COMM202/Class notes
From Driscollwiki
COMM202: Communication and Technology
Jan 10: Overview
Broad topics
Understanding Technological Change
- Comparison of various moments of media change
Reinventing...
- How are existing media forms affected by the emergence of new media?
Rethinking...
- Institutions + practices as re-imagined in response to the introduction of new comm tech
Communication + Culture
- How do they inform and shape each other?
- "Technological determinism"? "Social determinism"?
Grading
5 factors
- Participation (20%)
- In Blackboard forums
- Attendance in section
- Autobiographical essay (10%)
- Contextualizing a YouTube video (20%)
- Reporting on Wikipedia (20%)
- Midterm (15%), Mar 2
- Final (15%)
Honeymooners
- Buying a tv episode
TODO
- Due dates for reading responses
- 5pm? day before the section
Readings
- No course reader
- One required book: Gee, J. P. & Hayes, E. R. (2010). The sims and 21st century learning. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)
Jan 24
Questions about open books
- No laptops during exam
Talking about method
- Textual analysis
- Institutional analysis, subcultural analysis
- Discourse analysis
What does it mean to have "invented" the internet?
- Al Gore's father was key figure in development of interstate highways
- Gore, following in those footsteps, championed the intenret as an "information superhighway"
- Created a "rhetorical process"
- Enabled government funding, support
Gore 1994 speech
- Centralize government theory of the net
- Nationwide role out? Re: telephone
- Providing services through the net
The electronic frontier
"Frontier"
- New spaces open up
- People pour in who do not want a lot of rules, structures
- "Freedom on the fringe of society"
Inherent conflict between frontier metaphor and info superhighway
- Highway is highly regulated, supported by gov't
Leading up to the Web
Multiple early visions of the web
- Document sharing among academics
National disaster relief
- People in bunkers ("as many as a dozen")
Vannevar Bush, Memex
- Re: "As we may think" (1945)
- Multiple points of access
- Trails, connections, among microfilm
- Using the term "trail blazer", calling forth the frontier
Howard Rheingold, "Virtual community"
- 1993
- Intimacy, passion via computer-mediated comm
"Digital revolution"
- Counter-culture
- Power to people
- Empowerment
Negroponte
Personally invested in "digital revolution"
- But funded by major corporations via Media Lab
"Atoms" v. "Bits"
- Building off of Mitchell "City of bits"
- Shift in thinking
- Likely underway by 1996 - stock market
"Weightless bits" might level the playing field
- What advantage do big media companies have? (pg. 19)
- The advantage== litigation, influence on policymakers, "intellectual property", infrastructure
- Predicting the end of tv networks, film studios, record labels
What did Negroponte miss?
- Inertia
- Ability to repress via legislation, etc.
Outcome?
- Media concentration
- Big media is bigger
-
Convergence
- George Gilder, Life after television: The coming transformation of media and american life, 1994
Historical examples?
- Library of Alexandria?
- Seemed to contain all of human knowledge
- Old library burned to the ground
- Egypt rebuilt the LoA as a digital archive
- Tower of Babel?
- A world of "daily me" leads to Balkanization
Limits of tech?
- Tech is a tool
- Can only "do" what its users set in motion
More metaphors:
- "Force of nature", inevitable
- Society can shape it but they can't stop it
Barlow
Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace
- Cattle Rancher (frontier)
- Grateful Dead (counterculture)
- EFF
Libertarian position
- Free market, free speech
- Opposed to regulating content
Online Decency Act
- Overturned by Reno v ACLU in 1997
- Supreme Court uses metaphor of the pamphleteer to describe listservs, web, chat rooms, newsgroups
Dense text of the Declaration
- "Netizens" of the future, mind-oriented
- "Governments" are of the past, industrial
- "You have no sovereignty where we gather"
- Barlow speaks from authority of "liberty" against "tyranny"
- Responding to Gore, net can't be a "public works project"
Barlow sees a "public sphere" emerging from the net
- With its own social norms, commitments
Jan 26
Students turn in papers
Thinking about role of "internet" and SOTU
What happened before YouTube?
"You"
- Singular?
- Plural?
- Y'all, ustedes/vosotros
What is the "you" in YouTube?
- Individuals?
- Communities?
Who are the central protagonists of YouTube?
- The founding entrepreneurs?
