On politics in the classroom

After attending a college where it was standard practice for professors to move beyond sharing their political opinions to punishing students who disagreed, I am admittedly oversensitive to this issue. But the readings we did a while back, on teaching kids how to use digital media to express their political opinions, and even some of the readings on media literacy, made me a little wary. There is a balance we need to strike between empowering kids to understand media messages and voice their own opinions, and convincing kids to believe the same things we do.

It can be tricky. On some level, teaching media literacy is in itself a subversive action. We’re teaching kids to think critically about information provided by the government, the media, corporations: sources that plenty of their parents trust without question. Learning to ask those questions is a vital skill, and one that kids are not likely to pick up on their own. Even so, it’s not without controversy. There are plenty of adults who would prefer that children believe what they’re told. There is, after all, a great deal of money at stake.

So it’s important, I think, to make certain that we teach kids how to make these evaluations and judgments on their own, without asserting that our own views on the subject are right. Rheingold’s goal seems like a good one: “What if teachers could help students discover what they really care about, then show them how to use digital media to learn more and to persuade others?” Helping kids refine and articulate their views, and teaching them how to share those views in interesting, attention-getting ways – that’s all well and good. This stuff, though, concerns me more:

Finally, American youth are particularly susceptible to being influenced by corporate-funded mass culture, which is aimed directly at them even though it reaches a global audience. For that very reason, they have special leverage over media corporations, especially if they act cooperatively. It is not an exaggeration to say that youth civic engagement in the United States could benefit democracy around the world if youth-led associations challenged mass culture.

I agree, right? But this is a political opinion. Where do we draw the line between teaching media literacy skills and performing our own indoctrination? Is it really the place of schools or teachers to encourage kids to “challenge” mass culture, above and beyond just analyzing it? I don’t know. It seems like a difficult line to walk, anyway.

On the other side: for my annotated bibliography, I looked at copyright issues and youth, and while researching that topic, I ended up looking through a bunch of pro-corporate propaganda aimed at kids. The good news is, a lot of schools are teaching kids about copyright law in a responsible way: they're giving kids information about how they can and can't use other people's intellectual property, with plenty of emphasis placed on the fair use doctrine and on finding Creative Commons-licensed or public domain materials.

The bad news - there is always bad news - is that plenty of schools aren't. The MPAA and the RIAA, among other corporate interest groups, have created lesson plans that boil down to, “If you didn’t pay for it, you stole it.” That’s obviously not true. These lessons ignore the intricacies and vagaries of copyright law in the real world. Rather than introduce a complicated subject, like fair use, these interest groups ignore it entirely, even though it has a huge impact on the way we think about and interact with copyrighted materials.

Worryingly, plenty of schools are using these lesson plans. California now requires most schools to teach kids about copyright law. (Whether or not this is more worthwhile than teaching them, say, math or English or music theory is up for debate.) Teachers, most of whom are pressed for time as it is, sometimes see these professionally produced, thorough lesson plans as an easy option. And so corporate interests continue to insinuate their way into our schools. And of course, the reason I find this so upsetting is that I do not think that the political positions of some corporate entity have any place in the classroom, where they are presented by teachers and other adults in positions of authority, and are less likely to be questioned by the young people who hear them.

So while teaching kids the realities of copyright law – how it impacts them, what exceptions they may be able to take advantage of, how to find materials that are freely available – is absolutely important, we have to be careful. Advocating for a change in copyright law, reasonable as it may be, probably isn’t something we should be doing in the classroom. (On our own time, or as an institution…that’s a different story. Advocating for copyright law reform seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for libraries and librarians to do.)

Anyway. Teaching media literacy skills can be a really empowering thing. Teaching kids about the ways copyright law can work for them, or the ways they can work around it, is also good. We just have to make sure that kids are empowered to take their media literacy toolbox and go out in the world to figure things out for themselves.

Some Scattered Thoughts on Copyright and Privacy

Copyight & Choking Creativity

Lessig’s TED presentation on copyright law certainly resonated with me, and left me with much to think about. While I very much respect where he is coming from, I have several concerns about his proposed solutions.

Corporations not Creators Own Copyrights

First, he argues that artists and creators should allow more freely available content into the marketplace. This makes sense, and I agree that this is necessary for movement toward his vision of a “legal” read-write society. What I question, however, is whether in today’s economy artists and creators are really in control of their work. Often artists sign away their rights (or at least some of their rights) to corporations –agencies, publishers, record labels, etc. While they may still gain profit from their work and have some limited control over how the work is used, it is the corporation that must give permission and make the content freely available. It is the corporation that will sue if copyright infringement occurs, and it is the corporation that has a vested interest in making sure the content is not freely available.

Copyright is Confusing

Lessig alludes to Creative Commons in his presentation, though he doesn’t go into a discussion of it. I strongly support the ideals of Creative Commons. However, I don’t see it as a feasible solution that will end “Copyright abolitionism” that is so rampant among youth (and many others), simply for the fact that it is too confusing. If you are remixing 10 movie clips with a song plus multiple photographs, and perhaps look at 100s of objects to decide which is best for your creation, think how time consuming and limiting it is to try to figure out the allowances and restrictions that are on each individual item. Even with Creative Commons labeling, it can be extremely difficult to discern how and when the item can be used, who to ask for permission, etc. I just don’t see young people taking the time to investigate this for each item.

I agree with Lessig that in this “Age of Prohibitions” youth will continue to be driven (or choose to) live life “against the law” simply because it is too hard and limiting to follow the law, and because the risk of prosecution is relatively low. The lessons of a previous age of Prohibition (remember speakeasys?) showed that in the end it was necessary to reconsider the law because it was impossible to prosecute everyone who has breaking the law, and only the gangsters and bootleggers were profiting. I wonder if digital copyright law might not be a similar case.


Does Participating in Society Today Mean Forgoing Privacy?

I’ve been thinking lately about the ways in which privacy is defined and does or doesn’t exist in today’s society. I have recently received a spate of privacy policy statements in the mail from various credit cards, banks, and businesses that I use the services of. In order to participate with nearly any business or web site, or to have a presence in the online world, etc., etc. we must sign away certain rights to our personal information. Many of us do this without thinking—often feeling that we don’t have a choice. And in many ways, I don’t think we do. How can one really avoid putting their information into the public sphere without becoming a recluse?

Even if you were able to somehow avoid working with any business or organization that had access to personal information, you would still be confronted with the massive amounts of public surveillance that goes on worldwide. I can’t remember ever signing or seeing a privacy policy about how an ATM or convenience store or city street camera can use my image. While generally these images are only released upon a crime being committed, how are images being stored, by who, and for how long? Is there any law saying that the owner of that surveillance tape could not use it to make a profit? If a celebrity sits down in a restaurant with someone who is not their spouse, could that restaurant sell the tape to a gossip outlet like TMZ?

I realize I am stretching things a bit here, but it is an interesting question. How much of our right to privacy do we give up just by leaving our house, whether virtually or physically? How much right to privacy should we expect to have in the public sphere? And will the legacy of our culture in the distant future be the massive amounts of surveillance images that we are leaving behind?

Also wanted to share this link to an intriguing map about surveillance from http://www.privacyinternational.org/. I was going to post a copy of the picture here, but decided in the light of copyright discussions this week, I would just link to it.