November 2006: Tarleton Gillespie

Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture

Monday 6 November, 3:30-5:00 pm
Room 126, Communication Building
Co-sponsored by the Department of Communication & the Information School, University of Washington

Listen to an audio file of the lecture "Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture" that was delivered by Tarleton Gillespie, Assistant Professor of Communication, Cornell University on 11/6/06:

Windows Media Stream | MP3 Download

Abstract:
As the dust settles in the digital "copyright wars," it has become clear that the U.S. media industries have embraced "digital rights management," calling on technology to govern how we purchase, use, and copy their content. Critics worry about using "code" as law, about how communication policy increasingly involves technology not just as its object, but as the means of its implementation. But we must also recognize that this "technical fix" in fact depends on an uneasy alliance of technologies, laws, policies, institutions, and norms -- requiring the political mobilization of several (not always obvious) allies and the cultural legitimation of the effort as necessary and just.

Recent work in the sociology of technology can take us beneath the technological surface of this strategy. I will frame the technological regulation of culture by examining how its proponents attempt to build the heterogeneous networks of things, people, rules, and assumptions required. Whether DRM succeeds, these ideological and infrastructural alignments themselves have implications for the shape of digital culture.

Bio:
Tarleton Gillespie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, with affiliations in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the Information Science program. He is also a fellow with the Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford School of Law. His book on the subject will be published by MIT Press in spring 2007.