Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) September 24, 2023: This morning, I read Julia Angwin's op-ed commentary "The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse" (dated September 23, 2023) at the website of the New York Times:
According to her, artificial intelligence (A.I.) systems are about to make the Internet much worse. For-profit A.I. systems are positioned to profit from applications distributed via the Internet. Angwin says, "Authors are suing A.I. outfits, alleging that their books are included in the sites' training data. OpenAI has argued, in a separate proceeding, that the use of copyrighted data for training A.I. systems is legal under the 'fair use' provision of copyright law."
But this interpretation of the "fair use" provision of copyright law is surely something to watch in the near future as A.I. applications continue to develop.
Before copyright laws emerged in our Western cultural history, a general sense of commonplaces prevailed in our Western cultural history. The American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) discusses the commonplace tradition in Western cultural history in his seminal 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press; for specific page references to commonplaces, see the "Index" [p. 347; for Ong's comment on the historical development of copyright, see p. 54]), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.
More recently, the American journalist Jeff Jarvis (born in 1954) discusses the historical development of copyright in our Western cultural history, among other things, in his new 2023 book The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (Bloomsbury Academic; for specific page references to copyright, see the "Index" [p. 307]; Jarvis refers, in passing, to Ong, pp. 136-137 and 140).
Wikipedia has an entry about Jeff Jarvis. However, it contains not a word about his new 2023 book.
In any event, for Jarvis in his new 2023 book, "The Age of Print" = "The Gutenberg Parenthesis."
For Jarvis, "The Age of the Internet" has now succeeded the supposedly ended "Age of Print."
However, for me, modern printers are the direct descendants of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s - and that gave birth to the print culture in out Western cultural history that has not yet come to an end with our ubiquitous printers attached to our computers - from which we may print out materials from the Internet.
In any event, in Jarvis' new 2023 book, he has constructed an elaborate array of tiny tidbits of information that he has gleaned from studies of book history and other sources. For a sense of the scope of his tidbits, see the "Index" in his new 2023 book (pp. 305-318).
The most efficient way for me to provide you with an overview of Jarvis' new 2023 book is to provide you here with its "Contents" (pp. vii-viii):
Part I: "The Gutenberg Parenthesis"
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