Her voice is just ridiculous! Another great live video from Florence + The Machine. Don’t fall for the false ending, it keeps going!
Check out more Florence + The Machine Videos here.
Edited: February 26th, 2010
Watch: Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Read: Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek rerun, reread, rewritten: Fan writing as textual poaching” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2 (1988). 29 Nov. 2009
< http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/15295038809366691 >
My last screening returns to the land of fiction as I wanted a good example of the types of borrowing and rewriting that already exists heavily within Hollywood. Hopefully with the previous weeks exposure to liberal copyright politics the students will take a closer look at who has the right to control and change this culture. I went back to revisit our friend Henry Jenkins for another look at the relationship between consumer and producer in the Star Trek fan universe. Jenkins notices a trend of fan “poaching” where fans take away a chunk of the universe for their own personal celebration or use. From “adult interaction games, from needlework to elaborate costumes, from private fantasies to computer programming” Jenkins identifies a multitude of ways that Star Trek fans have recreated elements of the media for the basis of their own creative works. Jenkins concludes that fans are unaware or unafraid of copyright protection laws concerning the Star Trek universe and have continued “undaunted by the barking dogs” to poach cultural texts from copyright owners for celebration in their own way, on their own terms.
Edited: February 22nd, 2010
We’re not quite sure just what the heck Lady GaGa is playing here, but it looks like she’s got a keytar slash bass slash MPC GaGatar in the Haus.
You can see Lady Gaga’s keytar thing in action in her video for Telephone & Dance in the Dark, below, unless it gets yanked by the YouTube police.
Check it out and let me know what you think of the GaGatar. And if you know anything more about it, leave a comment!
Edited: February 17th, 2010
Watch: Good Copy, Bad Copy (Johnson, Christensen, Moltke 2007)
Read: Pouwelse, J., P. Garbacki, D. Epema, and H. Sips. “Pirates and Samaritans: A decade of measurements on peer
production and their implications for net neutrality and copyright.” Telecommunications Policy 32 (December 2008): 701-712.
My last non-fiction week screens a documentary that takes a close look at fan-created media, sampling and copyright issues around the world. The film interviews Girl Talk who was introduced during week 8 and also DJ Danger Mouse who is another “king” of copyright infringement. What I felt was really valuable in this film was the way they relate the copyright issue to the international scene. Seeing that people in Sweden, Russia and Brazil feel the same about copyright law problems really reinforces the problems that are associated with copy-limiting cultural products. The Pouwelse article is very powerful since it recognizes the creative potential of the Internet and uses p2p file sharing as a springboard into talking about net neutrality and copyright law and how this will lead to “peer production.” They recognize that a pirate version of almost any copyright material is available freely on the Internet and this will soon lead to unenforceability of the existing laws. In the conclusion of the article Pouwelse proposes a new model, possibly a decade away, where millions of users self-organize into a content creating and consuming mass. Pouwelse calls these users prosumers as they are both active producers and consumers.
Edited: February 15th, 2010
Her voice deviates quite a bit from the version on the album. None the less it’s a solid performance and just goes to show how authentic the performance is.
Check out more Florence + The Machine Videos here.
Edited: February 12th, 2010
Watch: Manufacturing Consent (Wintonick, 1992)
Read: Seltzer, Trent. “RIAA, MPAA, and the Digital Piracy Issue: Comparing Public Relations Strategies and Effectiveness” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Sheraton New York, New York City, NY,
Following with the previous weeks examination of corporate media and how their agendas affect the media we consume I wanted to look at a seminal Canadian documentary based on the propaganda model of media. The film does a good job of criticizing the media for being partisan and only interested in the agendas of an elite minority. The article by Seltzer that I paired up with this documentary looks at the extension of power that the MPAA and RIAA have over the digital piracy issue. What I felt was important was how the article makes a point to mention that “suing your own customers is bad business,” a point that RiP!: A Remix Manifesto has made regarding the digital piracy issue. The article is very interesting because they analyze press releases about piracy from both RIAA and the MPAA against articles in the New York Times about piracy and copyright. Ultimately the issue is being looked at by Seltzer as a publicity stunt which is quite harsh considering people are being prosecuted by the law in the process of creating headlines for the agendas of movie studios and record labels.
Edited: February 8th, 2010
Another amazing performance by Florence. check out this video here:
Check out more Florence + The Machine Videos here.
Edited: February 5th, 2010
Watch: This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006)
Reading:
1) Higgins, John M. “MPAA Cuts Deal with BitTorrent.” Broadcasting & Cable. 135.50 (2005): 31-34. Print.
2) Imfeld, Cassandra. “PLAYING FAIR WITH FAIR USE? THE DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT’S IMPACT ON ENCRYPTION RESEARCHERS AND ACADEMICIANS.” Communication Law and Policy. 111.144 (2003): 122-136. Print.
My next week looks into the hegemonic rule that so called “culture creators” hold. I wanted to contrast RiP!: A Remix Manifesto’s philosophy about free media with the current role that organizations such as the MPAA and RIAA have in enforcing laws and lobbying for harsher penalties. The documentary for this week, This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006), takes a look at the voluntary rating system that the MPAA controls and how this is actually a form of censorship that is controlled by private interests. The first reading by Higgins is a short article outlining how the MPAA has worked with the creator of BitTorrent to remove links to Hollywood films from the search engine on the BitTorrent homepage. I felt that this article would show just how far the MPAA’s power extends. The next article, by Imfeld, covers the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and some of the legal problems that this is causing in the United States and I would have my students read the excerpt about research and “fair use”. It also shows how the revised copyright has negative implications for academics. The article shows some of the results of the MPAA’s push for more control over media and how this ends up limiting academic’s ability to reference copyrighted works. I feel this is a big problem with the copyright act and it exemplifies some of the types of problems that arise when too much power is given to a group that represents a corporate interest.
Edited: February 1st, 2010
Henry Jenkins talks about how “Transmedia” is changing the way we interact with media.
By Alex Massaad
The old media system is dying and a new system is being born. The major shift has been from spectatorial media where we participate one way, and participatory media where we can all collaborate and contribute.
This puts culture back in the hands of the average citizen. They can tell their own stories.
Historically important culture has been passed down orally. In the last couple hundred years important stories started to become owned by companies, limiting their free propagation. Now in the digital domain, we are rebalancing the “copyright” and innovating, recontextualizing and responding to the culture that is supposedly “owned” by companies.
Convergence culture means that every image, story etc, plays out over the web, cell phones, and all technologies through all topographies. And the result is a culture more complex than any individual could construct on their own.
The example that Jenkins uses is Obama’s presidential campaign. This had social media links which allowed official and participatory media to be uploaded on youtube and seen by everyone giving a way to new perspectives.
Henry Jenkins on Transmedia – November 2008 from niko on Vimeo.
Edited: January 29th, 2010
Film 4002 – “Is our future becoming less free?
By: Alex Massaad
Featured Article until March 2010
Course Description:
The proliferation of high-speed Internet and multimedia-capable computers has opened up an information highway that has changed the way modern audiences interface with audiovisual media. New information sharing technologies such as YouTube and Bit Torrent have enabled the swift dissemination of almost any commercial audio or video recording, while concurrently causing a furor within legal systems internationally.
This course will look at audio and video separately in order to understand how technology is altering culturally coded norms within media. As the course develops we will be looking at various binaries such as: copyright/piracy, free/paid, corporate/independent and original/remix in order to understand how our use of media and technology can alter both the media and the technology.
Edited: January 27th, 2010