Two questions I'd like to pose about the Lessig reading are:
1) Is the vast majority of remixing just pure crap and a waste of time? (91-7)
Lessig's answer is both a "yes" and "no," for several reasons, and I'm not quite clear whether he's advocating for both answers.
One of my thoughts is that "yes," a lot of remixes are a waste of time--but not necessarily on the part of amateur creators. I cite J.J. Abram's Star Trek as an example, as well as the Scary Movie parody series; Star Trek alienated many fans, and showed little imagination in the storyline (big bad Reman comes to destroy the Federation with a planet-killing ship--wasn't that the premise for the last failed Star Trek film?), and the Scary Movie franchise is unabashedly hackneyed in its mockery of classic horror films through common-denominator stereotypes (the weed-smoking black man, the virginal starlet, the rapist gay guy, etc.). Both are professional remixes, and both have strong arguments for why they're utter crap.
But there are other remixes, both professional and amateur, that are arguably better than the original. For example, the 1998 film Go featured a remix of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" that seems better to me than the original. Listen to them both, and see if you agree: original and remix. I rarely hear the original except in soundtracks, yet I've listened to the remix at least once a week for the past ten years.
So I tend to think of remixes in the same way I think of "originals": on a case-by-case basis. The best example of this, I think are the "Talent Show" programs that invite people to sing or dance or otherwise try to get famous; American Idol is pure crap to me, but there are some folks out there who practically worship Clay Aiken (and are actually over the age of 13!). And I'm not going to watch the British version, but I have to admit that Susan Boyle is an excellent singer (and that's about as far as I'm willing to discuss her). Of course, what these examples have in common is that they're all working off original content, sung or presented in a new way.
2) Are hybrid economies sustainable?
One of Lessig's examples of a hybrid economy is craigslist. According to Newmark (189), the site is paid for by job and apartment listings in major cities (where a posting fee is required), but anyone who's turned on their television, opened a paper, or had their fingers in the vicinity of the pulse of the mainstream news could tell you, craigslist also runs an "adult services" or "erotic services" category that also charges a posting fee (I guess that could be a job listing, but that's not where I'd go looking for the category if I was interested). Of course, all the negative press has forced craigslist to shut down this revenue source, but that's my point: how many more categories must now charge a posting fee in order to keep the service afloat? I've got no figures for how much income craigslist pulled in from the now-censored category, but I can hazard a guess that it was at least equivalent to the revenue from NYC apartment listings (although I may, in all likelihood, be lowballing that figure, if you'll pardon the pun).
This is just one example, but I've gotta ask: are these hybrid economies going to last, or will they end up as the next Pets.com?
----------
Finally, I think Lessig is right in valuing the creativity of remixes, and in laying out a case for the update of copyright laws. I'm among the generation who view remixes as new creative arts, even though I absolutely hate the autotuner (it makes singers out of the tone-deaf, and it sounds like shit to me. I blame Cher). I don't think that children (and adults) should be criminalized in the way they are now, or that universities should become de facto policemen for the RIAA. Having been an (innocent) victim of WSU's war on file-sharing, I certainly don't see it as the role of 20yo kids in the IT building to enforce copyright law.
[The story, as I'm sure everyone wants to hear it now, is rather uninteresting: in 2004, my university network account was suspended for suspected file-sharing activities due to a large amount of up-bandwidth (uploads to other people) usage, across different countries and even continents. This looks like illegal file-sharing, as one might question why I'd upload 50mb worth of data to someone in Sweden while downloading another 20mb from someone in Toronto. And it was file-sharing: I was participating in the World of Warcraft beta, and downloading the game client using Blizzard's downloader. Blizzard's downloader uses bit torrent technology (file-sharing); the idea is that if I download 50% or more of the client from other people, Blizzard's bandwidth won't get overused, and downloads will be optimal for everyone. However, the IT guys declared it a violation of the university's network use policy, and I had to attend a workshop on copyright law where the university's copyright protection lawyer lectured to me that I was hurting Eminem by downloading music illegally. It's one of the very few occasions where I've gotten in an argument with a university administrator so heated that he called me a "thieving shitrag."]
