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Critical Information Studies: A Manifesto

I usually speak to laypeople; now I get to speak to the academy.

The best academic cultures have a thin membrane between the campus and the community.

Just came from Cornell — is it the University’s business to choose a software platform, especially a proprietary software platform? That debate generated lots of interest in the outside world.

Scholarly norms are spreading out into the rest of the world, in areas like CC licensing and open source software.

What is Critical Information Studies?

It’s an exercise in taxonomy. He’s seen this developing, so he wants to name it. But taxonomy isn’t that useful.
It’s an exercise in branding. (Self-serving, of course.)
It’s fun and interesting. He figured this out while putting together the index for his first book. (There’s an easter egg in the index.) James, Rick and James, William were next to each other. Fantastic.
We are fighting the good fight. We like sharing and collaboration.
We are doing well. Used to be gloomy about the fight in the halls of congress, but the fight is being fought in every home wiht a computer and every university library. The fight is in our practice. The other side is finally taking us seriously. They used to ignore us. When the DMCA was passed, there was no consideration of the public interest. ALA and Jaszi were on top of it, but they couldn’t compete. But now, Congress can’t help but ask about the public interest.
This academic movement is a partner to the “Free Culture” movement. It is to the free culture movement what Silent Spring was to the environmental movement. We provide phrases, footnotes, and cultural capital to activists — the people arguing and filing lawsuits. We also contribute to hacktivism, which is bad.

We have a disorganized interdisciplibary field here. What do we know about it? It’s critical because it challenges the status quo and dominant policy trends. It’s about information, and it’s studies because that’s what we do.

Roots are in legal scholarship on copyright, and these works cross over into the rest of the academy. Benjamin Kaplan, Jamie Boyle, Rosemary Coombe, Peter Jaszi, et al.

We are bridging academic divides. CIS can only be public scholarship that crosses over to other areas. The research is always linked to teaching, and our students actually care and grasp the conflicts. We are both producers and consumers of knowledge; we are all copyright holders and copyright users. This deflates the cultural studies vs. political economy debate, since it requires both. Science and the humanities are getting together in exciting ways; this brings together people from every corner of the university. It’s also unifying the humanities and the professional schools, since we’re all in the same boat.

This isn’t just about copyright. The public domain doesn’t always serve every important ethical claim. “Local knowledge” challenges both proprietary regimes and free culture principles. Trademarks are important to what goes on at a university, even if we don’t always realize it. It’s also about technology and technological standards. What sort of formats and platforms are our universities perpetrating? And of course patents now regulate all kinds of scientific research.

CIS interrogates everything — histories, structures, functions, prices, habits, notms, ideologies, practices, and regulations.

We aren’t just talking about negative liberty — about fair use, academic freedom, and free speech. “Fair use” is neither fair nor useful. We make a mistake when we think we have fair use rights. We can defend ourselves in court, but University counsel won’t defend us in court. It’s meaningless unless you get sued; you can’t play the card up front. It’s so nebulous that a conversation about it always includes “well, it depends.” And that’s not a good way to guide behavior. Once we realize that, we can start getting tough. We’re always afraid of getting sued, and that’s not a good way of doing scholarship or of being a human being.

We ask questions about access — abilities, costs, and chilling effects on audiences.

What we’re doing. Scholarship about this stuff. Public criticism. Public engagement. Open access journals. Open courseware. Pushing publishers to lower costs of scholarly production.

We must be explicit about the fact that this scholarship is for something. We are for cultural, semiotic, information, and political democracy. (E.g. contracting out electronic voting machines so we can’t see what’s under the hood; this links to the Swarthmore Diebold memo incident.)

Some challenges to CIS. Institutional challenges include academic protectivism of their work. Trying to capture the value of what came out of their labs. Universities positioned themselves as content providers; getting through the content provider paradox now. Cultural challenges include that classical liberalism doesn’t translate well. Economic challenges include that subjects of scholarship can put up barriers to examination with IP rights. Political challenges include that coalitions are hard to maintain; global agendas are not forthcoming; scholars are privileged and elite and often elitist.

What happens next? We need to be powerfully vocal about open access journals. We need to stand up to journals about copyright contracts. Use Creative Commons licenses. We need to actually get together — to establish and maintain a global network of interdisciplinary scholars. Generate a wikibibliography of CIS works.