Today the ministry of government administration and reform published their new book about digital medias and sharing culture through the Internet. The meeting was hold at their offices, but also through media channels like their homepage and twitter. The book raises different problems and questions which are actual for a society, in which more and more information is spread in other untraditional ways. Some of the questions the book raises is if its right to criminalize music downloading and if public governmental information should be free. It also raises the problematic question about the conflict between freedom of speech and privacy protection on the Internet.

The book is divided into three categories.1) Free, open and accessible information. 2) Democratic culture of sharing. 3) Children and youths in the network society.

Each category with different authors and editors. The book is also publised under the licens Creative Commons 3 with mentioning author and share alike as licence. This means that every user willing to use the document in different forms are free to do so, as long as the author get his or hers recognition, and as long the information is shared in the same way. This has already been done in the translation of the book into equipment for seeing impared.

The photos in the book are found on Flickr and are gatherd on their basis of high photographic quality, but also that they are published with an open license.

In addition to the physical book, every article is also published on the website delte meninger.(trans.:”shared opinions”. In Norwegian) On this page it is also possible to discuss the articles.

I’ve been reading some of the articles and they are dealing with interessting topics. Its good that the politicians and the ministries and govermental institutions finally are entering the debate on these topics. This debate is going to be interesting before the next parlament election this fall since many of the political parties are going to use the digital/social medias in their campaign. its also interesting to get a more idealistic debate on the piracy legislation and how information should be treated in a world where more and more people which earlier were understood as consumers are beginning to produce and influence the public areana. I will come back to discuss some of the opinions and questions which are raised in this book, but first I have to read a lot of literature before the exam next week.