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Understanding Micropolis and Compunity 61

a final solution. For many authors the concern over copyright has as
much or more to do with having their work re- or de-contextualized
than it does with financial gain (the US is one of the few countries that
does not recognize an author’s moral rights in a work).
There is another way to think about protection vis-à-vis content,
as that which protects the integrity of a work. The technology that
enables both new forms of creative activity (desktop publishing, col-
laborative writing, computer-aided design, digital audio and video,
for instance) also enables its distribution via new media like the In-
ternet, and enables its ready editing and recombination. What, if
anything, can protect the integrity of a work that new technologies
make so malleable?
In fact the sociolegal system has had less difficulty with these is-
sues than it is now having, and is going to have, with issues related to
the “magnetic fields” (to return to the metaphor of electromotive force)
created by content. To put it another way, the technologies of content
distribution also deliver meaning to us. We will likely want to avoid
some of it, we will want to screen some of it, and some of it we may, for
good or ill, feel a need to censor. We will seek protection in the same
way some now seek it from violence, obscenity, and the like found in
older, traditional forms of media. We may also seek protection from
the equivalent of “crank” phone calls, and from the inability to verify
identity of the senders of messages. These are the concerns of legisla-
tion such as that found in portions of the telecommunications bill
passed in the US in 1996. What such forms of legislation seek to pro-
tect against is not content per se, but the consequences of content. We
sought (and continue to seek) such protection from the telephone, tel-
evision, radio, telegraph and virtually all other media, for they are not
merely “media” in any kind of passive sense, delivering information
and nothing more: they are active intruders into our mental processes,
requiring our attention, which, whether freely given or not, is not
returned.
Thus it is, I believe, that we seek protection from what we have
termed “information overload” (no matter how much, on some level,
perhaps only the commercial, we may wish to be the ones doing the
overloading). The question here is: How do we attend to the social
connections impinging on us, the connections we at once desire
(e-mail, telephone, fax, etc.) and despise (for they take up more and
more of our time and energy)? These are the lines of force created by
the “current flow” of content. We couldn’t be more in touch and yet
the telecommunication industry promises us ever closer, faster and
greater contact. It is necessary to think through the implications for