Course Goal:

This course prepares

students from diverse scholarly and professional backgrounds to investigate, analyze and critique the social,

political and cultural tensions surrounding contemporary information practices.

Students will critically engage with the theoretical approaches, ethical groundings, methodological

frameworks and technical skills utilized by information professionals.

Course Objectives:

Upon completion of this course students will be able to:

1.Identify and analyze information-related problems of a community or organization

2.Frame and articulate information resources, services and systems that can address the information-

related problems of a community or organization

3.Describe influences on individual and institutional information practices

4.Assess the implications of a contemporary information issue for an information organization

5.Apply knowledge of information technologies and resources to a real world situation, taking into

account the perspectives of institutional and community stakeholders

6.Articulate ideas and concepts in a variety of communication modes including oral, written and

multimedia

7.Provide direction and feedback within a team or small group setting

8.Synthesize scholarship from information studies and related fields, along with media accounts

9.Apply knowledge from existing scholarship to real-world information problems

10.Describe principles and ethics of the information professions

11.Critically evaluate the role of the information professions in societies

12.Describe the contributions of the information professions

13.Participate meaningfully in professional development opportunities

Course Topics:

●Contemporary Theory

●Technology and Information Infrastructures

●Intellectual Property and Copyright

●Questioning Information Freedom

●Privacy

●Data and Bias

●Repair and Care Work

●Practicing Anti-Racism in Information Spaces

●Legacies of Colonialism in Libraries, Archives and Museums

●Library Labour Required and Recommended Reading: Material from books, journals, videos,

podcasts and websites will constitute required reading. These will be listed in the course learning

management system (i.e. Canvas) and will be available directly through links or through Library

(e.g., electronic and/or print formats).

Topic Briefing The major assignment is a Topic Briefing Paper on a topic of your choice. Examples will be provided

on Canvas. A topic briefing document is a short, formatted document, outlining the key issues and

literatures on a topic, in order to provide information for an organization about making a decision,

moving forward with a policy, or creating a new program (for example). Topic Briefings often present

findings from literature in an easily accessible way, using graphics or images, and offer concise and

clear recommendations for an organization.

This assignment has 5 parts:

A.Topic Briefing Proposal:

You will submit a one-page proposal providing the following required information: the topic selected;

at least 4 relevant references; your motivation for choosing the topic; potential audience(s); initial

ideas concerning how you will explore the topic; and

B.Topic Briefing Draft:

You will submit a full draft of the Topic Briefing

C.Topic Briefing Peer Feedback:

You will provide peer reviews of 2 of your colleagues Topic Briefing Drafts.

D.Topic Briefing Final:

This is the final 4 page professionally formatted version of your topic briefing. This must have at

least 10 references.

E.Topic Briefing Pitch:

You will submit a slide deck of 3 slides maximum and present a 2 minute “pitch” of your Topic Briefing.

International Journal of Communication 6 (2012), 2870–2893 1932–8036/20120005

Copyright © 2012 (Kimberly Christen). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial

No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.

Does Information Really Want to be Free?

Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness

KIMBERLY CHRISTEN1

Washington State University

The “information wants to be free” meme was born some 20 years ago from the free

and open source software development community. In the ensuing decades, information

freedom has merged with debates over open access, digital rights management, and

intellectual property rights. More recently, as digital heritage has become a common

resource, scholars, activists, technologists, and local source communities have

generated critiques about the extent of information freedom. This article injects both the

histories of collecting and the politics of information circulation in relation to indigenous

knowledge into this debate by looking closely at the history of the meme and its cultural

and legal underpinnings. This approach allows us to unpack the meme’s normalized

assumptions and gauge whether it is applicable across a broad range of materials and

cultural variances.

Post on Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.