Thinking participatory historically
- Folk culture
- Mass culture
- Participatory culture
- Some detail about this as a process, cycle
- Movement of ideas, images through participatory cultures
- "Evolution of lolcats"
"Web -10"
- Fanzines, handset type, home printing press
Radio amateurs
- Connected to scouting
- As many transmitter as receivers: transceiver
- Transition to advertising-driven one-way "mass" media
SF fandom
- Connected to amateur radio, 18th c. leafletter
- Writers meeting at Clifton's in DTLA
Fanzines
- Indie comics
Independent filmmakers
- Home movies
- 8mm, video
Indymedia
- Coordinated media efforts
Role of teens:
- Young people frequently at the "cutting edge"
- Nonsense: net is the first time that kids understood media before parents
Bertolt Brecht, "The radio as an apparatus of communication", 1927
- Imagining radio as 2-way medium
Hans Magnus Enzenberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media", 1970
- Says TV is socially isolating
- Wishes for a "reciprocal action"
Democratization of media production tools
- Predictions in 1997:
- RU Sirius, "everyone will be famous to 15 people"
- Gareth Branwyn, Jamming the Media, "a global do-it-yourself newsroom"
- Douglas Rushkoff, is it all output? no interaction?
Burgess, Green study of YouTube
- No "Most Popular" category
- How to sample?
- Curious to know if commercial or amateur content dominates
- Results:
- Most viewed: traditional/ commercial
- Most discussed, responded: user-created
Hybrid media space
- Amateur and commercial materials together
- Network externalities
Fandom
History in 1900s
- Initially, mostly weird guys
- Star Trek changes the dynamic
- Very progressive themes, representation
- Women draw into the fandom
- Joanie Winston: Female organizer of a letter-writing campaign to keep Star Trek on the air
- Productive, creative female fans
- Old guard guys used "Trekkie" as a disparaging term
- Suggesting that Trek fans were just groupies
- Female fans called themselves "Trekkers"
Vidding
- Combining images, clips, video
- Drawing on knowledge of fan community
- Pleasure emerges from insider knowledge
- Technical expertise: editing with VHS and VCRs
- Now very sophisticated editing
- Peer teaching, learning
- Framing, priorities
- Emphasizing the aspects of the media of value to the fans
"Den of thieves"
- Are fans stealing?
- Or are they creating?
Attention to "remix" as a novelty
- Ignores the long history of vidding
- Frustrating to not get credit
- But what is the cost of publicity?
- "Benign neglect", legal challenges
Is EVERYONE on YouTube?
Who ISN'T there?
- Why?
Who is there but invisible?
Jump offs
- Nicole Nichols (Uhura) spoke to MLK Jr.
- Kandy Fong, "Both Sides Now", 1980
- blimvisible, Us - history of vidding
Jan 31
Primarly, wi-fi is out.
Egypt, Twitter
- "Sense of connection"
- "Calling out" of CNN by people who observed disconnect between msm and twit
Distinctions between citizen journalists and mainstream news media:
- CNN journalistic caution regarding internet take-down
- MSM able to apply pressure
"Kill switch" legislation
- How this conversation emerges amid crisis
Recap
- Stories we tell "projective" rather than "descriptive", part of the appeal of "digital revolution"
- Utopian/dystopian fantasies
- Media systems in which grassrootes + commercial media co-exist and influence each other
- Evolution of cultural expression in US: shifts between folk culture, mass culture, participatory culture
- YouTube as a hybrid space
SF history
Hugo Gernsbach
- Inventor, publisher
- Walkie-talkie, radio amateur
- Modern Electrics, Radio Craft, Amazing Stories
Coined term "scientifiction"
- But it was built on a history of speculative fiction
- The Steam Man of the Prairies, American Novels
- Jules Verne
- H.G. Wells - wargamer
Popular science
- Popular science fiction
Image of the scientist in popular culture
- Frankenstein
- Edison, the wizard of Menlo Park
- Thought of as an individual genius despite his large teams
- Tesla, the showman
- Playing with light, electricity, "wielding"
Bellamy, Edward. Looking backward.
- Falls asleep in 1887 Boston, wakes up in 2000
- Imagining the future: examples from Minority Report
- Technobabble: "Let's enhance"
Depiction of computers in Star TRek
- Spock with slide rule
- Uhura at mainframe
- Others using terminals
- And mobile tech, comm badges, radios, etc.
Making new Star Trek
- Retro future
Holodeck
- Murray, J. Hamlet on the holodeck.
Technological utopianism
Consistent imagery across representations
- Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Just imagine
- Air cars, hover crafts, aerial walkways
Industrial experience shapes the imagined future city
- Instead of noise, it is quiet
- Instead of chaos, it is ordered
Images of engineers and science in forcing transformation
- Fascism?
- Renaissance?
1939 World's Fair
The world of tomorrow: built and embodied
- Clean, perfect
- Ordered
What about the amusement park?
- Bawdy?
- Technology in control: thrilling but completely safe
Examples:
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
- Visit Terminal City
- Welcome to Radiant City
- Whatever happened to the World of Tomorrow?
- Where's My Jetpack?
