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You know how things always seem to come in waves. I’ve had several experiences lately that have caused me to pause and think about connections and relationships, both professionally and personally. I’ve been pondering why we organize our culture and systems the way we do, and thinking about the various choices that we make and how we make them.

Working as an educator and administrator is all about relationships and structures. In the educational system we organize ourselves in various ways, sometimes making conscious choices regarding how and when we relate and connect with our colleagues and students. Other times we let others make the decisions for us.

My recent experiences have made me appreciate all the more the two “structures” I most commonly find myself in these days – AIMS and the Miami Design Collaborative. It’s difficult to define AIMS and MDC using our traditional academic language – they aren’t really programs, departments, divisions. Words like “network” or “meeting-place” are better descriptions. These are places were colleagues and students come together by choice, not because of a pre-determined, historically-driven structure.

The majority of my colleagues in AIMS and MDC don’t “belong” because of their contract or title. I’ve been thinking a lot about why these amazing people choose to add more work to their plates by joining this “merry band of musicians” in an attempt to collaboratively create something special and unique, while still having the responsibilities of their normal departmental lives. They are drawn together by various common characteristics that have little to do with their traditional disciplinary specialty:

They are intensely curious about how others view the world and how people of various disciplines seek to solve the problems of that world.

They are passionate about their work and that passion is infectious to those around them.

They are both right and left brained. One side might be dominant, but the other shows itself on a regular basis, or at the least, there is a great appreciation and understanding of people “from the other side.”

They have an innate understanding of the connectedness of the world and delight in its complexity.

They are natural collaborators and understand that complex problems can’t be solved from one perspective.

They see as much benefit and importance in multi-disciplinarity, as disciplinarity.

They care about solving wicked problems and in making a big impact for their students and society.

As co-director of AIMS, and director of the MDC, it’s an incredible privilege to lead people with these characteristics. (Really, it’s less about leading and more about helping them do their work.) It’s even better to co-direct with someone who has these characteristics, times two.

Jacob's Leaf, graffiti added

We held our first AIMS brownbag: Jacob Tonski showed us his work, an amazing array of projects collectively called “experiential art.”  Jacob has begun using our digital modeling lab: he’s currently modeling some leaves in order to orchestrate a post-fall fall.  Stay tuned.  The attendees were terrific, an art professor noticing that all Jacob’s work is directed at undermining hierarchical (and sadistic) power relationships.  For instance, one work automatically brings participants in a conversation all to the same eye-level; another thanks people following a car for whatever courtesy they have shown.  I was thinking as I saw all Jacob’s work that he would have been a great special effects artist, but motion-picture effects are more often about violence and robbing people of their dignity, whereas his work definitely tends the other direction.

This week presents another milestone for new media and government as the FDA holds a public hearing on: “Promotion of Food and Drug Administration-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools.” FDA announcement

Without getting into a lot of inside baseball about the many issues and opportunities that surround Direct to Consumer (DTC) advertising online, these hearings represent a profound and positive shift in the relationship between government, industry and the public. Should Pharma companies be able to interact freely online with individual patients who use their products? What types of disclosures do they need to make? What about Twitter posts that mention side effects of branded treatments? – where do lines get drawn on regulated accountability? We have seen a lot of very positive impact of the administration in both acknowledging and embracing new media and I’m delighted to see the public invited and engaged. Government agencies are getting with the times and recognize that the transformation of media can mean improved citizen engagement and empowerment (see Help Design the New FCC Website).
In the spirit of using the media to improve the process and increase transparency , some of those testifying are posting their testimony online and encouraging crowd sourcing of comments from industry and the public. Here is an example of this from my company: Health Central FDA testimony
And one more thing, taking a chapter from the White House New Media team, this event will be webcast to the public as well so it is not just for those inside the beltway…Live Webcast Details Here

With all the talk about remix and “remix culture” (Lessig, 2008), it is useful to remind ourselves that remixing is not just a byproduct of the digital age. The networked computer may make copying, remixing, and viral distribution technically easier, but the basic process is fundamental to all language use, and always has been. When we use language, we remix … taking others words and phrases, imitating them, making them our own, adapting them to new circumstances.

