Hardly a Dying Art: Analyzing Print News in the Unconventional Form of Creative Non-Fiction Books, Katherine Aberbach
While newspaper journalism has seen better days, not every form of print news is struggling. In fact, creative nonfiction books are experiencing a tremendous resurgence in popularity and prestige, and have recently assumed a new identity as a powerful medium of communication. This paper argues for increased scholarly attention to book-based journalism. By reviewing the history of socially minded and creatively written American journalism and literature, I illustrate the various links between journalism and creative nonfiction. I conduct a close reading and analysis of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed to demonstrate the ways in which creative nonfiction fulfills popular expectations of “news.”
Networked Art: Displaced Commentaries, Multiple Artifices and Many Authors? Lanfranco Aceti
The cultural and critical impact of new technologies has altered the perception of authorship and the modalities used to create artistic products that reflect contemporary social activities. The paper will analyze how these new forms of contemporary artistic creations transcend both media and historical perceptions of authorship, as in the art practice of 0100101110101101.org and The Critical Art Ensemble. These new media based artistic practices generate the frameworks for experiences of artworks - virtual and real - that absolve both the function of social activism and critical commentary of contemporary society.
Where is the Auteur? Exotopia Revisited: The Author Inside, Outside and Inside Out, Lily Alexander
This paper will explore the theoretical debates in narrative theory on the relationships between the author and the fictional worlds. This is an issue very relevant to literature, film, and new media practices (games and interactive fiction, for example). Exotopia, a term in narrative theory attributed to Bakhtin means that the author is placed firmly and unequivocally outside of the text. Bakhtin’s original term, however, was misunderstood. This misinterpretation gave birth to confusion and limitations in understanding new trends and developing experimental practices. I will also discuss what other renowned theorists and authors/directors have to say on the subject. The paper will explore such issues as "the author inside his fictional world," the "protagonist as an author," and discuss a participant of the game or interactive narrative as an authority figure in the narrative decision-making process.
Blogs as Relational Spaces for Developing Civic Literacies, Mike Ananny
When bloggers blog, they appropriate technologies, practice communication rituals and maintain social relationships in ways that reflect their personal views on the roles and responsibilities of public communicators. To evaluate this, I conducted semi-structured interviews with three bloggers, finding four broad patterns in how they practiced and talked about their blogging: 1) they see the growth of new media expertise as tightly linked to the development of critical commentary skills and healthy social relationships; 2) they see themselves as creators and communicators of public information goods; 3) they view their blogs as simultaneous depictions of personal identity, social position and public professionalism; and 4) they closely monitor how others are represented in their blogs. The contention here is that such concerns are not only features of personal publishing but, more broadly, of contemporary civic literacy.
Ownership in the Digital Age: A Sociological Approach, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Fabio Giglietto, Luca Rossi
The modern legal construction of intellectual property is mainly based on the assumption that intellectual products have the same status as things and must be protected as the private property protects real goods: giving a sole and despotic dominion over them. We will address this issue from a sociological point of view using social systems theory as a theoretical framework. Under this perspective the function of private property is mainly to avoid conflicts in the society (thus making easy the reproduction of communication) making a larger number of people accept the fact that a smaller group holds scarce resources. Today this perspective collapse under the reality of the new media practices.
Reading Lost as Transmedia Narrative, Ivan Askwith
Critics and audiences tend to agree that Lost represents one of the most demanding, complex dramatic narratives ever to air on television. However, Lost is also breaking new ground in transmedia storytelling, by distributing relevant narrative content across a range of media platforms. This paper will consider the combination of economic and creative motives involved in the production of Lost's extensions, including The Lost Experience ARG, the novel Bad Twin, and the forthcoming Lost mobisodes and video game. This paper will explore several questions raised by the proliferation of narrative extensions surrounding Lost, with particular emphasis on how narrative extensions should be understood in relation to the show's core narrative.
Wanna Headbang in San Andreas?: Gaming and Music Industry Negotiations in the 1990s, Ben Aslinger
While music licensing for film became a critical part of the blockbuster in the late 1970s, the emergence of video game music licensing in the 1990s hit a snag when negotiations between music labels, music publishers, artists, and video game publishers and distributors broke down over issues such as licensing rates, royalties, and content. Drawing on trade press coverage, entertainment law cases, and law review journal articles debating licensing schemas in the 1990s, this paper maps out the major anxieties invoked with the increasing incorporation of music into games. Why did publishers such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Konami develop interests in music licensing? I argue efforts to include popular music reflect industrial desires to articulate discourses of game "quality" and to target new demographics. I also argue that the music industry's desire to exploit new methods of promotion ran up against the industry's ambivalence regarding new media technologies of distribution (such as MP3s and sites such as Napster), creating roadblocks in these 1990s moves towards convergence.