I think Lessig has some good ideas for reforming copyright law in a way that benefits everyone. However, I don't think it's gonna happen. On the internet, individual people may have power and authority, but in the halls of Congress the RIAA and other interested lobbyists write the law. Even Lessig admitted, in the video we watched Thursday, that going to the government was a failed idea. So the law ain't gonna change in any way that favors remixers, and will likely only go further towards increasing the power of the individual (or, rather, corporate) owner of a copyright. And, IMHO, this will continue until the current system reaches such a crisis that the recording, film, and publishing industries will crumble, and something else will take its place. Lessig, being a lawyer, thinks that it will be replaced by the Creative Commons license. But I think it will be replaced by an ethic of no-copyright (I'm one of the extremists that Lessig mentioned); like marijuana and speeding laws, I think that copyright laws will be largely ignored by amateur culture, though increasingly punished by professional culture (as it implodes). The incentive to publish or create remixes, professionally, will also suffer; why try to sell an amateur remix when it costs $40,000 for licensing rights? So, I see a crisis coming, and I don't see traditional copyright surviving; but I also don't see it being reformed through the law (I think Lessig's main weakness is that he's a law professor, and therefore has far too much faith in the law).
Monday, September 27, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Johndam Johnson-Eilola:
Writing and texts are increasingly being thought of as chunks rather than long, composed works. The ways in which authors connect these chunks are not only becoming more complex, but are also texts themselves. Search engines and hyperlinks are rhetorical compositions in and of themselves because, like traditional texts that incorporate the voices of other authors and texts, they create an amalgam of ideas and thoughts that are presented to the reader in a specific way.
Sorapure, Inglesby, & Yatchisin:
Revolving around the question, "should web sites be used in research papers?", Sorapure et. al. attempt to answer a pressing problem for composition instructors at the dawn of the internet age. While many of the examples Sorapure et. al. present have either disappeared or grown in complexity and sophistication ("Joe's 20 Coolest Sites of the Day" has now become the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report--or Google), the importance of judging a webpage's ethos in academic and any other contexts remains an important lesson for the composition classroom. Sorapure et. al. conclude that, following proper evaluation, web sites can be critical resources for academic research.
Sidler:
In order to teach students how to access the web, they must first recognize the web as a collection of spaces, and picture how to navigate those spaces. Sidler's focus on websites as spaces is especially important due to the disembodied (digital) nature of these spaces; without paper and ink to hold a document together, how can it be recognized as a real thing? Sidler suggests that students should think of the internet as a city, where certain types of sites represent different buildings or neighborhoods; personal web sites represent residential neighborhoods, whereas pornography-related websites might represent the seedier establishments within a city. The need for this kind of metaphor to describe digital places is the same as Sorapure et. al. confronts: the need to establish the ethos of a particular site.
The Big Picture
The obvious connection between these three readings is the need that these scholars feel to situate the Web within more traditional concepts--authors, texts, spaces. Furthermore, the need to establish, identify, analyze, qualify, and pick to death the ethos of any work is common to these readings; in order to accept the Web, at least in the academy, a hierarchy must be established--one that recognizes "Joe's 20 Coolest Sites on the Net" as being on the same publishing tier as The National Enquirer, and ProQuest or Lexis-Nexis as residing in the same gated community as the Princeton University Press. In this case, Weinberger might easily make a snarky comment about the new, digital Dewey Decimal Internet.
But ethos is important (so put your pitchforks and torches down!). The problem is not so much one of sifting through the major sites (to go through all the minor ones would be an endeavor best left to the immortal), letting some within the gates of the academy while shutting others out ("Hey you! Yeah you, Wikipedia! Beat it!"), and thereby forming a taxonomy of the acceptable. The problem is that, as Weinberger points out, there's simply too much information to filter in the third order of order (which, until digital spaces came along, we didn't have to think about or cope with) for any system other than dynamic filtering (tagging). How long can we, as educators, read our students' "Works Cited" pages and simply accept or reject sources based on the ethos of their sites? Surely, if we simply hide behind the "academic sources" gate, we'll be robbing our students of opportunities to use valid sources (primary and secondary) as they pursue their research (Sorapure et. al. 333).
My inclination is to, tenuously, evaluate the research presented by these new sources--as well as how students are using that research. In other words, I want to pursue Johndam Johnson-Eilola's model of approaching texts as chunks, rather than entire works; obviously, this is an old solution to a new problem, as scholars have long since used chunks of ideas and texts in order to form new ideas and texts. I don't think we need a taxonomy or hierarchy of the "reliable websites" in order to evaluate our students' research sources; a definition lifted from Dictionary.com is usually going to be a waste of print (let the student define the word, damn it!), but perhaps a definition of "santorum" from Urban Dictionary might be needed in a paper on how politics and internet culture affect each other (since the definition of "santorum" is quite specific, and is likely not to be found in the OED). IMHO, context is the answer to ethos.
Writing and texts are increasingly being thought of as chunks rather than long, composed works. The ways in which authors connect these chunks are not only becoming more complex, but are also texts themselves. Search engines and hyperlinks are rhetorical compositions in and of themselves because, like traditional texts that incorporate the voices of other authors and texts, they create an amalgam of ideas and thoughts that are presented to the reader in a specific way.
