[Nfb-krafters-korner] FW: [nfb-talk] Kindle E-Reader: A Trojan Horse for Free Thought

Tue Mar 31 10:50:05 UTC 2009

Maybe this will answer questions.  I did not finish reading it.

Terry

-----Original Message-----
From: David B Andrews [mailto:David.B.Andrews at state.mn.us] 
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 10:17 PM
To: david.andrews at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nfb-talk] Kindle E-Reader: A Trojan Horse for Free Thought

With all the discussion about the Kindle, and what it permits, and
doesn't permit, I thought this might be of interest to some.

David Andrews

Kindle E-Reader: A Trojan Horse for Free Thought

By Emily Walshe
The Christian Science Monitor
from the March 18, 2009 edition
<<http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0318/p09s01>http://www.csmonitor.com/200
9/0318/p09s01-coop.html>

Brookville, N.Y. - All you really need to know about the dangers of
digital commodification you learned in kindergarten.

Think back. Remember swapping your baloney sandwich for Jell-o pudding?
Now, imagine handing over your sandwich and getting just a spoon.

That's one trade you'd never make again.

Yet that's just what millions of Americans are doing every day when they
read "books" on Kindle, Amazon's e- reading device. In our rush to adopt
new technologies, we have too readily surrendered ownership in favor of
its twisted sister, access.

Web 2.0 and its culture of collaboration supposedly unleashed a sharing
society. But we can share only what we own. And as more and more content
gets digitized, commercialized, and monopolized, our cultural integrity
is threatened. The free and balanced flow of information that gives
shape to democratic society is jeopardized.

For now, though, Kindle is on fire in the marketplace.
Who could resist reading "what you want, when you want it?" Access to
more than 240,000 books is just seconds away. And its "revolutionary
electronic-paper display ... looks and reads like real paper."

But it comes with restrictions: You can't resell or share your books -
because you don't own them. You can download only from Amazon's store,
making it difficult to read anything that is not routed through Amazon
first. You're not buying a book; you're buying access to a book. No,
it's not like borrowing a book from a library, because there is no
public investment. It's like taking an interest-only mortgage out on
intellectual property.

If our flailing economy is to teach us anything, it might be that an
on-demand world of universal access (with words like lease, licensure,
and liquidity) gets us into trouble. Amazon and other e-media
aggregators know that digital text is the irrational exuberance of the
day, and so are seizing the opportunity to codify, commodify, and
control access for tomorrow. But access doesn't "look and read" like
printed paper at all - just ask any forlorn investor. Access is useless
currency.

Why is this important? Because Kindle is the kind of technology that
challenges media freedom and restricts media pluralism. It exacerbates
what historian William Leach calls "the landscape of the temporary": a
hyper mobile and rootless society that prefers access to ownership. Such
a society is vulnerable to the dangers of selective censorship and
control.

Digital rights management (DRM), which Kindle uses to lock in its
library, raises critical questions about the nature of property and
identity in digital culture.
Culture plays a large role - in some ways, larger than government - in
shaping who we are as individuals in a society. The First Amendment
protects our right to participate in the production of that culture. The
widespread commodification of access is shaping nearly every aspect of
modern citizenship. There are benefits, to be sure, but this
transformation also poses a big- time threat to free expression and
assembly.

When Facebook, for example, proposed revisions to its terms of service
last month - claiming ownership of user profiles and personal data - the
successful backlash it spawned caused complex (even existential) ideas
about property, identity, and capitulation to bubble up: Is my Facebook
profile the essence of who I am? If so, who owns me?

The hallmark of a constitutionally governed society, after all, is the
acknowledgment that we are the authors of our own experience. In an
Internet age, this is manifest not only in published works, but also an
ever-evolving host of user-generated content (Twitter, Blogger,
Facebook, YouTube, etc.). If service providers lay claim to digital
content now, how will it all end?

Print may be dying, but the idea of print would be the more critical
demise: the idea that there needs to be a record - an artifact of
permanence, residence, and posterity - that is independent of some
well-appointed thingamajig in order to be seen, touched, understood, or
wholly possessed.

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture,"
Ray Bradbury once said. "Just get people to stop reading them."

Access equals control. In this case, it is control over what is read and
what is not; what is referenced and what is overlooked; what is retained
and what is deleted; what is and what seems to be.

To kindle, we must remember, is to set fire to. The combustible power of
this device (and others like it) lies in their quiet but constant claim
to intangible, algorithmic capital. What the Kindle should be igniting
is serious debate on the fundamental, inalienable right to property in a
digital age - and clarifying what's yours, mine, and ours.

It should strike a match against the winner-take-all casino economies
that this kind of technology engenders; revitalize American libraries
and other social institutions in their quest to preserve the doctrines
of fair use and first sale (which allow for free and lawful sharing);
and finally, spark Americans to consider the extent to which they are
handing over their baloney sandwich for a plastic spoon.

Like a lot of people, I'm a sucker for a good book. But not at the
expense of freedom, or foreclosure of thought.

Emily Walshe is a librarian and professor at Long Island University in
New York.

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