Cyberpunk
Sterling's Manifesto
- Technology is visceral
- Under our skin, often inside our minds
Mirrorshades
- Obscuring the eyes, windows to the soul
Austin, TX as a home of cyberpunk
- "Hackers, cowboys, rock stars"
- Hi tech
- Gateway to the Western frontier
- Rock scene
- Japanese anime draws on the "image bank" of the 1980s cyberpunk movement
- Embrace of "the street"
Self-authoring, -design
- Resistant, subcultural tech use
Jump offs
- Sleep dealer, about virtual Mexican labor
- Onion, Rebecca. 2008. "Reclaiming the Machine: An introductory look at steampunk in everyday practice".
- SILLOF.COM
Feb 2
"Piracy"
- Negative assumptions built-in: damaging, unauthorized, etc.
- Contrast with "fair use", compare with "plagiarism", "citation"
Deborah Spar
- Digi tech challenges government and authority, borders
Talking about Pirate Bay and bittorrent
Other kinds of "pirates"?
- Apple, Microsoft as "pirates"?
- Marketplace piracy, competition?
- "Tomorrow's entrepreneurs, businessmen are probably pirates today"
Disruptive technology
- Productive destruction
Tech may challenge authority for a period of time
- But it seems to eventually invite it back in
Moral economy
- Social + moral system that underlies any system of economic exchange
- Trust based on shared norms
Spar's theory of tech/econ innovation
Phase 1: Innovation
- So few participants that property enforcement is not required
- e.g., homebrew computing
Phase 2: Commercialization
- e.g. Nollywood
- Who initially takes up innovation?
- Pirates have infrastructure, networks
- Also evangelical Christians
- As entrepreneurs acquire resources, stability
- They reach out to regulators for protection
- Lawsuits...
Phase 3: Creative Anarchy
- Entrenched stakeholders want to maintain power
- Claiming ownership, struggling over property rights
- Thug-like tactics
- Pressure for standardization, outside diversity
Phase 4: Rules
- Rush, start-up phase gives way to rule-making
Past transitions
- CBS news clip re telecome & cable in 1992: http://youtu.be/iy1MxWKbEQE
- Save free tv: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shV6T_p8X_Y
Net neutrality
Feb 7
Today's tasks
Historical explanations of tech change functions at several levels
- Beyond dates, names
- How do I understand the world that exists when a new media technology is introduced?
Domestication
- Adaptation
- "Newness"
No dead media, only dead delivery technology
Gitelman, phonograph
Phonograph invented for business, recorder/player
- But dominant use ended up being pleasure, amusement, player-only
The invention of technologies does not necessarily lead to their popularization
- Context is key
- Phonograph enters into the world of sheet music, player piano
Repetition, compulsion
- Metaphor for madness
- Madness certainly pre-dated phonograph but the technology provided a terminology for describing it
Print-based mass media
Intensive reading:
- Small numbers of books
- Repeated reading
Extensive reading:
- Novels, magazines
- Reading many books once
Niches, genres, ethnic identification
- Caruso
- Jazz
- Historical irony: Paul Whiteman
- Schwartz, Jean. Chinatown my Chinatown
Realism
Edison ad: "the Acme of Realism"
- Child is "Looking for the band" inside the box
- "Little nipper" for RCA Victor, responding to "his Master's voice", cocking his head
- HMV == His Master's Voice
Evolution
Variants on the basic invention
- Shellac, vinyl discs
- Magnetic tape
- Digital media
Domestication of the other technologies
Home computers
- Using stock photos designed to show the computer as a family device
Architectures, homes themselves
- Space age
- Automation, sensing, information driven
Demands of information technologies
Always-on expectations
Conspicuous reproduction
- Mommy blogging: home as an entrepreneurship environment
- Changing relationships among family members
Jump offs
- Old pop song - I'm all a-twitter
- Enrico Caruso
- Kun, Jewface
- Buster Keaton, the electric house, Det Elektriska Huset
Feb 9
Autobiographical writing
- HJ shared an autobio essay from Fans, Bloggers, ...
- Finding voice, constructing argument from first person
- Be honest about how you understand what you know
- Put subjective biases, experiences out on the page
Introducing new media
Balance of familiar and attention to the novel, distinctive
- Solitaire, familiar game, you don't need to learn the rules. Instead, it gives you a chance to learn how to operate the GUI.
Quick n dirty on McLuhan
Medium is the message:
- content aside, the characteristics of the medium itself matters
"Laws of media"
Enhances...
- Extends, amplifies, enhances some previous medium/phenomenon
Retrieves...
- Recovers some experience or medium from the past
- e.g. bringing a concert into the home
Obsolesces...
- What does it drive out of the center and into the margin
Reverse into...
- When pushed to extreme, reverse into opposite intention
Is there such a thing as a "dead" medium?
