussed a couple of times here before) and John Philip Sousa, of all people, as predecessors of the cultural commons. But where Sousa had defended “young people” getting together “singing the songs of their day” against the consumerist media culture that was rising in his time, Lessig defends on-line remixers, Anime music video makers, and others — he shows us some excellent and entertaining examples of all of these — against the vested interests constraining cultural creativity today.<\/p>\n

The increasing cross-breeding between environmentalism (of the old, new, and open varieties) and the free culture\/open source movement is, to my mind, one of the points of light on the horizon — a harbinger, I hope, of the “liberation ecology” that would bring cultural, media, democracy, and ecology activists into sync in issues and struggles around the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Mediacology for sharing this presentation on “Green Culture” by Lawrence Lessig from the recent Green Festival in Seattle. Lessig is the guru of the creative commons movement, and his talk, on what he calls “cultural environmentalism,” is really on media ecology, i.e. the “ecology” of cultural production and creativity, and especially on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[203,690660,196],"tags":[4474,4475,4476,4412,4477,4478],"class_list":["post-1060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","category-cultural_politics","category-ecoculture","tag-creative-commons","tag-cultural-environmentalism","tag-ecology-of-culture","tag-ecomedia","tag-lessig","tag-media-ecology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-h6","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6485,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/02\/04\/thinking-through-media-ecologies\/","url_meta":{"origin":1060,"position":0},"title":"Thinking through media ecologies","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"On e\u00b2mc we're thinking through the various meanings of \"media ecology.\" The first, chronologically, is the medium theory of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others -- sometimes called the Toronto School of communication theory. Neil Postman's \"New York school\" can be considered a more critical and pessimistic adjunct\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cultural politics"","block_context":{"text":"Cultural politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cultural_politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1081,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/06\/01\/more-lessig-kelly-socialism\/","url_meta":{"origin":1060,"position":1},"title":"more Lessig, Kelly, socialism","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 1, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Now that I've taken the time to read the growing list of responses to Lessig's post, I have to say that I'm much more impressed with the collective hive mind -- the network of respondents he's grown around himself -- than with the Queen Bee (Lessig himself) on this matter.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6451,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/01\/18\/introducing-e2mc-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":1060,"position":2},"title":"Introducing e\u00b2mc","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"e2mc, short for \"evolving ecological media cultures,\" has gone online. e2mc\u00a0begins as the class blog for the University of Vermont course \u201cMedia Ecologies and Cultural Politics.\u201d Its long-term goal is to become the online face of the UVM Ecomedia Studies Lab, which is still in development. 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(And how none of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/S9yKvpvD4oA\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1033,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/26\/about-this-blog\/","url_meta":{"origin":1060,"position":5},"title":"About this blog","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"An online space for environmental cultural theory, this weblog has two primary objectives: (1) To communicate about issues at the intersection of ecological, political, and cultural thought and practice, especially at the interdisciplinary junctures forming in and around the fields of ecocriticism , green cultural studies, political ecology, environmental communication,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11876,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060\/revisions\/11876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}