Subject line: “Aboriginal archive uses new DRM”

Submitted by: ianare on Tuesday, January 29, 2008, @ 02:57PM

1 I’d like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that have

strengthened this article. This article has been a work in progress for several years as the Mukurtu

platform grew and took shape. During that time, I was lucky enough to be in conversation with

wonderfully thought-provoking colleagues who pushed me to think about the politics of openness and

access, including Jason Jackson, Chris Kelty, Tara McPherson, Craig Dietrich, Paul Dourish, Ramesh

Srinivasan, Robin Boast, Gabriella Coleman, Rosemary Coombe, Matt Cohen, Jane Anderson, Kate

Hennessy, and Robert Leopold. No amount of thanks is enough for Mukurtu’s Director of Development,

Michael Ashley, who took Mukurtu CMS from its alpha version to a 1.0 release in record time, all the while

reminding me not to let perfect be the enemy of good enough. My biggest debt of gratitude goes to the

indigenous peoples who have worked with Mukurtu CMS to help create a platform that reflects their

diverse needs.

Kimberly Christen: [email protected]

Date submitted: 2012-04-04

International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2871

“A new method of digital rights management which relies on a user’s profile has been pioneered

by Aboriginal Australians for a multimedia archive. The need to create profiles based on a user’s

name, age, sex and standing within their community come from traditions over what can and

cannot be seen. For example, men cannot view women’s rituals, and people from one community

cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the

deceased cannot be viewed by their families. This threw up issues surrounding how the material

could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a

traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their gender, their

relationship to other people and where they were situated.” (Slashdot, n.d., para 1)

Comment #2

Subject line: How is this DRM?

Submitted by: Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2008, @07:13PM

“This doesn’t sound like DRM. It sounds like access control.”

Comment #182

Subject line: DRM/Censorship is ALWAYS bad!

Submitted by Auldclootie on Wednesday January 30 2008, @09:11AM

“No one elected some anthropologist and gave him/her the Godlike power to decide

which aspects of Aboriginal culture are rigidly enforced. Culture is a dynamic process. It

should not be fossilized with rigidly enforced rules about what is and is not permissible.

Are Aboriginals not to be allowed to dissent? To be non-conformist? This kind of

DRM/censorship should be thrown on the scrapheap with all the rest. It disenfranchises

the ordinary people and puts their welfare into the hands of some supposedly benign

protector. Total bullshit! Of course the Aboriginal elders support this – they are

conservatives and resist change – what about the rising new generation? I worked with

Aboriginal people in the 90’s in central Australia – it’s about time this kind of paternalist

crap was consigned to the trash…” 2

Slashdot <reply>

On January 29, 2008, about five months after several Warumungu people and I installed the

Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari community digital archive in the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in the

remote Central Australian town of Tennant Creek, we had our fifteen minutes of Internet fame, as the

archive was debated on forums from Slashdot to the BBC. 3 As far as I can piece together from the e-

traces of the above Slashdot commentary, it began with a post I made to my blog on January 6, 2008,

2 Original Slashdot comments archived at http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/01/29/2253239/Aboriginal-

Archive-Uses-New-DRM; see also Dietrich and Bell (2011, pp. 208–209). 3 See Christen (2007, 2008, 2009). Slashdot online discussion archived at

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/01/29/2253239/Aboriginal-Archive-Uses-New-DRM; see also

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7214240.stm

2872 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)

announcing the launch of an online demo of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive. 4 Less than a week

later, on January 11, Wendy Seltzer, an intellectual property lawyer, wrote a post on her blog lauding the

archive as an example of “digital restrictions done right” (Seltzer, 2008, emphasis mine). The BBC’s Bill

Thompson read Wendy’s post and told his colleagues from Digital Planet about our project. Digital Planet’s

focus is on “reporting the human side of technology from around the world” (Titherington, 2011). On

January 15, I received an e-mail inviting me to be on the show. I gladly accepted. The next week, I went

to the local NPR station and recorded a 40-some minute interview with Gareth Mitchell, the host of Digital

Planet.

On January 29, the edited segment aired, and a podcast was made available via the BBC website.

