Lessig

Lessig makes several interesting points in this chapter about the media, internet and how things have evolved over time. In the first part of the chapter, Lessig describes the evolution of Kodak and the importance of it. Kodak made a significance impact on the society because people finally had the ability to capture their lives in a new way. Lessig also brushed on the fact that taking images meant less ambiguity in recording the lives of others. Basically, before photographs, people wrote about their lives and that was subject to interpretation by others, but with photographs, it was a clear-cut way to record events.

Just Think! Is an interesting program focused on teaching kids about media literacy and allowing them to experience how videos, images and media are produced. I thought this was an interesting contrast to the Kodak story because not only has media and technology come this far, but it has developed so much since Kodak that children need to learn how the mass media works and attempt to make media themselves in order to understand the images that they are exposed to. Before Kodak, literacy bias’ were an issue when recording an event, and now we have media literacy bias’ that have become an issue.

Next, Lessig describes the world of blogging with an interesting example of 9/11. To me, this section illustrated how the Internet is quickly becoming a new and different source for news, images and media. The mass media often puts out the same story, over and over, and people get tired of hearing about the same thing. But blogging allows individual’s to share different viewpoints to the story, different images of the event, and different information to learn.

Lastly, Lessig discusses open source software as a different way to gain information and learn about the media and technology. Instead of gathering gossip and information from media and/or Internet, open source software is something that helps people understand how the internet, computer programs, etc. work. It’s similar to Just Think! in the sense that “tinkering” is essential to gaining knowledge. I feel as though open source software is on a different level than the rest of the topics discussed in the chapter. Although I have never used or played with open source software, I have heard of many examples such as Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice and wordpress.