Week 12: Intertextuality and Hollywood

Edited: February 22nd, 2010

Week 11: Copyright, copyleft

Edited: February 15th, 2010

Week 10: Propaganda Model of Content Creation

Edited: February 8th, 2010

Class 9: Culture Creators

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 on Transmedia

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

Is our future becoming less free? A course on recent audio-visual history

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.

(more…)

Edited: January 27th, 2010

Class 8: AV Remix Culture

Watch: RiP: A Remix Manifesto (2009)
Listening: Download and listen to a copy of Girl Talk – Night Ripper
Reading: 1) Bermingham, L.B. “CULTURE JAMMING or a culture jammed? RiP!: A Remix Manifesto.” Screen Education. Winter.54 (2009): 44-47. Print.
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Ripper (for list of sampled songs)

Week eight was a central week in my course since I really feel that the film RiP!: A Remix Manifesto (2009) talks about very important current issue within media studies. I also assigned the album “Night Ripper” by Girl Talk since the artist’s work forms the basis for the documentaries subject matter. Ever since Napster first breached the copyright boundary a decade ago we have needed to update our copyright infringement laws. I think the film does an excellent job of answering not only the problems with copyright laws but also whether or not they should be changed or updated. The reading would prepare students for some of the issues that the documentary looks at such as how our future is becoming less free and Girl Talk’s creative process. What I really felt makes this film valuable was how it makes the leap from media copyright into scientific copyright and patents. The film hints that laws that are in place to protect intellectual property limit research in the cure for cancer and AIDS. This makes the issue of copyright infringement much larger than just about protecting someone’s ideas or musical property. Each of the samples that are used by the artist Girl Talk are examples of copyright infringement but the Bermingham article makes the point that Disney has been appropriating classical stories for the basis of their content for years and asks the question “what is different about their use?” Finally I included the wikipedia page for Night Ripper because it lists all the samples used in the album that I’m sure many students will recognize from their own music libraries. An idea for class this week might be to poll students about which albums from Night Ripper they already own in order to see what percentage of the album the average fan might have already paid for.

Right now you can check out this snippet of the documentary looking at how our culture is becoming less free

Edited: January 25th, 2010

Class 7: A Patchwork Culture

Watch: Notorious (Tilman Jr, 2009)
Reading: Jonker, Julian. “A Black Secret Technology.” Critical Digital Studies: A Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Printing Press, 2008. Print.

As I began to look more at culture and the role technology plays in creating different consumption patterns I wanted to touch on one culture than references itself heavily. In order to examine hip-hop culture I decided to screen the film Notorious (2009) the biopic about the murdered or assassinated rapper Notorious B.I.G. A big part of hip hop involves sampling and building on the existing works in the genre, and the film helps to show how the collaborative and creative process essentially created patchwork of cultural artifacts that were based on a multitude of authors and sources. The article by Jonker appropriates the title of an album for its main thesis about a “Black Secret Technology.” The idea is just stating that black culture has had an advantage in being an outsider to “white culture” in America. By having an outsider’s perspective “black secret technology is taking white technology apart and not putting it back together properly.” This type of multi-authored media is exactly what I look at next week with Girl Talk.

Edited: January 18th, 2010

OiNK Admin Not Found Guilty

Written by enigmax on January 15, 2010:

“Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.”

How long are legal systems going to be junked up with these pointless trials, this is such a distraction from important issues.

Read the Complete story at TorrentFreak.com

Edited: January 18th, 2010

Class 6: Privacy and Technology

Watch: Enemy of the State (Scott, 1998)
Reading: Munster, Anna. “Welcome to Google Earth.” Critical Digital Studies: A Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Printing Press, 2008. Print.

As I began shifting into my units about copyright infringement I wanted to look at some of the good and bad aspects of technology’s infringement on our privacy. While a decade ago Enemy of the State (1998) seemed a like a bit of a conspiracy theory movie, the digital mapping technology that was imagined ten years ago is now a reality with Google Earth and even Google Street View within its Maps application. Munster’s article helps to tie this in with theoretical questions about Google Earth’s position as a simulated world and whether or not we should consider this virtual earth as more than a map. Google Earth is an interactive virtual environment where users can go, and see a representation of our own Earth as well as leave tags and information that other users can then read and edit themselves. This gives Google Earth a lot in common with the social media websites that I examined at the beginning of the term.

Edited: January 11th, 2010