Host Gareth Mitchell opened the segment framing the story this way: “A remote and ancient Aboriginal

community in the Australian Outback has become the unlikely setting for a digital archive that’s turned

received wisdom about digital rights management or DRM on its head.” As I sat listening to the show, the

cultural anthropologist in me cringed at the “ancient” qualifier (how could a group of people living today

be ancient?), and the digital humanist in me was less convinced by the invocation of DRM as a

counterpoint to the cultural protocols built into the archive. However, by the end of the program I was

quite pleased with the way the producers had edited the piece together, highlighting the community-

focused, ground-up production of the system based on Warumungu cultural protocols. I appreciated the

commentary at the end of the show from Bill Thompson, who discussed the system as one based on trust.

I made the point, and Bill echoed it in his comments, that the system could give us a way to think about

control and access in ways that didn’t have to mean an abuse of power or “locked down” culture. 5

The same day the radio program aired, the BBC Online ran an article entitled “Aboriginal Archive

Offers New DRM” (BBC, 2008), and Bill Thompson included the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive in his

article, “Locking Down Open Computing” (Thompson, 2008), in the technology section of the BBC Online.

In contrast to the radio program segment, which covered the history of the project and the nuances of the

Warumungu cultural protocols, the two articles made DRM central to the project, when in fact, my

comments on DRM were in response to Mitchell’s query and analogy. They were certainly never central to

the creation of the archive itself, or to my work at the time. Yet, over the course of a few weeks, the

Mukurtu archive—a project with multiple goals and two years in development—became framed around one

of the most controversial contemporary legal, social, and economic debates: digital rights management.

The Slashdot commentary was bookended by equal parts racist diatribe and compassionate romanticism,

with perhaps a third or more of the comments falling somewhere in the middle—not sure that Mukurtu

amounted to DRM, but confident that technology should be put to diverse cultural uses.

In this article, I examine the reach of digital rights management (DRM) and commons talk as

they extend to—and often push up against—indigenous articulations of information management and

knowledge circulation protocols within the digital realm. DRM is a hot-button issue because of high-profile

corporations using digital “locks” to regulate consumer use instead of copyright or other legal tools.

Tarleton Gillespie argues that, after the Napster case in the United States, there has been a “fundamental

4 See http://web.archive.org/web/20080201093247/http://www.kimberlychristen.com

5 See http://web.archive.org/web/20080201093247/http://www.kimberlychristen.com

International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2873

shift in strategy, from regulating the use of technology through law to regulating the design of technology

so as to constrain use.” Further, he suggests that:

What we might call “social engineering” has come full circle back to actual engineering,

where the tools and the environment are built to assure the right practices are

facilitated, the wrong are inhibited. These technologies are largely being developed and

deployed below our cultural radar, enamored as we are with the thrill of the “information

revolution,” the faith in progress, and the freedom of individual agency. (2007, p. 6)

Gillespie charts the shift in managing what has been dubbed the “culture industry”—music,

books, movies, video games, and other software—around corporate solutions to murky legal issues. He

rightly points to the general fascination with technology and its associated progressive narratives that

blind us to the reach of technology and its unintended consequences. However, off of Gillespie’s radar are

the other uses for building “control” into systems for purposes that are not mired in greed, consumerism,

and the circulation of commodities. Curation and circulation of indigenous digital cultural heritage

materials are, in fact, activities that undo this neat alignment of control with the abuse of power.

Highlighting these diverse and situational types of controls gives us another lens through which to view

the notion of digital management of cultural materials and knowledge.

Almost three years after the first interview on February 22, 2011, I was once again on Digital

Planet. This time, Mitchell invited me to participate in a discussion about “openness and ownership” and

our conversation took off from two projects that stemmed directly from the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari

archive: the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal (PPWP) and Mukurtu CMS. 6 These two projects leverage the

backend software of the original archive to build digital platforms for indigenous cultural heritage

management. The PPWP is an online educational portal of Plateau materials co-curated by tribal nations

across the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Mukurtu CMS is a free and open source digital

archive and content management tool aimed at the specific needs of indigenous peoples globally. Whereas

the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive was a stand-alone archive, Mukurtu CMS is a tool that can be

adapted to the local cultural protocols and dynamic intellectual property needs of any indigenous

community. 7 During the interview, Mitchell was once again curious about the potential of these projects to

upend dominant discussions about digital technology’s role in managing and controlling access to culture.