Mixing, mashing, merging — these are fundamental writing processes that have analogs in classical Greek and Roman rhetoric. OK, it wasn’t called remix back then, it was called imitatio, and it was an integral component of rhetorical invention and rhetoric pedagogy, particularly as developed by Roman rhetoricians. Rote copying itself was seen as integral to invention — that is, a strategy for creating content. Through much of the history of Western rhetoric education the practices of memoria, imitatio, and compilatio were integral not only to the canon of rhetorical invention but also to the education of the speaker/writer overall. This was especially true in the Roman era. Cicero (in the first century BCE) and Quintilian (in the first century CE) understood that imitatio was important to preserving cultural values. And this was true well into the era of medieval rhetoric. The writers of the Christian patristic era “borrowed” others’ work heavily — and that was a sign of respect for the authority of those existing texts. By our contemporary academic standards, St. Bernard of Chartres and St. Jerome were certainly plagiarists.

Imitatio meant “deliberate modeling of an existing artifact or text.” The effort was aimed at “using preexisting texts to teach students how to create their own original texts” (Murphy, 1974, p. 54). There were various types of imitatio. One was variatio, or paraphrase. The young Erasmus was “the all-time champion of variatio,” as he came up with 147 variations for the phrase “your letter pleased me very much” (Lanham, 2001, pp. 106–107). Another imitation tactic was compilatio, or collecting fragments from various sources and putting them together into a new whole — aka remixing.

If you were a student in the Roman system, you were expected to copy and memorize the wisdom of the past in the form of maxims and fables. You were supposed to imitate good models. You were supposed to collect sayings and pieces of texts and put them together in new configurations. To put it another way, remix was integral to invention. This process served a generative purpose in helping you produce a particular speech or text at a particular moment, but it also was intended to help your intellectual development as a citizen needing to speak wisely and effectively within your culture. These practices promoted respect for intellectual ancestry and wisdom and respect for one’s culture.

However, two warnings are important here: You weren’t supposed to take credit for others’ ideas and words. Back then, as now, that was seen as a form of lying and misrepresentation — not so much a crime of stealing the words as of misrepresenting one’s authority. It is also important to point out that imitatio was seldom merely rote copying, and especially not at the upper levels of education. As articulated in Quintilian’s pedagogy, imitatio is more than merely transcription. Students certainly did copying but they were also expected to add transformative value through other rhetorical strategies such as delivering the text into a new context (new audience, new occasion), collecting the text with other texts to make a new compilation, taking a new stance, parodying the existing text, etc.

References
Lanham, Carol Dana. (2001). Writing instruction from late antiquity to the twelfth century. In James J. Murphy (Ed.), A short history of writing instruction: From ancient Greece to modern America (pp. 79–121). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum/Hermagoras Press.

Lessig, Lawrence. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York: Penguin Press.

Murphy, James J. (1974). Rhetoric in the middle ages: A history of rhetorical theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sanity has temporarily prevailed: A federal court has ruled that “when a ringtone plays on a cellular telephone, even when that occurs in public, the user is exempt from copyright liability, and [the cellular carrier] is not liable either secondarily or directly.” In a previous, related case in 2007, the same court had ruled that downloading of digital music did not constitute a public performance either.

In its decision in US v ASCAP, New York’s Southern District court cited the basics of US Copyright Law that “includes exemptions for certain public performances of copyrighted music,” particularly if there is no “direct or indirect commercial advantage” (17 USC 110(4)). As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, “this ruling is an important victory for consumers, making it clear that playing music in public, when done without any commercial purpose, does not infringe copyright” (von Lohmann, 2009).

References
Electronic Frontier Foundation. (2009, July 2). ASCAP makes outlandish copyright claims on cell phone ringtones. EFF.

Lasar, Matthew. (2009, July 2). Phone ringtones a “public performance”? EFF, AT&T say no. Ars Technica.

Singel, Ryan. (2009, July 2). Ringtones are not concerts, groups tell judge. Wired.

von Lohmann, Fred. (2009, October 15). Court rules that phones ringing in public don’t infringe copyright. EFF.