Free Culture
Antes de mais quero sublinhar que este blog, é meu, representa a minha opinião e não aquela da empresa para que trabalho, por isso antes de impulsivamente comentarem leiam o meu disclaimer.
A blogosfera em geral tem gerado um enorme “buzz” no que toca á liberdade de expressão. E eu não resisti a partilhar algo que tem estado entre as minhas leituras e que acho oportuno.
Alguns parágrafos da página 41 do livro Free Culture, escrito por Lawrence Lessig:
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September 11 was not an aberration. It was a beginning. Around the same time, a form of communication that has grown dramatically was just beginning to come into public consciousness: the Web-log, or blog. The blog is a kind of public diary, and within some cultures, such as in Japan, it functions very much like a diary. In those cultures, it records private facts in a public way — it’s a kind of electronic Jerry Springer, available anywhere in the world.
But in the United States, blogs have taken on a very different character. There are some who use the space simply to talk about their private life. But there are many who use the space to engage in public discourse. Discussing matters of public import, criticizing others who are mistaken in their views, criticizing politicians about the decisions they make, offering solutions to problems we all see: blogs create the sense of a virtual public meeting, but one in which we don’t all hope to be there at the same time and in which conversations are not necessarily linked. The best of the blog entries are relatively short; they point directly to words used by others, criticizing with or adding to them. They are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have.
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People post when they want to post, and people read when they want to read. The most difficult time is synchronous time. Technologies that enable asynchronous communication, such as e-mail, increase the opportunity for communication. Blogs allow for public discourse without the public ever needing to gather in a single public place.
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Blog space gives amateurs a way to enter the debate — “amateur” not in the sense of inexperienced, but in the sense of an Olympic athlete, meaning not paid by anyone to give their reports. It allows for a much broader range of input into a story, as reporting on the Columbia disaster revealed, when hundreds from across the southwest United States turned to the Internet to retell what they had seen. And it drives readers to read across the range of accounts and “triangulate”, as Winer puts it, the truth. Blogs, Winer says, are “communicating directly with our constituency, and the middle man is out of it” — with all the benefits, and costs, that might entail.
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This speech affects democracy. Winer thinks that happens because “you don’t have to work for somebody who controls, [for] a gatekeeper”. That is true. But it affects democracy in another way as well.
As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticized by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy.
Today there are probably a couple of million blogs where such writing happens. When there are ten million, there will be something extraordinary to report.
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Se quiserem ler mais, podem fazer o download do livro completo em PDF aqui.
