Afterword: Critical Information Studies

This paper takes measure of an emerging scholarly field that sits at the intersection of many important areas of study. Critical Information Studies (CIS) considers the ways in which culture and information are regulated by their relationship to commerce, creativity, and other human affairs. CIS captures the variety of approaches and bodies of knowledge needed to make sense of important phenomena such as copyright policy, electronic voting, encryption, the state of libraries, the preservation of ancient cultural traditions, and markets for cultural production. It necessarily stretches to a wide array of scholarly subjects, employs multiple complementary methodologies, and influences conversations far beyond the gates of the university. Economists, sociologists, linguists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, communication scholars, lawyers, computer scientists, philosophers, and librarians have all contributed to this field, and thus it can serve as a model for how engaged, relevant scholarship might be carried out. CIS interrogates the structures, functions, habits, norms, and practices that guide global flows of information and cultural elements. Instead of being concerned merely with one's right to speak (or sing or publish), CIS asks questions about access, costs, and chilling effects on, within, and among audiences, citizens, emerging cultural creators, indigenous cultural groups, teachers, and students. Central to these issues is the idea of ‘semiotic democracy’, or the ability of citizens to employ the signs and symbols ubiquitous in their environments in manners that they determine. Keywords: copyrightcultural policyintellectual propertylawregulationsemiotic democracy Notes 1. The author wishes to thank Sonia Katyal for defining and clarifying these themes in private correspondences. More insightful comments and criticism came from Julie Cohen, Cory Doctorow, Samuel Howard-Spink, Kembrew McLeod, and Ted Striphas. Donna Wentworth also contributed much to the formation and core themes of this paper by publicizing and inviting commentary on the concept on the blog, Copyfight.org. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to: Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. The author wishes to thank the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa, the Boston University School of Law, and the Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities at New Hall, University of Cambridge for allowing him to present portions of this paper as lectures. 2. The initials CIS also sometimes describe ‘Computer and Information Studies’. Alas, I was limited to 26 letters of the modern Roman alphabet. I hope that the other CIS scholars forgive my trespassing on their mark. 3. More Americans believe in UFOs, angels, and ghosts than believe in evolution by natural selection (Angier Citation2004). And oddly, higher levels of education do not significantly deflate pseudoscientific beliefs nor bolster belief in solid scientific concepts (Massimo 2004). So we are all failing in our efforts to train students to think critically. 4. In the case of my own work, a hacker who uses the handle ‘Beale Screamer’ cracked the digital rights management (DRM) scheme that was to protect music distributed by Microsoft. In the notes appended to the program that cracks the DRM code, distributed widely on hacker bulletin boards, Beale Screamer quotes several sentences of Copyrights and Copywrongs (Screamer 2001).