Negating the Gaze; Open-Sourcing the World

          

                As we have continued to study the mainstream media in class, one theme continually stood out among the rest; the theme of power. It began with the gaze- both the male and the oppositional gaze, followed by patriarchy, masculinity versus femininity, and the list goes on. Throughout all of this, one thing was clear; there were people at the top who want to control the way you think, dress, and act. They do this by infiltrating your world and bombarding you with images that force you to consume whatever they are trying to sell you- including their message. In short, in their eyes and gradually in the eyes of others, they create their customers. They have power over you; you are not only their medium, but their message. When you buy a product, you endorse whatever message is behind the product and advertise it for others to see. However, there is one form of alternative media that has been popping up with the advent of the internet age. It is the Open Source culture, which is a culture that, like the Male versus the Oppositional gaze, looks at all of these big corporations who try to use you to sell their messages, and essentially takes the power away from them.

In the Open Source world, the customer does not exist; it is a society of creators. It is a large group of people who share their knowledge in an effort to create a world where the notion of one person holding all of the power does not exist. There is no over-arching message. There are no gimmicks. It is simply a large group of people working toward making the world a better place by taking the power away from these large corporations who try to sell you their ideas and products and gives it back to the people.

One product to come out of the open source movement that demonstrates this is Linux- a fully-fledged operating system that functions perfectly and rivals both Apple and Microsoft. A group of people decided they did not want to pay money for software that would not allow them to look at the source code, essentially people wanted to know exactly what they were purchasing. Microsoft would not allow it for fear of them sharing the code for free. Therefore, people began to write their own code and share it online for free. Soon enough, many people began to collaborate on the project and Linux was born. The people had successfully taken the power away from the large corporations who made software, like Microsoft and Apple. They did not do it for a profit. They simply believed in something and worked on it until it became a reality.

This is very similar to the notion of the male versus oppositional gaze. Berger believes that the behavioral characteristics, i.e. that men act and women appear, have always been reinforced in media. He goes as far back European oil paintings and the birth of nude depictions. In these paintings he makes the realization that there is a difference between the act of being nude, versus the act of being naked. He asserts that if a woman is depicted as naked, there is a certain quality of shame within the painting, which alludes to the fact that the woman is made aware that she is being seen. However a nude exists only when the woman is naked but feels as though she is alone, or perhaps does not seem to care that she is being seen. In these paintings the power lies within the woman and the male gaze becomes null and void; “She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her” (Berger 50).

          

Once she becomes aware of the gaze, she can be made shameful of it, or own it. Applying this notion to Open Source; once a person, or a group of people realize that they are being used to perpetuate an idea, or they are not shown the whole picture, they can take matters into their own hands. It is here that the power structures begin to change. So, there is power within the gaze, but there is also power within the subject to negate this gaze. Essentially, Open Source is a sort of "oppositional" gaze that negates the gaze of big corporations.