Codes and Other Laws of Cyberspace

This book is not so easy to read as I thought it to be. The main reason here is, again, that I do not have enough knowledge and understanding of the politics and society of the United States. This idea of "American democracy" (the related ideas of power, control,and actions) can get much more complicated in real life than just an idea, or just the practice of election. Several of the articles that I've read for this class have talked about this particular issue. In this book, as I can see so far, democracy is also a great concern (this is particularly evident in the last couple of chapers). Maybe I'm just ideologically sensitive to this topic? Anyway, it struck me when I read about the author's argument that the government is "pathetic" and incapable of making the "choice". I believe I'll learn more about this society and its democracy when it comes to the fourth book.

Although it is sometimes hard for me to clearly understand the author's claims and evident, fortunately, he did a great job laying out and reiterating his main arguments and theses. Thus, the structure of the book is very helpful for understanding.

The arguments of this book have a lot of similarities with last week's readings (the critics of the information society), yet much more comprehensive. It's not from historical perspectives, but more from a lot more aspects: social, political, legal, and economic . The Net can serve as a source of control - Lessig does not make the claim based on historical experience, rather, he starts from the "architecture" of the Net itself. If the readings for the last two weeks are more about the general idea of information society, then this book begins to explore the "nature" (maybe "status" or "architecture" is a better word because the "cybersapce has no nature") of the cyberspace itself in details and in depth. I've only read less than a half of the book, but I find that the questions that the author discusses are not only intriguing and also timely. As the Net is becoming more and more a part of our lives, as power and control are extending to this space, the code is something everyone involved in the cyberspace should think about seriouly.