A Generation is waking up

Recently I came across the site http://freeculture.org/, an international student movement for free culture. Their manifesto says...

"The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person -- and with a truly active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will slowly but surely vanish from the earth.

We believe that culture should be a two-way affair, about participation, not merely consumption. We will not be content to sit passively at the end of a one-way media tube. With the Internet and other advances, the technology exists for a new paradigm of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed, based not on their industry connections, but on their merit."

After reading the manifesto one can easily figure out that the founders of this movement are highly influenced by the free software, open source movements. If one can spend some time on the internet searching for sites similar to these... he/she is bound to be overwhelmed. www.publicknowledge.org, creativecommons.org, www.plos.org are some of them. If you are a book worm never miss out www.gutenberg.org, there are over 17,000 free eBooks in their repository.

And never be content to sit passively at the end of the one-way media tube, bring out the artist/journalist/writer/activist or whatever in you. Take back the web, take back the world.