• Free Culture**

After reading the introduction to free culture i found that it used the past inventors and their stories to portray the interest of protecting cognitive property. I actually found his style to be captivating, in a sense. Because he was able to relate his feeling to obvious and well know inventors like Bell and inventions like AM/FM radio, that made great impacts on our lives to this day through these innovations. He easily showed why cognitve property is so great.

By using inventors as examples, he also made a subtle suggestion that without those breakthroughs, without the proper use of their theories, we could be with out simple technologies that we throughly depend on. Technologies from which most others were born. Lessig made his point by using common examples that any one who grabbed his words would relate to.

I sat on this for a couple days. I feel strongly about the inro to _Free Culture_.

The law is suppose to be on our side, protect us from wrong, while allowing us as a collective democracy to govern out people...but where does the law stop...? where does it begin? and when do we put in the final say?

I continued on in the Lessig novel this week. He writing style is intriguing to me. It is as though he is speaking directly to his audience. Lessig uses language, but does not abuse it. The novel, so to speak, is written using literature and vocabulary pertaining to its various topics, but never rises to a level of preaching or bestowing his knowledge as right. He speaks well and asserts himself in a encouraging way.

Deepening into his plot, he continues to use examples that are relatable. Speaking about the jury process in our democracy provoked me slightly. It is amazing that we often believe that our system is the RIGHT system, 'we' believe in it enough to encourage others to follow a similar structure, and yet we aren't truly fulfilling the requirements ourselves. In many ways, society is comfortable enough to allow our freedom of speach to lax, to allow newspapers and other sources to print the latest news...that sells the paper rather than informs... or the voting process to be directed or manipulated by those campaigning in it.

Blogging also became a topic in this section, and this also raises and interesting question...are we better at talking to a computer screen than talking to an LIVE human being? I myself have found that the 'im'ing, commenting and email can be liberating. It is much easier to refute a person if they can't actually be heard in a literal sense. And as Lessig says, its easier to have selective hearing when all you have to do is stop reading. But where will we draw the line there? Now that its is just as easy to speak to someone in India as next door, will we never travel there? Will we never go next door to meet our neighbors? It would be so simple in todays time, to grocery shop online, have a job online, converse online, watch television, read books, explore foreign continents and meet their people...Why would we ever leave the comfort of our cushy chair in our living rooms to explore the outside when we can do it right here right now? And how scary an idea, that we speak more freely in this space, than we do to each other in person.