Adding to Wiki

Hey all,

I added a bit to the new media page on wiki:

under the main section:

The CRTC’s defines new media as, “Any digital media production that is interactive and digitally distributed.” They make the distinction between “new” media and media on the basis of: a) it’s accessibility and transmission; there is an increase in use of internet, and an emphasis of integration of text, pictures, sound and video. b) Its interactive nature, which will be the most defining feature for future new media development.

and under new media and interactivity:

Vin Crosbie described three communications media in “What is new media?”. He saw Interpersonal media as “one to one”, Mass media as “one to many” and, finally New Media as “many to many”.

 Rachael

Context: The Disciplined Society

In one more of countless such examples, the police have been caught spying on ordinary citizens engaged in peaceful civil liberties. This story, from the Washington Post, shows the erosion of civil society into a post 9/11 police state, and demonstrates the very narrow degree of actual liberty in the disciplined social order of capitalism. New media will enable counter-surveillence strategies.

The petty and pernicious spying operation of Maryland’s state police

American governments have an inglorious history of spying on domestic dissidents; compared with FBI operations during the Red Scare, the Maryland State Police seem like Keystone Kops. But it’s a mistake to dismiss Maryland’s police espionage against its own residents as the work of hapless bunglers. In fact, it is pernicious and symptomatic of a post-Sept. 11 erosion of respect for fundamental civil liberties…

Justice Department regulations explicitly prohibit police from gathering information on groups and individuals unless “there is reasonable suspicion that the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct or activity.” But with state and local law enforcement agencies awash in federal money meant to root out domestic terrorist plots, civil libertarians have warned that police will start seeing potential terrorists and plots everywhere, “reasonable suspicion” be damned. The Maryland episode and other recent cases in Colorado and Massachusetts suggest their concerns are justified.

If the authorities equate dissent with criminal intent, they undermine the impulse for free speech and political activity itself. The specter of police infiltration can sow suspicion and paranoia and prompt people to keep their mouths shut. Could anything be more anti-American than that?

The police, invoking the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, suggest that any operation undertaken for any reason is legitimate. “In a post-9/11 world,” said Col. Terrence B. Sheridan, superintendent of the Maryland State Police, officers are duty-bound “to protect the citizens of Maryland from threats foreign and domestic.” But if they cannot distinguish five middle-aged peaceniks from criminals, the police themselves become the real threat to American society.

Readings for July 15

Please read:

Alan McCluskey, ‘Trees of Knowledge, an Interview with Pierre Levy.’

Lawrence Lessig. ‘Cyberspace’s Architectural Constitution.’

Video Projects Due Today

Anyone NOT presenting a 15 minute lecture has a video project due today. Post your video on YouTube and e-mail me the link. Here is another video from your classmates:

Strangelove’s Website

Hi all,

I just wanted to post a quick comment about our prof’s website - I actually enjoy browsing around this website; there are many interesting articles to read and you can learn alot from it. I like the fact that I can view everyone’s opinions about the pros and cons of the articles, it gets one thinking… It is very useful in the sense that one can develop their own opinions and thoughts.

I also added a few sentences on our Wikipedia website under “Interactivity and New Media” - check it out.

See you all Thursday,
Lisa

Required Reading for Tuesday July 8

Please read:

Niels Werber. ‘Current German Media-Theory and their Ancestors: Benjamin and Brecht.’

Required Reading for Thursday July 3

Please read:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.’

Walter Benjamin. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

As you read these articles, note the attitude the authors have towards the masses and mass pleasure.

