Open Access and the Complexity of Digital Rights · Global Voices

"How do ways of thinking change through time and space? British anthropologist Jack Goody posed this question in ‘The Domestication of the Savage Mind’, his 1997 publication covering new forms of communication within society. According to his study a culture which transmits its knowledge orally does not think in the same way as a writing-based culture. Today, this is compounded by a new method of knowledge transmission – digital technology. We communicate on the internet by combining oral and written forms. Thanks to this technology, still new on the scale of human history, the transmission of knowledge – that is, data – is continually expanding as in a interconnected matrix. If this space was constructed by each of us, then there is a fundamental question to be answered. How should we use the internet? This question covers many issues. Should the sharing of all types of data be authorised? Who can access which data and under which conditions? Who should have oversight and control over it? ... "