McLuhan says that new medium shifts around the relationships among existing media
Media (and their social practices) are unstable
Convergence culture
- Capacity to communicate across many media channels
- Need to determine your own socio-technical norms
Sven Birkerts, Fate of the book
Trying to imagine a world in which the "paged book" is replaced by screens and digital storage
- Is this technological determinism?
Will the book be antiquated? Obsolete?
- Will the next generation find it hard to believe?
Closure v. open-endedness
- Print books are limited in length
- e.g. HJ struggling with length of Spreadable
Open-endedness of news online
- Destabilization of text, authority undermined
- When news comes on paper, you can return to the archive
- What is the archive for nytimes.com ?
Closure, finality
- Hierarchical: some books matter, others are forgotten
- The fixity of text on the page is a necessary component
Private sphere v. Public space
Intimacy of writing
- Alone with a pen
Intimacy, reading with your own thoughts
- Berkirts argues: computer doesn't have this solitude
- Screen is a "circuit"
Expressive v. Function uses of language
Style emerging from absence, need
- There is no amendment, correction, clarification
Text in an email does not require the same style, precision
Internet making us stupid, shallow, lonely, etc...
Clips from Colbert
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows
- Is google making us stupid? More superficial
Andrew Keen, the Cult of the Amateur
Sherry Turkle
Jump offs
Dynamica, Ray Martin,Stereo Action, sound your eyes can follow
Feb 14
Last week
Historical explanation of tech change
- Specific historical circumstances surrounding a particular set of innovations
- Broad explanation of repeated patterns
Domestication process involves adapting new tech to ongoing social needs of home + family
- May involve projecting aspects of tech onto the home and reshaping human conduct to reflect tech mandates
No dead media, only dead delivery tech
- Instead of thinking about displacement, think about convergence
Understanding the process of tech change requires paying attentino to both resisters + adapters
This week
Legacy media
- That pre-existed the rise of the digital
Reimagining the institutions of print culture
The face of the book revisited
What is threatened by a transition to a digital library?
People are not clustered around a few major titles
- Seeking many less popular, specialized, niche books
- How do publishers anticipate these preferences?
- Project Gutenberg
bezakor, Imagining the future of the library animation
O'Donnell, Avatars of the word (1998)
- Print culture / Digital culture
- Monologue / Dialogue
- Fixity / Fluidity
- Durability / Immediacy
- Transmission / Innovation
- Read / Read&Write
Sports illustrated preview of ipad app
Where are the archival copies of SI?
Nick Bilton, I live in the future and here's how it works
- QR codes
IDEO Future of the book
Clip from the Wire regarding the newspaper
Newspapers: "this really is a crisis"
- Re: Shirky reading, shift from "save newspapers" to "save society"
- "Fourth estate", re: Jefferson preferring "newspapers without a government"
Morely Safer: "I would trust citizen journalism as much as I would trust citizen surgery"
- First, journalists are citizens, tricky distinction
- Second, Why must "citizen" infer "amateur"?
- Different expertise that is not journalism
- Third, compare to "horseless carriage"
- Named in the context of legacy model
- What is really being produced?
- Fourth, over-emphasis on citizens, citizenship
- When some of the most important struggles concern citizenship status
"Civic ecology"
- Supplementary materials
- Mobile phone videos, tweets are incorporated into an on-going newstream
- Doing what a pro journo "can't do"
- Full range of resources through which citizens get information about their society
- Not just newspapers but all channels through which information flows
Reimagining the book
The face of the book revisited
Next week
Visiting speaker on podcasting, radio
Jump offs
Feb 16
Begin with clips from Hillary Clinton's Internet Freedom speech
- See BBC news article
Reducing these revolutions to "twitter" oversimplifies the "media ecology" of these events
Can we "port" the inalienable rights from the U.S. Constitution to the internet?
Overview of today:
- I don't even know what Television is anymore
- Transmedia entertainment
- End of an Era
- Performing with Glee
I don't even know what Television is anymore
Jay Leno example:
- Lower cost of production for 10pm but "own" that hour
- Economic decision: not about maximizing audience SIZE but ROI
Outcome: people had so many options at 10pm, they didn't care to watch Leno
- 10pm: a slot for "passion", "intellectual engagement"
- Local news was getting destroyed because they followed Leno
- Leno was sleepytime TV for after 11pm
"Must see TV"
- Urgency, appointment TV
- If you're not there when it airs, you're out of luck
- This limited the kinds of stories that you could tell
- The episodes had to be self-contained
- It's okay to miss an episode
"Engagement" TV
- It doesn't matter when it is on
- Interest, investment, loyalty over time
- Not about random channel-surfing
- Serialized, multi-episode arcs
What is television?
- Is it only TV when you watch on a TV?