After describing the various ways in which both the PPWP and the scaled-up Mukurtu CMS allow

those using the tools (indigenous communities, museums, libraries, and archives) to manage and define

access, circulation, and licensing at granular levels, Ray Corrigan from Open University turned back to the

general notion of DRM, critiquing it as a corporate “digital lock” put on by producers aiming to shut out

6 See http://www.mukurtu.org and http://plateauportal.wsulibs.wsu.edu

7 In Warumungu, “Mukurtu” translates to “dilly bag,” but was adapted by elders in the community to mean

“a safe keeping place.” Wumpurrarni-kari means “belonging to the Warumungu people.” Elders gave

permission in 2009 for the word Mukurtu to be used for the software platform. Production of Mukurtu CMS

was funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, as well

as an Institute for Museum and Library Studies National Leadership Grant.

2874 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)

consumers. He remarked, however, that “the interesting thing about Mukurtu is it turns that control stuff

on its head, so it now gives the access control switches to the users” (Digital Planet, 2011). Exactly. And

yet, this point is oftentimes lost in the cacophony calling for openness at any and all costs. The celebration

of openness, something that began as a reaction to corporate greed and the legal straightjacketing of

creative works, has resulted in a limited vocabulary with which to discuss the ethical and cultural

parameters of information circulation and access in the digital realm. We are stuck thinking about open or

closed, free or proprietary, public or private, and so on, even though in such common online experiences

as using social media platforms Facebook and Twitter, or when reading through legal parameters for the

use and reuse of digital information, these binaries rarely exist. These are not zero-sum games, and

information sociality and creativity is more porous than these choices allow us to imagine.

In the remainder of this article, I address the contentious issues of access to knowledge and

information freedom as they play out through assertions of control over digital materials, clarion calls for a

more robust public domain, and expansive definitions of open access. I begin by exploring the narrative

field of openness and access on which indigenous claims and practices are mapped, and then I move to

examining the production of Mukurtu CMS in order to focus on the tensions produced when archival

platforms and culturally diverse notions of information management, sharing, and privacy rub up against

one another. 8 By highlighting these tensions, I explicitly interrogate entrenched notions of the public

domain, appeals to openness, and the contours of information circulation in order to better understand the

stakes of digital sociality as it is lived, imagined, and performed across cultures and within the messy

spaces where different notions of collaboration, collection, and curation intersect.

Information Wants to be Free

Like all powerful and formative memes, “information wants to be free” has a genealogy that can tell

us something about how supporters conceive of the connections between information, freedom, openness,

and access in relation to digital technologies. Apparently, at the first Hacker conference in 1984, Stewart

Brand suggested that:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right

information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants

to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you

have these two fighting against each other. (Brand, 1984)

Emphasizing the tension between particular types of social and economic practices born from

information circulation, Brand highlighted the seemingly natural give and take between two factionalized

aspects of information. They are “fighting against each other.” Pitting informational relations in an

inherent squabble produces a problem to overcome, a side to choose. One must decide: free or

expensive? Six years later, in 1990, Richard Stallman tweaked this notion and argued that,

8 I use the term “indigenous” in an inclusive manner and follow the United Nations (n.d.) in not creating a

definition that would restrict peoples’ self-definitions.

International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) Does Information Really Want to be Free? 2875

I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By “free” I am not referring

to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own

uses. . . . When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity

wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving. (Denning, 1990,

pp. 653–654, emphasis mine)

Here, Stallman emphasizes the benefits of information freedom as social freedom. Information

that is “generally useful” is something that should be adaptable, open, and accessible. Reuse, in this

formulation, is a form of social good. Stallman does not address—nor, perhaps, did his audience of

software designers wonder—how one decides which information is generally useful, nor did he imagine the

possibility that some information might, in fact, not be useful or beneficial in the hands of just anyone.

