The Language Barrier
If you’re curious about the origin of Free Culture Swarthmore, CampusProgress.org recently ran an article about us, giving a good summary of Nelson and Luke’s epic battle against Diebold (unfortunately mis-titling us Swarthmore Free Culture — but they can be forgiven; several other Free Culture chapters are similarly titled). The whole Diebold hubbub has died down a bit by now though, and most freshmen — myself included — don’t see Free Culture Swarthmore as Those Guys Who Sued Diebold. In fact, the biggest debate we’ve had recently was trying to identify exactly who we are and what we represent. Everyone who is in the group knows what “free culture” is, and what Free Culture is, but each person’s ideas are a little different from the next, and trying to articulate those ideas has proven surprisingly difficult.
What makes identifying what we do and who we are so hard? Perhaps the biggest obstacle is that there is no commonly accepted jargon for talking about the things that we are interested in. If you walked up to someone on the street and asked her what she thought about protecting the info-commons, she’d probably think you were insane. Before a jargon evolves and is accepted, however, there needs to be a general understanding of the issues, and without a way to identify those issues quickly and effectively, people lose interest. Thus our greatest challenge is trying to bring important issues (such as the Diebold thing) to the attention of the public despite this language barrier.