- Is it still TV when you watch on a laptop?
What are the biggest shows on the net?
- Heroes, Lost, Prison Break, Dexter, House, ...
- Common features?
- Culty, fannish, deeply-motivated viewers
Why do networks want fans instead of casual viewers?
- In most cases, fewer than 10% of viewers consider a show their "favorite" show
- However, in rare cases, 60-70% of viewers might consider it a "favorite"
- At the time of HJs research: Buffy, WWF
- More likely to watch every week, more likely to watch all the way to the end, more likely to stay in the room during ads
- Higher level of brand recall overall and higher positive brand association
- More likely to seek out content on the web
Chuck fans organize a Subway footlong "buy-in"
- "Chuck sent us" notes
- Subway increased its financial support of Chuck and the show stayed on the air
- Passionate viewers created a passionate sponsor
Transmedia entertainment
"Story universe"
- Story spread across many possible media and platforms
Transmedia storytelling
- A process
- Integral elements of a fiction get "dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels"
- Creating "unified and coordinated entertainment experience"
- Each medium makes its own "unique contribution" to the unfolding of the story
Status of "advertising" is confusing
- Exposition and details about the world begins before the movie/TV show even exists
- True Blood was highly anticipated by fans before they'd seen any clips
- Transmedia, engagement
- Similar to Walking Dead
Campfire
- Production company planning campaigns for True Blood, Walking Dead
- Previously, Blair Witch
Transmedia producer
- Someone who organizes the story across three or more media channels
- Major milestone that the guild created a new job classification
Early examples of transmedia worlds?
- Star Wars
- Dungeons and Dragons
- He-Man
- Lord of the Rings
- Pokemon
- Buffy
In transmedia, certain channels are reimaged
- Buffy moved from TV to comics
- Comics are "canon"
iPad as a locus for these various channels to converge
Which fans are the core?
- Affirmational fans: fans support producers, celebrate canon
- Transformational fans: fans transgress the authority of producers
- Which fans are facilitated, which are marginalized?
End of an Era
Four shows were cancelled last season that represented an ideal kind of engagement TV:
- 24
- Lost
- Heroes
- Ghost Whisperer
- "Plucky underdog"
- Kim Moses: her job was to "produce the audience" keep the show on the air
Cultural attractors
- TV shows have to draw people together who already have something in common
Cultural activators
- No one person can solve the puzzles in Lost
- Need a group or a community to make it happen
- e.g. Lostpedia on Wikia
24: responding to contemporary events
- Gave bloggers significant stuff to talk about
- Big fans among American conservatives
- Rush, Bush, Cheney, etc.
Heroes: huge ensemble cast
- Introducing 20+ characters in three weeks
- Backstory developed in webcomics
- The momentum of this show was hurt by the writers strike
Ghost Whisperer
- Holding on with middling ratings until it had enough episodes to go into syndication
Attempts to create the "new Lost" are more or less failing
- The Cape
- V
- The Event
- Flash Forward
Performing with Glee
Building off of High School Musical
- Building interest in musical theatre / Broadway
- To music industry
- To music education
Music industry tie-in
- Each week the songs on the TV show become major sellers on iTunes
- Flip: Christmas album preceded the show
- "Tantalizing clues" in the album
- Comparable to Rock Band, Guitar Hero
Music elements can be enjoyed separately from the episodes
- Glee does not shut down the fan activities that appear around the show
- YouTube could filter and takedown these videos which suggests that the producers are actively supporting the fan/amateur productions
League of Extraordinary Dancers
- Straight to Hulu
- Similar to Dr. Horrible and The Guild
- USC grads
Recurring extra on Glee: "the Other Asian" (Harry Shum Jr.)
- Positioned in the background initially
- Now he is named (Mike) and integrated into the plot
- But he was also a major performer and dancer on LXD
- And a soloist in John Chu's Step up 3-D
- In a live Glee / LXD tour, he becomes the bridge character
- Special appeal to Asian-American viewers, magazines, etc.
Feb 23: Reinventing music
- Francesca guest lecture
Recap
- Tech alone isn't enough to change culture
- New media/tech are measured by the value system of the existing media
- Media change plays out in conflicts between different factions of society
Fischer, promises to keep, music
Digital tech enabled changes in how we access music + movies
- Interrelated with social needs + expectations
Mapping out the positive and negative characteristics of these changes
Student takeaways
- Thinking through iPhone AppStore, people trade freedom + cost for convenience
Dance, Lindy
Lindy hop
- Vernacular dance
- Social
- Improv
Challenges of recording dance steps
Pre-film dance notation
- Requires a teacher-student relationship
Originality in dance didn't matter because preservation was impossible
Does lindy in the digital era ...?
- Continue the tradition of transgression?
