Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais
Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais
Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais
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eng<br />
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s<br />
As a footnote here (oh good, a footnote! my Turnitin score just went up!), an<br />
interesting irony about the use of Turnitin occurred recently in a law suit in which a<br />
number of students sued the iParadigms corporation because their papers were being<br />
folded into the Turnitin <strong>da</strong>tabase without explicit consent or compensation. The<br />
irony is that the students lost that case. Student term papers fed into the program are<br />
automatically appropriated and become the “intellectual property” of the corporation.<br />
Thus, the company that seeks to protect scholars from theft has become the<br />
spitting image of educational larceny! 4<br />
I do not want to place too great an emphasis upon Turnitin itself. It is just one<br />
among many institutions embodied in software and on the Internet nowa<strong>da</strong>ys that<br />
offer perverse varieties of civic education. Students are expected to internalize habits<br />
of mind that involve an obsession with avoiding borrowing. They learn excessive<br />
caution that borders on dread. This is horrible training for any society that assumes<br />
free inquiry, freedom of thought, and free democratic citizenship as bases of political<br />
life. Contrary to best impulses of young people, any people for that matter, what<br />
is emphasized is anxiety, compliance and passivity. In effect, students are taught to<br />
fear the digital commons. They learn that the world of knowledge and invention is<br />
not really your place, but a space governed by powerful forces and that, if you cross<br />
the line, you will be severely punished. Unless this belief is challenged and replaced<br />
with better practices, institutions and conditions online, it is an understanding that<br />
young people will carry with them about the real relationship between information<br />
and public life.<br />
My second illustration of contemporary practices and institutions that include<br />
the digital realm is a positive one. It involves a recent experiment in global citizenship<br />
using the resources of the World Wide Web to coordinate deliberation, discussion,<br />
debate, and voting on a range of issues that are among the most important<br />
ones facing humanity to<strong>da</strong>y.<br />
Beginning in 2008 and continuing through September 2009, a group of political<br />
activists based in Copenhagen organized an event called “Word Wide Views on<br />
Global Warming” 5 . The goal was to assemble groups of ordinary people in different<br />
countries around the globe who would meet on one particular <strong>da</strong>y to discuss and<br />
4. A good overview of the Turnitin case can be found in Michael G. Bennett, “The Edge of Ethics in<br />
iParadigms”.<br />
5. http://www.wwviews.org.<br />
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