Sorapure, Inglesby, & Yatchisin:
Revolving around the question, "should web sites be used in research papers?", Sorapure et. al. attempt to answer a pressing problem for composition instructors at the dawn of the internet age. While many of the examples Sorapure et. al. present have either disappeared or grown in complexity and sophistication ("Joe's 20 Coolest Sites of the Day" has now become the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report--or Google), the importance of judging a webpage's ethos in academic and any other contexts remains an important lesson for the composition classroom. Sorapure et. al. conclude that, following proper evaluation, web sites can be critical resources for academic research.
Sidler:
In order to teach students how to access the web, they must first recognize the web as a collection of spaces, and picture how to navigate those spaces. Sidler's focus on websites as spaces is especially important due to the disembodied (digital) nature of these spaces; without paper and ink to hold a document together, how can it be recognized as a real thing? Sidler suggests that students should think of the internet as a city, where certain types of sites represent different buildings or neighborhoods; personal web sites represent residential neighborhoods, whereas pornography-related websites might represent the seedier establishments within a city. The need for this kind of metaphor to describe digital places is the same as Sorapure et. al. confronts: the need to establish the ethos of a particular site.
The Big Picture
The obvious connection between these three readings is the need that these scholars feel to situate the Web within more traditional concepts--authors, texts, spaces. Furthermore, the need to establish, identify, analyze, qualify, and pick to death the ethos of any work is common to these readings; in order to accept the Web, at least in the academy, a hierarchy must be established--one that recognizes "Joe's 20 Coolest Sites on the Net" as being on the same publishing tier as The National Enquirer, and ProQuest or Lexis-Nexis as residing in the same gated community as the Princeton University Press. In this case, Weinberger might easily make a snarky comment about the new, digital Dewey Decimal Internet.
But ethos is important (so put your pitchforks and torches down!). The problem is not so much one of sifting through the major sites (to go through all the minor ones would be an endeavor best left to the immortal), letting some within the gates of the academy while shutting others out ("Hey you! Yeah you, Wikipedia! Beat it!"), and thereby forming a taxonomy of the acceptable. The problem is that, as Weinberger points out, there's simply too much information to filter in the third order of order (which, until digital spaces came along, we didn't have to think about or cope with) for any system other than dynamic filtering (tagging). How long can we, as educators, read our students' "Works Cited" pages and simply accept or reject sources based on the ethos of their sites? Surely, if we simply hide behind the "academic sources" gate, we'll be robbing our students of opportunities to use valid sources (primary and secondary) as they pursue their research (Sorapure et. al. 333).
My inclination is to, tenuously, evaluate the research presented by these new sources--as well as how students are using that research. In other words, I want to pursue Johndam Johnson-Eilola's model of approaching texts as chunks, rather than entire works; obviously, this is an old solution to a new problem, as scholars have long since used chunks of ideas and texts in order to form new ideas and texts. I don't think we need a taxonomy or hierarchy of the "reliable websites" in order to evaluate our students' research sources; a definition lifted from Dictionary.com is usually going to be a waste of print (let the student define the word, damn it!), but perhaps a definition of "santorum" from Urban Dictionary might be needed in a paper on how politics and internet culture affect each other (since the definition of "santorum" is quite specific, and is likely not to be found in the OED). IMHO, context is the answer to ethos.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Information Monopolies, Panopticism, and Utter Nonsense
Note: I've been working on this prompt all weekend, and I'm still not finished with it. In fact, it's likely I might use this as the basis for a paper. Therefore, if my ideas seem to lack a certain finality, it's because I'm not settled on any of this, and what follows is only a sketch of my ideas for using Foucault's Panopticism in some published fashion. Also, some of you may recognize some of these ideas from previous conversations--I've been mulling them over for about two years now.
Foucault's allegory of the panopticon as a system of control both problematizes and illuminates issues in Ohmann's "Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capitalism." In one fashion (certainly the dominant interpretation I've come to understand), panopticism demonstrates how technology can serve to extend and reinforce the values, beliefs, and systems of power of a culture (Ohmann 26, Foucault "Eye of Power" 148-150). As Ohmann observes, "literacy is an activity of social groups, and a necessary feature of some kinds of social organization. Like every other human activity or product, it embeds social relations within it;" however, Ohmann also recognizes that technology and literacy "[are] malleable; [they do] have liberatory potential" (29-30). While panopticism (as an ideological system of control) is focused in Foucault on surveillance and the application of power, Ohmann's argument can still be applied: in short, panopticism can be just as much a liberatory system as it is a disciplinary system; panopticism can be used to further democratic goals and extend power to the historically disenfranchised.