- Undermine the possibility of subversive power?
- Introduce entirely new elements of power and media engagement?
Feb 28
J. Ignacio "Nacho" Gallego
- Univ. Carlos III de Madrid, Esp
- PhD diss is about podcasting
- http://www.uc3m.es/portal/page/portal/dpto_periodismo_comunicacion_audiovisual/com_audiovisual/personal/juan_ignacio_gallego
- http://www.suenabrillante.wordpress.com
- juanignacio.gallego@uc3m.es
"Some ideas about podcasting, radio, and audio content distribution"
- The "little brother" of media
Overview
- Podcasting as a biz model in the Spanish radio market
- Big radio players are podcasting their content
- New indie services: filters, aggregators
- Handicaps: conservative management, digital copyright, user generated content not included
- Takes advantage of tech to develop new audio vocab, compete with traditional radio
Olallo Rubio as example of podcast diff from radio
- The language, aesthetics, sonics are different
New kinds of audience participation
- http://audioboo.fm
- KYOU radio
Users as programmers
Fan productions, radio remix:
- Pairing audio with slideshow on YouTube
- Bowie on marae, Bowie's Waiata Radio Documentary Part 1
- Carne de video club
Community radio sharing audio online:
Conversation with HJ
Characteristics of radio
- Live-ness, assumption of performance
- Podcasting moves to engagement-based
- Local, proximity to transmitter
Lowered barriers of entry to podcasting
- No license required
Archiving, accessing old shows
- Downloading programs that were once ephemeral
Jump offs
Stations
- http://rtve.es/podcast
- http://cadanaser.com/ -- first station in spain
- http://icat.fm/
- http://kyouradio.com
Podcasts
Podcast aggregator
Tools
- http://audioboo.fm
- @audioboo
- Spotify
Is podcasting radio? No.
- New way of audio content distribution that admits different sound contents
- Radio stations think that podcasting == radio but it's not the same
Amnesia
- Story about a man who lost his memory
- Created a podcast about trying to recreate it
- When it was revealed to be fake, people were very upset
Fan fiction, fan podcasting
- Actors living all over the world
- Assembled, edited together into a coherent production
How to distinguish podcast + images from YouTube?
March 7
YouTube assignment
Refer to DIY Media series on HJ's blog
Rethinking production
Key terms
- Networked culture
- Innovation
- Lead user
- Peer-based production
- Crowd sourcing
- Expertise
- Responsiveness
Together, we can do things that individuals cannot do
Next week?
- Consumption
LEGOs
Eric Von Hippel
- Lead user
Lead user
- Face needs that will be general in a marketplace years before the general consumer population
- Pushing on boundaries
- e.g. early users of Edison's phonograph contradict his expectations
Conglomerates & Networks
Mode of production (in Marxist theory of historical materialism), combo of:
- Productive forces: materials, labor
- Relations of production: propery, power, control
- Often codified in law
Conglomerates
- Large, multinational
- High coordination, communication costs
Peer production
Yochai Benkler
- Creative energy of large numbers of people
- Coordinated into large, meaningful projects
- Without hierarchical orgs
- With/without financial compensation
- May be org'd via internt
Crowdsourcing
Jeff Howe
- "Communities", "crowds" coming together online out of a shared interest
Star Wars examples
Phantom Edit
- "Fixing" Jar Jar
Galaxies
- Focus on community, ownership
- Lucasarts changed the responsibilities
Neverwinter Nights
Ray Muzuka, Bioware, Neverwinter Nights
Building new games on top of NN as a platform, structure
- Similar use in Little Big Planet
Mar 9
Starting with G4 clip regarding gamification
- Jesse Schell dystopian vision
- Gamification
Crowdsourcing the independent cinema
Examples:
- There are nazis on the moon
- The cosmonaut
- Films made in dialogue with their audiences
Self-branding
Web 2.0 ... is people!
- Wealth generating
- Discursive tool for exploiting social relationships for commercial ends
The Long Tail
Transition from the hits system to many niches
Data-driven applications
- Competitive advantage is owning, controlling data
- Where is the user?
- Participating user as laborer
Folksonomy
Exploitation
Terranova
- You may not know that you are being exploited
- The contract is not made clear
"Precarious work"
- non-standard employment
- poorly paid
- insecure
- unprotected
- cannot support a household
Jump off : "playbor
"Spheres of influence"
Mar 23 : Innovation
Zittrain's background is in law
- Trying to imagine regulation, policy
Generative technology
Internet
- Supports a range of uses and remains accessible to a broad range of users
Concern
- Entertainment content may lead people away from the open ended structures that have sustained digital innovation
Code is the law
Code as a regulatory force
Generative internet
- Diverse audience
- Technological innovation
- Expression
Generativity?