Also see the WikiBooks entry, Communication Theory/The Frankfurt School:

Since Adorno made sweeping generalizations about the impact of the culture industry, and since he did not systematically explore how the culture industry operated, it has been generally easy for some to dismiss the idea of a culture industry. It is nonetheless the case that motion pictures are still made by large companies and that their movies largely rely on formulaic plots. It is also the case that radio is increasingly controlled by a small number of companies, which tend to impose restrictions on how stations operate. As a broadcast medium, television is very much related to both radio and film, and shares with them qualities that situation it in the culture industry. While there is a democratizing aspect to the Internet (in that anyone can create a web site), it happens that the commercial companies operating on the Internet continue to maintain an ideological function. For example, one seldom sees new stories on MSNBC or Yahoo that would question the prerogatives of corporate America. A reexamination of the idea of the culture industry may be necessary in order to theorize on how mass communication media propagate dominant ideologies.”

and Douglas Kellner’s article, ‘The Frankfurt School,”

Of course, media culture was never as massified and homogeneous as in the Frankfurt school model and one could argue that the model was flawed even during its time of origin and influence and that other models were preferable, such as those of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and others of the Weimar generation and, later, British cultural studies. Yet the original Frankfurt school model of the culture industry did articulate the important social roles of media culture during a specific regime of capital and provided a model, still of use, of a highly commercial and technologically advanced culture that serves the needs of dominant corporate interests, plays a major role in ideological reproduction, and in enculturating individuals into the dominant system of needs, thought, and behavior.”

And Kellner on the key differnce between the structure of corporate media (the culture industry) and the Internet:

“While the form of technological-mediated interaction is always structured, limited, coded, and predetermined, especially in interaction with big media corporations, new computer technology allows for creation of alternative cultural spaces that can attack and subvert the established culture. In this new cultural space, one can express views previously excluded from mainstream media and so the new cultural forums have many more voices and individuals participating than during the era of Big Mainstream Media in which giant corporations controlled both the form and content of what could be spoken and shown. Cyberdemocracy and technopolitics is too recent a phenomenon to adequately appraise its possibilities, limitations, and effects, but it provides the possibilitity of the sort of subversive politics and the use of the tools of the spectacle against the capitalist spectacle” (from ‘Debord and the Postmodern Turn: New Stages of the Spectacle, by Steven Best and Kellner).

and this from the Wikipedia entry on T.W. Adorno:

Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. He wrote that “the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardised production of consumption goods” but this is concealed under “the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretense of individualism”. [10] Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. But the subtle dialectician was also able to say that the problem with capitalism was that it blurred the line between false and true needs altogether.

The work of Adorno and Horkheimer heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. At the time Adorno began writing, there was a tremendous unease among many intellectuals as to the results of mass culture and mass production on the character of individuals within a nation. By exploring the mechanisms for the creation of mass culture, Adorno presented a framework which gave specific terms to what had been a more general concern.”

Also see the Wikipedia entry on the culture industry.

Assigned Reading for Thursday June 26

Please read Kellner, ‘Remembering Baudrillard,’ and ‘Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?‘ for the next class (Thursday June 26). You will score much higher on the final and get more out of the class (as well as be able to contribute more to the class) if you read the required chapters before class.

Those of you on the right side of the political spectrum who do not care for Marxist-informed analysis (known as critical theory) may find Baudrillard’s critique of Marxism interesting. From an obituary:

Baudrillard was one of the first sociologists to have written on simulation and “hyperreality” — a realm created by entertainment, communication and information technologies which is more pleasurable and “real” than ordinary life — at the moment that these concepts were beginning to play a significant role in theoretical analyses of contemporary culture and society.

As his intellectual career developed he disassociated himself from the academic world, particularly the social sciences. He also became a critic of the main forms of western politics and culture, stigmatising the doctrines of democracy and human rights as alibis for increased western penetration, globalisation, and elimination of other cultures (paradoxically after having virtualised its own).”

Adding to “New Media” at Wikipedia

Also note, you now also have material on the new media of amateur video as a new mode of cultural production (re: Henry Jenkins), and lots on new media and the subject-object relation (Mark Poster), along with his comments on how new media changes authorship, art, and meaning — these are issues that could easily be entered into the “New Media” Wikipedia article.

Remember: you must make a contribution to the “New Media” article before the last class and report on your contribution to Wikipedia in this blog BEFORE the last class or no credit will be given for the course.

