COMMENTARY: Power vs. freedom in the palm of your hand

(RNS) The future broke in like a sunburst last week, when a sign appeared in the window of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, one of the nation’s premier research and lending libraries. The sign offered help in setting up e-readers to access the library’s collection. Regular folks could bring in their iPads […]

(RNS) The future broke in like a sunburst last week, when a sign appeared in the window of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, one of the nation’s premier research and lending libraries.

The sign offered help in setting up e-readers to access the library’s collection. Regular folks could bring in their iPads and Kindles and, in five minutes, get them set up with an app called OverDrive for “checking out” a book and reading it on a tablet device for a specified time period. Nothing new — OverDrive has been around for years — and yet it seemed a burst of newness.

“Do you mean I can read any book in your library?” I asked in amazement. No need to deal with long checkout lines and surly guards. Just open my iPad, search for a book, download it for, say, a three-week read, or join a queue to download it later.


“Cool!” I said, and became number 270 in the queue for John Grisham’s latest novel.

This further democratization of library reading strikes me as huge. In the years before politicians and nabobs happily sent young commoners to die in the Civil War, when the library’s site was still a reservoir, city leaders argued about letting just anyone read books.

The lofty set wanted to keep workers docile and uninformed. They argued against a free lending library. Progressives responded that teaching people to read and then denying them books was a “crime.” Soon, the reservoir was filled in, the library was built, and books began to transform even common lives.

Now comes technology to take that radical dissemination of learning and literature even farther.

Meanwhile, colleges and universities are riding the same wave, placing their curricular materials online and offering online versions of popular classes. An example is the “online learning initiative” that MIT announced last month. It anticipates “a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.”

The Sloan Foundation estimates that by 2014, 81 percent of post-secondary students in the U.S. will be taking some or all of their coursework online.

Workers are discovering they can do their work anywhere. They don’t need to sit in a cubicle, attend meetings or endure office politics. They can work from home or in a “co-working” shared space.


Tectonic shifts are happening throughout the marketplace, as people flood online for commerce (estimated at $197 billion in 2011), banking, investing, and entertainment.

None of this is exactly new, and yet every day one more barrier falls, one more market or function wriggles from constraint or geography.

The looming battle over Internet piracy is about more than copyrights. It is about letting this radical freedom proceed unimpeded. Like the lofty set in the 1850s, many find freedom threatening when others have it. They want docile workers, conformist learners, uninformed voters, believers occupying pews, and entertainment made available in ways that benefit sellers, not consumers.

This battle is the latest front in the age-old conflict between power and freedom. Power wants to control access; freedom demands open access. Power wants to win elections through media only it can afford to use; freedom deploys free technology to disseminate other views.

When Congress returns to action, they will deal with Internet freedom. Much is at stake. Lobbyists for power are working behind the scenes. Advocates for freedom are taking the fight online.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus” and founder of the Church Wellness Project. His website is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com. Follow Tom on Twitter (at)tomehrich.)


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