Learning in the Digital Age: Information Is Not Property
“Insulin does not belong to me. It belongs to the world.” (Frederick Banting)
When Mr. Banting patented the way to extract insulin from canine pancreas in 1921, he sold the patent to the University of Toronto for 1 dollar. His decision meant that any health institution in the world could afford access to the patent, which ultimately meant that insulin could be mass-produced and made easily available to diabetes patients whose life depends on it.
Banting’s thinking stands in stark contrast to today’s Big Pharma and Big Science practices: the 3 American manufacturers of insulin charge 300+ dollars per vial, in a country of roughly 7.5 million diabetics. In the context of the U.S., this reflects an individualistic, self-centered culture where an ethic of sharing is viewed as suspect (Communism!), and where access to both healthcare and education is a privilege.
In a global context, it also speaks to the tendency of neo-liberal capitalism to treat information and knowledge as property and hide it behind the wall of “intellectual property” (IP). We now live in an era of what educator and philosopher Michael Peters dubs “cognitive capitalism.” As an educator myself, I find that the idea of knowledge ownership runs against the very core of who I am and what my profession stands for.
Who owns knowledge?
The digital era has given us unprecedented access to information and knowledge. The digital media, in conjunction with new technologies, also enable us to share this knowledge, and thus they play a crucial role in the democratization of education. The digital era rests on the early-Internet notion of dialogue and collaboration among peers, and contributes to the creation of what Peters calls “knowledge cultures.”
It sounds wonderful: the Internet as the great equalizer, giving everyone access to knowledge and education, and getting rid of gatekeepers. A culture of sharing know-how, opening up the musty halls of academia, and reaching out across disciplines to collaborate on projects.
Yet somehow, Big Science and academia don’t seem to have gotten the digital memo. Access to knowledge, and how that knowledge is (not) shared, remains problematic.
This was an issue well before the digital era, but now that the average person has adopted digital media in order to develop “hacks” which bypass and/or disrupt the system, the boundary between the amateur and the institutionally validated expert is becoming more and more porous.
Theorist and writer McKenzie Wark calls individuals and groups that straddle this boundary the hacker class, where a hack is defined as any activity that produces new information out of the old.
Issues around access to knowledge range anywhere from the opaque process of drug manufacturing, to organizing research around the tenets of promotion, tenure, publication, and money to be earned from intellectual property; to producing results that are only shared in journals requiring a costly subscription, or affiliation with a recognized institution, to be accessed.
All of this enforces the popular perception that research is happening behind closed doors of elite institutions that only the privileged have access to.
By “protecting” information as property, and positing knowledge as something available only to a select few, knowledge capitalists who claim ownership of ideas undermine people’s trust in institutions, which in turn breeds suspicion against scientists and academia, and helps feed the petri dish of “post-truth” where conspiracy theories flourish and facts become irrelevant.
Hacking academia
Some educators already grasped this inequality in access to learning in the early years of the digital revolution and started focusing their research on trying to effect a change from within the system.
Petar Jandric’s book Learning in the Age of Digital Reason (2017) is exactly that: an experiment in hacking academic publishing. It’s a collection of conversations between Jandric, a researcher in critical pedagogy and digital education, and various other scholars and activists in the fields of philosophy, history, education, and art, on the topic of how education is affected by digital media.
The idea is brilliantly simple: talk to as many experts as possible about learning in the digital age. Conversation is here understood to be the cornerstone of civilization, our primary mechanism of learning.
The clever twist is: involve experts across different disciplines and with different agendas whose paths would normally never cross because they work in different fields. These fields, however — media studies, game theory, pedagogy, film-making— all explore how we learn, and how learning is being shaped by digital media.
I am not interested in bringing old friends together — instead, I want to link people who do not normally talk to each other, transgress disciplinary borders, and foster conversations that are unlikely to take place elsewhere. At the intersections of these people and their ideas, I would like to try and create a new spectrum of (educational) opportunity for a better society. (P. Jandric)
Jandric’s interlocutors all agree on the need for more openness in the world of higher education: openness to experience “as a precondition for creativity” (Peters); to including non-academic professionals in the conversation by publishing in open access journals; to collaborating across disciplines and mixing high and low theory (Wark).
But the most fundamental notion they all share is that “knowledge has a social character” (Peters), which voids the whole concept of ownership of intellectual property. Ideas cannot be owned. As an educator, it feels good to see colleagues taking a stand against cognitive capitalism.
For anyone working at the intersection of education and digital technologies and media, this book is a must-read.
Hacking science
Another strand of the hacker class are so-called “D.I.Y scientists,” or “biopunks,” who responded to Big Science practices by creating community labs, or “biospaces.” A number of them are not amateurs and actually hold scientific qualifications, but didn’t find life in academia appealing.
As Margaret Talbot explains in her article on the phenomenon, community labs are spaces open to anyone who wishes to learn more about science, and perform experiments in a setting that you’d normally only see in corporate labs or academic institutions.
The digital era has made it possible for some of these extra-institutional scientists to create networks of scientific collaboration. They operate on the principle of sharing know-how and equipment, instead of hoarding it and competing against one another. Many of them don’t even bother patenting their designs and protocols, but just release them into the public domain. This is another example of resistance to the notion of ownership of ideas.
We reject the popular perception that science is only done in million-dollar university, government, or corporate labs; we assert that the right of freedom of inquiry, to do research and pursue understanding under one’s own direction, is as fundamental a right as that of free speech or freedom of religion. We have no quarrel with Big Science; we merely recall that small science has always been just as critical to the development of the body of human knowledge. . . . A thirteen-year-old kid in South Central Los Angeles has just as much of a right to investigate the world as does a university professor. (Meredith Patterson on “biopunk”)
Ownership of ideas and Covid-19
The Year of Our Pandemic 2020 has brought all of these issues to the fore in a way and to an extent that we haven’t seen before. It has also exposed the double-edged nature of Internet democracy and the digital media; their powerful, unprecedented ability to both link and divide.
WhatsApp groups sharing information about Covid-19 as a government hoax co-sponsored by Bill Gates; the QAnon vortex of millenarian paranoia, and Russia-backed bots sowing disinformation and discord in the comments sections, all operate on the intersection of digital illiteracy and social marginalization. This indicates a dire need for an updated, more inclusive global curriculum on digital citizenship and elementary science in schools. As Qassim Cassam says in his book on conspiracy theories,
Learning how to navigate the web with discernment is the most pressing cultural mission of our age.
At the same time, the current global rush to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, which is justifiably a race against time, is in some corners also being cast as a race of who will get there first; in other words, another competition between scientists for profit via the acquisition of intellectual property. There is nothing proprietary about a vaccine against a pandemic, nor is it the Moon landing.
When the U.S. government botched the response to the pandemic and failed to supply tests, masks and equipment to struggling hospitals around the country, it was the network of extra-institutional scientists and “bio-hackers” who stepped in to provide what was needed. Their ethic of sharing data and protocols made a difference for embattled healthcare workers who were reduced to donning garbage suits for protection.
Ultimately, Jandric’s book and Talbot’s article underscore the fact that, now more than ever, the world needs a digitally and scientifically literate population and a culture of sharing and collaborating, instead of hoarding and competing.
Further reading:
P. Jandric, Learning in the Age of Digital Reason (2017)
M. Talbot. The Rogue Experimenters. The New Yorker, May 25, 2020 issue