That is, Stallman’s “humanity” seems to erase the cultural logics of many groups who view improper reuse

and redistribution of their materials as possibly damaging to their cultural practices or traditional

knowledge systems. In many indigenous communities, cultural knowledge is conferred and transferred

based on systems of obligation and reciprocity that, while they need not be romanticized as somehow

more natural than their non-indigenous counterparts, should nonetheless be respected and merged into a

pluralistic understanding of information’s circulation routes (Chander & Sunder, 2004; Leach, 2005;

Myers, 2005; Srinivasan, Boast, Becvar, & Enote, 2010). Stallman’s usage prompted an ideological shift

within the debate about digital technology, cultural production, and remix, a shift whereby technology

producers, users, and activists reimagined information in social and moral, rather than economic, terms.

A few years later, while cyber-utopist John Perry Barlow was busy declaring the “independence of

cyberspace” (1994), he produced a laundry list of things that information wanted, including “to be free.”

His bumper-sticker version of the tension-filled statements that preceded it became the tag line for a

generation of individuals invested in defying corporate and legal attempts to control content and

technology. “Information wants to be free” became a battle cry and rallying point for legal pundits, social

activists, and academics against the rising regulation of “information,” whether through technological locks

or expansive intellectual property rights laws. High profile legal cases pitted industry giants and

corporations against media consumers and small-time creators, providing the ingredients for a David vs.

Goliath-style drama to play out across mainstream news media and more marginal networks alike (Lessig,

2004; Gillespie 2007). Brand recognized the power of the meme, noting its reach beyond his first

utterance. In April 1997, Wired magazine’s Jon Katz called it “the single dominant ethic in this

community.”

Grounding their stance in information’s assumed natural inclination toward freedom, Internet

enthusiasts and intellectual property rights critics easily connected openness, the public domain, and the

commons, creating a well-defined (and seemingly neutral) platform for information’s circulation routes—

particularly digital information. The “cultural commons” was, thus, easily defined as “the vast store of

unowned ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich”

(Hyde, 2010, p. 18). Conjuring a sense of information passed down through generations easily washes

over other, more dubious ways that “we have inherited from the past,” making the process seem both

2876 Kimberly Christen International Journal of Communication 6(2012)

natural and necessary without tainting it with colonial conquests or racist research agendas that pushed

scientific exploration and collection practices. In this framing, it is easy to forget the following:

Many cultural and historical artifacts of indigenous life are spread across the collections

of museums and private holdings. Such holdings may be viewed on site or, increasing,

electronically through virtual museums. Still, many indigenous people have limited

access to their own cultural heritage and may be excluded also from interpreting these

objects even when publicly displayed. (Resta, Roy, De Montano, & Christal, 2002, p.

1482)

Although the “information wants to be free” meme emerged from 25 years of digital celebration,

it was also successfully linked back to the nation’s beginnings to weave a narrative of information freedom

as a bedrock of national freedom. In their quest for a benign and balanced intellectual property rights

system, legal scholars and Internet freedom advocates delight in quoting founding father Thomas

Jefferson as he inscribed the natural state of information:

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and

mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been

peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,

expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in

which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or

exclusive appropriation. (Boyle, 2002, p. 15)

“Like the air we breathe,” Jefferson’s poetic framing of information’s natural state, has worked

just as well when considered in light of digital bits and bytes as it did for early 19th-century analogue

information. In 1918, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis used Jefferson’s words to pen a

dissenting opinion suggesting the following: “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human

productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary

communication to others, free as the air to common use” (Boyle, 2002, p. 15, emphasis mine). Jefferson

and Brandeis, along with a handful of other early American thinkers, are routinely marshaled in support of

a “balanced” intellectual property regime that takes as its main focus the maintenance of a public domain

where ideas move freely, creating an information commons. While freedom is made paramount in these

discussions, the first half of Brandeis’ quote is downplayed: after voluntary communication to others. In

relation to Western intellectual property laws, this half of the sentence, if discussed at all, is viewed as a

creator’s right to disseminate his or her works commercially or otherwise. What is not generally discussed

is the vast store of materials in Western museums, archives, libraries, and personal collections that were

not voluntarily given, and would not generally meet the standards of prior informed consent. The colonial

collecting history of Western nations is comfortably forgotten in the celebration of freedom and openness

that would give “us” a storehouse of materials for the common good. In fact, the commons was ne