Far more eloquently described, more then 15 years ago, by Lawrence Lessig, I too sense an open or free culture, and design there within, might be constrained or conditioned by technology , policy, community and market vectors.
I perceived Lessig’s work then to have been focused on who controls your cultural artifacts. These artifacts, I sense, could arguably be understood as types of (in)tangible data sets given meaningful or semiotic form as co-creative learning artifacts (by you and/or others).
I imagine, for instance, “Mickey Mouse” as a data set (perhaps extended, as a cognitive net, well beyond the character?). Mickey, or any other artifact of your choosing, aids one to learn about one’s cultural narratives and, as extended cognition, in positive feedback loops, about one self in communicative co-creation with the other (who is engaged in similar interactions with this and other datasets). However, engaging with a Mickey meant / means risking persecution under IPR (I wrote on this through an artistic lens here ).
Today, such data sets for one’s artificial learning (ie learning through a human made artifact) are (also) we ourselves. We are data. Provocatively: we are (made) artificial by the artificial. Tomorrow’s new psychoanalyst-teacher could very well be your friendly neighborhood autonomous data visualizer; or so I imagine.
Mapping Lessig, with the article below, and with many of the sources one could find (e.g.: Jason Silva, Kevin Kelly, Mark Sprevak, Stuart Russell, Kurzweil, Yuval Noah Harari, Kaśka Porayska-Pomsta ) I am enabled to ponder:
Who do the visualizations serve? Who’s privacy and preferences do they interfere with? Who’s data is alienated beyond the context within which its use was intended? Who owns (or has the IPR) on the data learned from the data I create during my co-creative cultural learning (e.g: online social networking, self-exhibition as well as more formal online learning contexts); allowing third parties to learn more about me then I am given access to learn about myself?
Moreover, differently from they who own Mickey, who of us can sue the users of our data, or the artifacts appropriated therefrom, as if it were (and actually is) our own IPR?
Given the spirit of artificial intelligence in education (AIED), I felt that the following article, published these past days on such data use that is algorithmically processed in questionable ethical or open manners, could resonate with others as well. (ethics , aiethics )
Epilogue — A quote:
“The FTC has required companies to disgorge ill-gotten monetary gains obtained through deceptive practices, forcing them to delete algorithmic systems built with ill-gotten data could become a more routine approach, one that modernizes FTC enforcement to directly affect how companies do business.”
References
Lessig’s last speech on free culture: here
Lessig’s Free Culture book: here