Anything But Free
By Alaina Steg
Among the millions of articles that exist on the World Wide Web, very few are informative and credible. In finding valuable information online, particularly information found in published, scholarly journal articles, time is more often wasted finding the right source than writing about it. Students are often required to use scholarly based sources, but access to these sources is extremely limited.
There is something that must be understood about limitations, especially when applying them to education. Limitation in academia is one of the purest forms of segregation. For instance, the only people who have access to any professional and legitimate form of scholarly articles are those who pay entry for their access; primarily students who pay the outrageous tuitions of universities. In reference of limitations in scholarly-based work, one should be aware of the Creative Commons. Lawrence Lessig produced and generated the Creative Commons license, a strategy that takes Copyright, all rights reserved, into Creative Commons, some rights reserved.
As Lessig explains in his book Free Culture, “Journals are increasingly becoming electronic, and libraries and their users are given access to these electronic journals through password-protected sites” (Lessig 280). This leads to the ultimate question Lessig addresses, “But what if the only way to get access to social and scientific data was through proprietary services? What if no one had the ability to browse this data except by paying for a subscription?” (Lessig 281). Then what happens after students graduate? And where will they find valuable information or, actual knowledge, after they are done paying their tuitions? Does it really just stop there? With such apparent traits of segregation, it is clearly conveyed that those who cannot provide economic growth to the article or database are not worthy of reading the information. Nevertheless, a furtherance of their knowledge is neglected. After all, “The millions of dollars being spent on wonderful electronic resources are wasted if the researchers can’t even find them” (LaGuardia 606).
Lessig explains that the original distribution of journals in libraries existed only in print, allowing for free, public access. But as print publishing has merged into digital publishing, “the publishers are demanding that libraries not give the general public access to the journals. This means that the freedoms provided by print journals in public libraries begin to disappear” (Lessig 281-282). Not only do freedoms begin to disappear in means of accessing scholarly journals, freedoms also disappear from the search results of what is presented to the user. When printed text was the primary material of research, researchers could find the exact information they desired by obtaining one book. But now as research has formed a heavy reliance on digital texts, the serendipity of the search is not so reliable and the time that was once able to be devoted directly to research is interrupted as, “The individual website is obviously not the consumptive unit of the Web experience. Rather, links encourage new consistencies of consumption, new flows by which Web users are encouraged to pursue other websites and other portals on existing pages” (Reeves 316).
The first step in reading any web text is merely obtaining the information. This is a simple task, one presumed to be very easy, but the proper and desired information is incredibly difficult to find. “The objective of formalities is to make things clear. The existing system does nothing to make things clear. Indeed, it seems designed to make things unclear” (Lessig 291). The entire objective of students writing research papers based off of scholarly articles is to learn, but as access to these articles decreases, there is an even higher increase in the amount of time wasted on the web. “Bouncing from one site, profile, or activity to the next, users routinely find themselves in unexpected places, spending much more time on the Web than they had initially planned” (Reeves 318).
Likewise, as segregation has increased in academia, freedoms find themselves either contradicted or completely vanished. When this happens, clouds arise, lines become blurry, and we are left with the fearful reality of how the, “rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased” (Lessig 281). Aaron Swartz, “The Internet’s Own Boy,” was a strong activist for the freedom of scholarly articles, but ended up in a swamp of lawsuits for copying the database, JSTOR, onto his own server. Although Swartz did not share his hackings with others, the criminal charges he faced were unreal for a crime that was never truly committed. As Swartz said in an interview, “You can’t just punish people because they took away a potential sale” (Kofman). So who is the true criminal, after all? The young man pushing for freedom in a country that is known to be “The Land of the Free?” Or the system of the country that deprives the so called freedom?
“The technology that preserved the balance of our history - between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission - has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture” (Weinstein and Wild). Fine lines do not exist anymore; freedom on the web does not exist anymore. And there is so much more information, stagnant and ready to be indulged in, but there are so many barriers that continue denying people the freedom of knowledge unless they are privileged and profitable. As students, as people, and as a society, we must take a stand against the segregation in the World Wide Web and demand back our rights to the access of information.
Works Cited
Creative Commons. “About the Licenses.” April 28, 2016. Web.
Kofman, Ava. "A Serious Man." Nation 302.8 (2016): 27-32. Academic Search Complete. Web. 26 Mar. 2016.
LaGuardia, Cheryl1, claguard@fas.harvard.edu. "Library Instruction In The Digital Age." Journal Of Library Administration 52.6/7 (2012): 601-608. Education Source. Web. 28 Apr. 2016.
Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Print.
Reeves, Joshua. "Temptation And Its Discontents: Digital Rhetoric, Flow, And The Possible." Rhetoric Review 32.3 (2013): 314-330. Literary Reference Center. Web. 28 Apr. 2016.
Weinstein, Stuart, and Charles Wild. "Lawrence Lessig's ‘Bleak House’: A Critique Of “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology And The Law To Lock Down Culture And Control Creativity” Or “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Internet Law” 1." International Review Of Law, Computers & Technology 19.3 (2005): 363-375. Business Source Complete. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.