Need-to-be Shared Culture

It was quite interesting to see how the students in Spigelman’s class established ownership over their writing while regarding their writing need-to-be shared to elaborate their writing better. As they adapt other group members’ ideas, ways of writing, and thoughts mentioned during the group discussion in their own writing with their own words, they think it is acceptable and desirable rather than avoidable. As I was reading this article, I kept pondering about whether the compositions of these students still belonged only to them even after their group members spent time and exert actual physical efforts together to elaborate and edit them or whether their writing can be claimed as collaborative works by their group members?

As I read Spigelman’s article, I kept pondering about dilemma in which contemporary culture is experiencing, the dilemma that the students in Spigelman’s students experienced. (I guess that I became into this thought because I read this article just after reading Lessig's and Tushmen's) Having ownership over one’s own works and allowing publicity for those works. Even though each student claimed that his/her compositions belonged to them, they admitted that their writing was influenced by group members and their writing in terms of reflecting each other's advice and integrating each other's ideas into their writing. It may be undeniable that each student was indebted to other group members in order to make their writing better. Thus, it is hard to decide to set the boundary between how much each one's writing belongs to the actual writer and how much her/his writing is collaborative work.

When I was cogitating on this, I could not help wondering about whether our culture should belong only to the people who create such specific forms of clutre as literature, movie, music, etc. or the public as another types of participants in culture can also claim the ownership over that culture. If one creates something, it surely belongs to her/her. However, it is not pure creation of one’s own in that the social and cultural environment surrounding the person who makes or writes it affects her/his creation. Without previously existing culture and other people’s contributions to it, it is almost impossible that we can develop what we declare our own writing or works. How can we make something if there is nothing that inspires or motivates us to write or make?

I agree with the idea that there should be a fine boundary that devides the part of culture that we can freely share and the other part of culture that we cannot access. However, it is quite lamentable that the accessibility that was available in the past before the advent of the Internet and other technologies that make us accessible to our culture in creative ways.