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[RRE]Peter Lyman
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The UCLA Department of Library and Information Science invites you to the 1998 Samuel Lazerow Memorial Lecture.
Peter Lyman UC Berkeley
"Virtual Communities, Digital Libraries and Information Highways: Information Society Metaphors and the Future of Copyright"
Thursday, November 19, 1998 at 4:00 p.m. 111 GSE&IS Building -- UCLA Reception following
The Samuel Lazerow Memorial Lecture is sponsored by the Institute for Scientific Information.
ABSTRACT: Living in the rain shadow of the millenium it is perhaps inevitable that discourse about information technology has been constructed as a poetics of the future, the coming of the information society of the 21st Century. In the coming information society, it is predicted that intellectual property will be the capital driving a global knowledge economy and yet, seemingly a contradiction, that free access to information will create a more just civil society. Which is to say, intellectual property has become the way that we discuss questions of economic and social justice in the future.
The poetics of the future are used to describe different modes and conditions within which information will be produced (authored?), distributed (accessed?) and used (consumed?). And yet, visions of intellectual property are guided by metaphors from the past: the knowledge economy will travel on information highways; the information society will read and write in digital libraries; and civil society will return to gemeinschaft, virtually at least. Highways, information or otherwise, carry interstate commerce, are regulated by the Commerce Department, and governed by contract. Libraries, print or digital, manage the boundary between the market and education, private and public domains, guided by a copyright regime. And communities, at least virtual and pre-capitalist ones, are governed by gift exchange systems.
As Wittgenstein observed, metaphor is the way we make sense of things, but it is also the way we make nonsense when there is too great a gap between the language we use and the way of life we practice. What does each of these metaphors teach us about information society, and when do they mislead us? What do we know, and what do we need to know about how information technology is changing our social, cultural and economic practices in order to select the right metaphors to create a just intellectual property regime?
SPEAKER BIO: Peter Lyman is a Professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. He received his BA in Philosophy from Stanford University, Masters degree from Berkeley in Political Science, and Ph.D. from Stanford in Political Science in 1972. He taught Political Theory at Michigan State University, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has been Assistant Director of Academic computing at Michigan State University, Executive Director of the Center for Scholarly Technology, and has served as University Librarian at the University of Southern California and UC Berkeley.
His research interests include the political sociology of emotions, ethnographic research on computer mediated communication, the impact of information technologies upon the sociology of scholarly communication and publication, especially upon the management of the Library and Computer Center, and future of the Library in an information society. Professor Lyman co-teaches a SIMS class, Copyright and Community: The Future of the Information Society, with Professor Pamela Samuelson.
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