Saturday, September 19, 2009

Connections and more connections

I found this image after seeing this plea on Reddit: "Help us Reddit". Then I followed a link to a Youtube video of part of the recent protests. And then a link to a Persian online newspaper/blog. On which I saw this icon. I copied it and reposted on the possibility that the Newspaper might be taken offline.

The icon is doubly interesting. First, in terms of representing the protest movement in Iran, and second as an example of diffusion of stylistic cues, since this is certainly in the style of Banksy's stencil graffiti. Or see this discussion of his work.

One of the interesting potentials of online systems of communication is how they make it easy to combine threads of ideas and spread them in new ways, which also allows the ideas to evolve and become something other than what they started out as. The Benkler book "The Wealth of Networks" for this coming week in our course, and well as Larry Lessig's discussions emphasize this issue as a key justification for why ideas, and much of cultural production should be free, in the sense of open for re-use and modification with attribution, promoted by the creative commons.

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