- Capacity to produce unprompted change
- PC/network is a grid
Principles
- Ease of mastery
- Required to adopt, adapt
- Skill required
Mar 30 Rethinking privacy
Last week on innovation
Generative tech
- Innovation
- Conflict between desire for security/ease of use
Cultures can be generative
Overview this week
Rethinking privacy
- Privacy / publicity related
Don't let facebook ruin your relationship
"Don't let facebook ruin your relationship"
Persistence
- Recorded for posterity, extends the existence of a speech act
Searchability
Replicability
Invisible audiences
"Privacy is about how information flows..."
Teddy bear nanny cam
Security by obscurity
- Just because something can be read it doesn't mean that it is
- Calculated risk
Publicity and privacy
Social need for tool that could hlep maintain relationships over geographic space
Dream Activists coming out as undocumented
- "My name is Mohammad and I am undocumented"
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFdTQWBkiwM
Risks:
- http://therealpedro.com
- Student leader outed and turned over to ins
"Outing" across history, populations
Massive publicity and mobbing
- Noxious ideas spread widely by the negative reaction
Publicly quitting
Code and Law (Reconsidered)
Who's watching who?
Apr 4
On wikipedia
Beginning with Middlebury College History Dept banning of WP
- Students are responsible for the accuracy of information they provide
- WP is not an acceptable citation
- Response to the Shimabara Rebellion page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimabara_rebellion
Wales response:
- Duh. Don't cite encyclopedias.
- But to tell students to avoid WP altogether is unreasaonable
- "Free access to the sum of all human knowledge"
Andrea Forte
- Wikipedia from a "collection of articles" to a "collection of people"
Robert McHenry, former editor of Britannica
- Invisible processes behind the development of an encyclopedia article
- Role of expertise?
- Mystique about Encyclopedia Britannica "shattered" for HJ after being asked to write an entry
- Declined to complete a contribution
Jason Mittell, Middlebury College
- WP is "transparent" in its goals + roles
- Other encyclopedias don't have "such reflexivity"
User experience:
- Conventional encyclopedia: users are consumers
- Wikipedia: users are contributors
Roy Rosenzwig, Prof. of History & New Media, George Mason Univ.
- Admire the process while remaining skeptical of the product
- Contestation in the WP article
- "Like journalism" ... "first draft of history"
- "Unlike journalism" ... "subject to change"
Entropy of info in a conventional encyclopedia
- Versus instability on WP
Deliberation: Collective intelligence
Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence
- Not only making knowledge available to the collective but also enables discussion, negotiation, development, etc.
- Shared, collaborative, developed in groups
Levy 4 sources of power:
- Nomads
- Mobility is key
- Nation states
- Governments form, establish borders
- Nomads persist
- Multination capitalism
- Collective intelligence
Aggregation: Wisdom of crowd
James Surowiecki
- "Wisdom of crowds", not the same as collective intel
- If you aggregate individual judgement,
4 criteria for a wise crowd
- Diversity
- Independence
- Decentralization
- Aggregation
Diff from Levy
- Surowiecki thinks that people should not be communicating with each other because this may sway their responses, bias them
Expert paradigm v Collective intel
Expert paradigm
- Requires bounded body of knowledge
- Credentials, exams, formal
Collective intelligence
- Encourages open-ended and interdisciplinary
- Non-hierarchical, real life experiences, past performance
Badges
Examples
Survivor Sucks
Wikipedia neutrality
Neutrality is a goal achieved over time
- Not all articles are neutral at a given time
What knowledge counts?
What can we learn when we see that the Asimov article is larger than Woodrow Wilson?
Unexpected skews tell us something about the population contributing to the site
Conflicts on WP
Edit wars / revert wars
- Users repeatedly re-edit or undo or reverse the prior user's edits in an attempt to make their own preferred version of a page visible
Inclusionism, deletionism
Eventualism, immediatism
Eventualism
- Value developed in the long term
Immediatism
- Usefulness in the current moment
These reflect the fact that WP is a living, publicly-accessible site
Apr 6: Rethinking Play
Ben Stokes guest lecture
Starting with a vote:
- Are you a "gamer"?
Gee & Hayes
21st c. skills
Assembly Lines, Fordism
- Industrial production
Is education unchanged in a changed world?
Gateway games
Not chocolate covered broccoli
- Bad education, bad entertainment
"Not all games but just some game"
Age of Mythology
- Mythology-based RTS (2002)
- Hard work
- Rushing + tutling strategies
- Matches market forces: games that are too easy/ too hard fail
Cheating "a little bit"
- Working backwards toward not cheating
Gateway to skills
Apr 11 Rethinking community
Guest lecture from Ray
How does "online" change "community"?