Democratizing the Means of Cultural Production

Notes on Henry Jenkins‘ essay, ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.”

Key words and Concepts:

• fan appropriation
• amateur video democratizes the means of cultural production
• grassroots archiving, annotation, appropriation, and recirculation of media content
• ‘the current trend within the entertainment industry has been toward the increased concentration of media ownership into the hands of a smaller and smaller number of transmedia and transnational conglomerates’
• Participatory culture = the new style of consumerism (’the right to participate in the creation and distribution of media narratives’)
• ‘Media consumers want to become media producers, while media producers want to maintain their traditional dominance over media content.’
• ‘The Industrial Revolution resulted in the privatization of culture and the emergence of a concept of intellectual property that assumes that cultural value originates from the original contributions of individual authors.’
• ‘The ability of corporations to control their “intellectual property” has had a devastating impact upon the production and circulation of cultural materials, meaning that the general population has come to see themselves primarily as consumers of — rather than participants within — their culture.’
• ‘we have lost the possibility for cultural myths to accrue new meanings and associations over time, resulting in single authorized versions (or at best, corporately controlled efforts to rewrite and ‘update’ the myths of our popular heroes).’
• ‘new structures of ownership diminish our ability to participate in the creation and interpretation of that culture.’
• Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, Patricia R. Zimmerman ‘concludes, “[Amateur film] was gradually squeezed into the nuclear family. Technical standards, aesthetic norms, socialization pressures and political goals derailed its cultural construction into a privatized, almost silly, hobby.” Writing in the early 1990s, Zimmerman saw little reason to believe that the camcorder and the VCR would significantly alter this situation, suggesting that the medium’s technical limitations made it hard for amateurs to edit their films and that the only public means of exhibition were controlled by commercial media-makers.’
• ‘Scholars and critics writing about third world filmmaking have productively described those films as an “imperfect cinema,” noting the ways that filmmakers have had to deal with low budgets and limited access to high tech production facilities, making it impossible to compete with Hollywood on its own terms. Instead, these filmmakers have made a virtue out of their limitations, often spoofing or parodying Hollywood genre conventions and stylistic norms through films that are intentionally crude or ragged in style.’
• amateur filmmakers ‘parody is almost always affectionate and rarely attempts to make an explicit political statement.’ — this is no longer true
• ‘amateur filmmakers see themselves as actively promoting media texts that they admire’
• ‘We are witnessing the emergence of an elaborate feedback loop between the emerging “DIY” aesthetics of participatory culture and the mainstream industry.’
• Conculsion: ‘We are witnessing the transformation of amateur film culture from a focus on home movies toward a focus on public movies, from a focus on local audiences toward a focus on a potential global audience, from a focus on mastering the technology toward a focus on mastering the mechanisms for publicity and promotion, and from a focus on self-documentation toward a focus on an aesthetic based on appropriation, parody, and the dialogic.’
• ‘This third space will survive, however, only if we maintain a vigorous and effective defense of the principle of “fair use,” only if we recognize the rights of consumers to participate fully, actively, and creatively within their own culture, and only if we hold in check the desires of the culture industries to tighten their control over their own intellectual property in response to the economic opportunities posed by an era of media convergence. At the moment, we are on a collusion course between a new economic and legal culture which encourages monopoly power over cultural mythologies and new technologies which empower consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and re-circulate media images.’

Google, Porn & Community Standards

‘The Internet is for porn,’ or so goes a song in a recent Broadway play. Here is an interesting news item from the Washington Post:

What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer

By Matt Richtel, June 24, 2008

Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?

Considering the accessibility of online pornography, how should communities shape local obscenity standards in the digital age?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm…

“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed,” he added.”

Strangelove Challenge:

Use Google Trends to find a pattern in search terms. Here is a pattern I found which suggests a seasonal trend in the mass mind regarding ‘capitalism’ — why the big dip at Christmas and shallowing out at Summer each year?: