The New Enlightenment And The Fight To Free Knowledge

How the internet transformed education and knowledge in the 21st century.

Peter B. Kaufman is a visionary of the video age who, from his perch at Columbia and now MIT, sees what he calls "the Monsterverse" for what it is--an Internet dominated by purely commercial interests--and how, just maybe, we can change that.
A publisher, teacher, and videographer, Kaufman describes how recapturing control over moving images and recorded sound can transform our online engagement from one that is stubbornly unsatisfying, aggravates inequities, and even facilitates totalitarianism, to one that can free our minds and transform education--in much the same way that the Encyclopédie and the Enlightenment helped European society modernize and democratize in the 18th century.
He reminds us how the control of publishing, broadcast media, and knowledge itself has evolved--and devolved. He looks at copyright law and other laws that govern the dissemination of information and intellectual freedoms in our digital age. Kaufman's subject is the battleground of ideas, how the fights there affect the quality of life in our society. He charts how corporate dominance of the Internet has meant that we the people have been losing these battles in recent decades and, most pressingly, he proposes new ways for us, finally, to start winning now.
"In many ways," writes Kaufman, "we are returning via the Internet to a world of sound and pictures--after a detour among letters for a few hundred years." He shows how a whole new era of visual education awaits us with exciting and unprecedented opportunities--opportunities that could expand the very definition of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.