I prefer to distinguish these two systems of control as tyrannical panopticism, where a culture of surveillance serves the traditional or hegemonic interests of those in power, and democratic panopticism, where a culture of surveillance instead serves the interests of minorities and those without power. The former is often regarded as altogether a bad thing (and relatively unpopular), especially in the humanities, while the latter is enjoying a surge of popularity and is often thought to be a good thing, even when it goes largely unrecognized. For example, I enjoy watching Jon Stewart every night on the Daily Show, where the first segment of the show usually consists of video clips that expose a lie or contradiction by forces in power; I equally enjoy Stephen Colbert's occasional spotlighting of police abuse of the Taser (a supposedly nonlethal technology that allows police to subdue suspects with a 22 volt burst of electricity). Both of these examples can be attributed to democratic panopticism, where the focus of surveillance is on the elite and powerful and serves the interests of everyday citizens.
To illustrate these examples further, go to YouTube and search for both of these terms: "police abuse" and "fox news caught lying" (other search strings come to mind, but for the sake of simplicity I'll stick to these). The "caught on camera" phenomenon has already had an impact on the way police respond to crimes in public (by means of an awareness that others may see their actions replayed on video), and while twenty years ago it was possible to confiscate the lone cameraman filming acts of repression or abuse, the widespread availability of recording (in high definition!) virtually any event and computer software that can edit video clips of mainstream news events to highlight contradictions makes repression of this sort of democratic panopticism difficult at best (example: Iran's elections and subsequent protests in 2009).
The technological capability to record video, edit video clips, and publish to the world without traditional means of filtration (news editors, lawyers, censors, bureaucrats and police, etc.) allows everyone a chance to become the guard in the panopticon. Whereas surveillance cameras, news cameras, and other means of surveillance that Western society has grudgingly become accustomed to have traditionally served the interests of governments and powerful organizations, democratic panopticism can shift the power of surveillance into the hands of the people, therefore constituting one of Ohmann's literacies of liberation.
Foucault's allegory of the panopticon as a system of control both problematizes and illuminates issues in Ohmann's "Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capitalism." In one fashion (certainly the dominant interpretation I've come to understand), panopticism demonstrates how technology can serve to extend and reinforce the values, beliefs, and systems of power of a culture (Ohmann 26, Foucault "Eye of Power" 148-150). As Ohmann observes, "literacy is an activity of social groups, and a necessary feature of some kinds of social organization. Like every other human activity or product, it embeds social relations within it;" however, Ohmann also recognizes that technology and literacy "[are] malleable; [they do] have liberatory potential" (29-30). While panopticism (as an ideological system of control) is focused in Foucault on surveillance and the application of power, Ohmann's argument can still be applied: in short, panopticism can be just as much a liberatory system as it is a disciplinary system; panopticism can be used to further democratic goals and extend power to the historically disenfranchised.
I prefer to distinguish these two systems of control as tyrannical panopticism, where a culture of surveillance serves the traditional or hegemonic interests of those in power, and democratic panopticism, where a culture of surveillance instead serves the interests of minorities and those without power. The former is often regarded as altogether a bad thing (and relatively unpopular), especially in the humanities, while the latter is enjoying a surge of popularity and is often thought to be a good thing, even when it goes largely unrecognized. For example, I enjoy watching Jon Stewart every night on the Daily Show, where the first segment of the show usually consists of video clips that expose a lie or contradiction by forces in power; I equally enjoy Stephen Colbert's occasional spotlighting of police abuse of the Taser (a supposedly nonlethal technology that allows police to subdue suspects with a 22 volt burst of electricity). Both of these examples can be attributed to democratic panopticism, where the focus of surveillance is on the elite and powerful and serves the interests of everyday citizens.
To illustrate these examples further, go to YouTube and search for both of these terms: "police abuse" and "fox news caught lying" (other search strings come to mind, but for the sake of simplicity I'll stick to these). The "caught on camera" phenomenon has already had an impact on the way police respond to crimes in public (by means of an awareness that others may see their actions replayed on video), and while twenty years ago it was possible to confiscate the lone cameraman filming acts of repression or abuse, the widespread availability of recording (in high definition!) virtually any event and computer software that can edit video clips of mainstream news events to highlight contradictions makes repression of this sort of democratic panopticism difficult at best (example: Iran's elections and subsequent protests in 2009).
The technological capability to record video, edit video clips, and publish to the world without traditional means of filtration (news editors, lawyers, censors, bureaucrats and police, etc.) allows everyone a chance to become the guard in the panopticon. Whereas surveillance cameras, news cameras, and other means of surveillance that Western society has grudgingly become accustomed to have traditionally served the interests of governments and powerful organizations, democratic panopticism can shift the power of surveillance into the hands of the people, therefore constituting one of Ohmann's literacies of liberation.
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