Old Email Archive

digest 1998-11-04 #001.txt


Tuesday
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
-> SoCal area lecture: Peter Lyman on Virtual Communities...
by WAYNEM@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 3 Nov 1998 09:34:54 -0800
From: WAYNEM@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU
Subject: SoCal area lecture: Peter Lyman on Virtual Communities...
Hi,
Those of you in the area may wish to come on over to Westwood for this
one!
Wayne
- -----Original Message-----
From: Phil Agre 

To: UCLA Information Studies Seminar 
Date: Monday, November 02, 1998 6:31 PM
Subject: Samuel Lazerow Memorial Lecture: Peter Lyman
>
>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.
>
>
>Everyone is invited.  Please feel free to redistribute this
announcement.
>
>
>To receive regular announcements of Information Studies Seminars,
join
>the ISS mailing list by sending a message that looks like this:
>
>  To: requests@lists.gseis.ucla.edu
>  Subject:
>
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