Communities:
- Deliberative
- Civic, service
- Social
- Sports
Online communities
- De-emphasizing geography
- Interest driven
- Tech driven
- Culture driven
Race / class?
danah boyd
- Reproduction of divisions in online spaces
- Parents forced, encouraged children to leave MySpace because of aesthetics
Virtual actions, real consequences
Julian Dibbell
- Shared clip about being killed by another human online
- Ultima Online
- Rape in cyberspace, 1993
Griefing, trolling, online vigilantism
"Watching the watchers"
Peter Ludlow
- Urizenus Sklar, founder of Second Life Herald
Looking at the raids and griefing done by Patriotic Nigras (PN) in SL
Vigilantes "as bad as" griefers
- Justice League being banned from various legit groups
Takeaways
Apr 13
Are kids failing schools...
Myths of the digital native
New media literacies
Jump offs
- Waiting for superman
- YouMedia in the Chicago Public Library
Apr 18 - the Public Sphere
Re: posts with Dayna Cunningham on HJ blog
- Takes place shortly after Obama election
- Challenging notions of "post-racial" society
Habermas + public sphere
"The Public Sphere"
- "Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion"
Ideal of public sphere were the coffee shops of the 18th/19th centuries
- But these are very limited spaces
- Who is excluded?
Hush harbor
Open to all who know
- But people are excluded by not knowing
Blurring of traditions, institutions, languages, knowledges
Black church as a network
- Traveling pastors, preachers
Civil rights leaders able to build on the same network
Barber shops as key sites for ...
- Debate
- Discussion
- Information sharing
(Viewing Barack Obama visiting Barber Shop)
The Black press
- Rising up almost immediately after slaves are freed
- Today, these are "endangered publications"
BlackPlanet
- Considerably larger than Black newspapers
- But is this a public sphere?
Driven by same celebrity, entertainment topics as Ebony, BET, etc.
- Could public opinion be formed here?
Obama online
First American politician to effectively deploy online, digital media
But how would he govern with these tools?
Putnam "Bowling alone"
Civic engagement declined as home entertainment risen
- What about online spaces?
- Part public, part private?
Danger of online space:
- More bonding
- Fewer bridging ties?
Myth of the "Twitter revolution"
Reviewing Gladwell argument
But would we call the civil rights movement "the Telephone Revolution"?
Freedom Riders
- Mostly college students from the North
- Came down South without knowing many of the people personally
DREAM Activists
The revolution will not be ___
Gil Scott Heron - the revolution will not be televised
How does this compare or contrast with "social media" today?
"The whole world is watching"
Phrase originates in Chicago 1968
- Network TV coverage of people getting their heads kicked in would radicalize people at home
- Dramatizing an on-going conflict
Recurring phrase
- The whole world may be watching today but not via TV
Green revolution
"Green revolution" in Iran opened the conversation
- Twitter didn't support Farsi
- Was not popular among Twitter users
- But what did matter was that Twitter provided a channel for people outside of Iran to get news that was not available in the MSM
Iranians were vilified in the US for most of the last generation
- Twitter and "green" user icons opened up a new discourse
Egypt, Tunisia, ...
For many young people, the first time they circumvented a government regime, it was to access forbidden pop media
Connections to social movements in the US
- Child holding a "We shall overcome" sign
- "Egypt supports Wisconsin workers"
Jump offs
Apr 20 Rethinking piracy
Global media
Transnational localization
- Sesame Street
- Disney
- Putomayo
Appadurai
- ethnoscapes
- mediascapes
- technoscapes
- finanscapes
- ideoscapes
Interrelated
- "Shuffling the deck" in term of world cultures
Desi pop
Borrowing back and forth
- MTV Desi
- Madonna Ray of Light tour
- Moulin Rouge
- Fandango Bollywood advertisement
Otaku
Pop cosmopolitan
Fansubbing
- Amateur subtitling of media from somewhere else
- Grassroots circulation
- Translator notes
Sites from the American side:
- Crunchyroll
- Dramabeans
- Noveleros
Apr 25 Rethinking originality
What is an author?
Beginning with a discussion of Shakespeare
- Controversial authorship
Homer
- Bard
- Storytelling systems
- Adaptation to audience needs
Authorship in medieval
- Scriptor
- Compilator
- Commentator
- Auctor
Assumption that all forms of authorship are remix, borrowing
M.H. Abrams, Mirror and the lamp
- Pre-Romantics saw authorship as a mirror on culture
- Romantics saw it as a lamp, shining light from the author onto the culture
What is intellectual property?
Laws out of step with contemporary culture
Trademark
- Looking at clip of the trademark world
Copyright
- Exclusive right for a limited time: incentive
- Exception made for fair use
- Does not protect ideas, only their expression
Fair use
- Defense to be used in a court of law
