“Culture always builds on the past, but the past will always try to control the future”
This idea was introduced in the “Copyright manifesto” presented in RiP!, Brett Gaylor’s 2008 Remix Manifesto Documentary. After watching the documentary today in class, I’ve had my eyes opened to the war over copyrights, specifically for the purposes of remixing media.
The viewing of this documentary perfectly coincides with a topic discussed in another class this week, Learners and Learning Environments. Essentially, there is a cultural belief at play that cooperation is a form of copying. Eurowestern society has a deep rooted obsession with competition and self sufficiency, an idea that is echoed in formal schooling.
Prior to the 1960s, and again ever since the 1970’s, North American school systems have based their pedagogy around competition. From a young age, schoolchildren are presented with the idea that they must work harder and smarter than their peers in order to succeed. This is actualized through constant celebration of “winners” and downplay of “losers”, the ranking and curving of grades, and the general sink or swim mentality that dominates curricula and practice.
Fostered competition motivated learning breeds anxiety and trumps comradery. Furthermore, it is not an effected teaching strategy, as students generally loose their intrinsic motivation to achieve their goals in favour of simply aiming to win. Most importantly, however, it creates citizens who believe, consciously or not, that bouncing ideas off of others is a form of plagiarism.
This attitude proves to be quite toxic in many areas of work and study, including teacher education, where group projects and collaboration make up a good portion of the academic workload. Since entering the program, I’ve come to realize and learn to abandon the idea that my thoughts, ideas and work are my personal belongings. Adopting a more cooperative outlook towards creation has allowed for more higher quality work and the fabrication of things that could not be produced by just one individual. This is true of many cultural domains – especially digital media.
A public domain would enable artists to build off each other’s ideas, further advancing the ever-shifting timeline we know as culture. However, digital rights management is halting this sort of collaboration in its tracks. As stated in Rip! “our future is becoming less free” through copyright laws.
Changing this narrative, I believe, starts in education. In order to do so, we as teachers choose must to adopt cooperative, rather than competitive goal structures in our classrooms. By doing so, we might plant seeds in the copyright lawyers and artists of the future that cooperation can be a beautiful means of creation, rather than theft.
-Katie