Sketching a Theory of New Media: The Case of Cybermohalla from India, Sanjay Asthana
Cybermohalla (Cyber-Neighborhood) is an experimental project designed to enable democratic access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) among poor youngsters, mostly school dropouts. Working at media labs, the participants write, draw and sketch a range of verbal and visual narratives and texts published as books, diaries, magazines, and wallpaper that become available in print as well as digitized formats. These young people from the poor neighborhoods of Delhi explore new media technologies not only for self-expression and informal learning, but also as interventions into the cultural politics of the city. Although the Internet and the World Wide Web are increasingly becoming a staging “space” for activism and protests involving a range of social actors, they mostly resemble a benign de-materialized realm of free floating information. In the hands of the youngsters from Cybermohalla, however, the new media forms and narratives acquire an immediacy and materiality that is worth exploring.
Sci-Fi Narrations Become Real: Dematerialized and Mechanized Body in the Real Life, Sule Atilgan
This article examines emerging mechanical replica beauty of the human body. “Cyborg” the fictitious machine-human hybrid imaginary hero/heroin has become real in our century. This postmodern creature is thye result of the collaboration between science fiction narrations and medical technology and art: machine aesthetics. Community’s dependence on the machine is increasing day to day. Consequently the street is full of people that appear like cyberpunk heroes; dressed like cyberpunk movie fashion. Science fiction narrative and vision, fantasies from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Kubric’s AI about human and machine, organic and inorganic combinations become real. A machine aesthetics has developed, too, begining in the Industrial Revolution.
DIY Copyright Reform: How to Liberate Fair Use for Tomorrow's Media Literacy, Pat
Aufderheide, Renee Hobbs
What is fair use in a participatory era? Media literacy teachers are on the front lines of this challenge, as they use popular culture in the classroom and begin to move into online environments, games and social networking. This panel showcases preliminary results of research on copyright practices for media literacy education. Attendees will participate in an open session to extend the map of current problems and practices, contributing to the building of a code of practices that can liberate fair use for far broader media literacy practices than ever before.
Authorship in Interactive Media: Collaboration, Interaction, and User-Generated Content in the Games Industry, Alec Austin
Where is authorship located in a computer game? The easy answer would be to attribute authorship to a single, visionary auteur or to the team of artists, designers, and programmers that took part in its creation, but player choice is also significant in shaping the player’s experience of the game. In addition, the spread of tools that allow end users to modify existing game content further blurs the line between audiences and content producers. This paper will trace the history and theory surrounding ideas of auteurship and delve into the role of authorship and user-generated content in both electronic and tabletop games (such as Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering). By examining how game designers create frameworks to shape their audience’s experience, and how that audience interacts with, interprets, and distorts those frameworks, it will be demonstrated that the recent trend towards user-generated content is merely the newest manifestation of a long history of co-creation between game designers and their audience.
Textual Poaching of Digital Texts: Hacking and Griefing as Acts that Create Performative Narratives in Second Life, Burcu Bakioglu
The open-source environment provided by Second Life, which allows the metaverse to be built by its users, not only attracts a considerable amount of hackers who are able to appropriate and poach the textual space by creating hacks that make the world behave in unforeseen ways, but also provides an environment ripe for second-hand textual poaching in which these legitimate hacks are appropriated for other purposes such as griefing (activities that make the game less enjoyable for other residents). I will argue that the activities of these groups become performative acts and, moreover, these activities instigate other acts that are equally performative, such as generating narratives created by other residents who actively participate in blogs and forums to discuss these events.
Digital Marionettes – Training with Technology, J.A. Ball, Matthew Gray
As Thomas S. Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, new paradigms of knowledge and community require novel exemplars. In this paper, we offer the work of Robert Lepage’s French-Canadian production company Ex Machina as just such a model for how academic training institutions in the arts should be co-evolving. As Lepage describes Ex Machina, it is a “multidisciplinary company bringing together actors, writers, set designers, technicians, opera singers, puppeteers, computer graphic designers, video artists, film producers and musicians.” Specifically, we offer a morphology of this interdisciplinary creative process in the making of The Far Side of the Moon (2003), a multi-media theatre piece that was refashioned into film of the same name. We conclude our paper by deriving strategies for disciplinary change on the basis of Ex Machina’s media-centric practices.
Reconfiguring Labour Relations in Participatory Culture Networks: Linking Professional Production with User-led Innovation, John Banks
New and challenging modes of labour relations, which are hybrid and radically distributed collectives of amateur and professional, expert and non-expert knowledge and creative practices, emerge from the increasing reliance of the creative industries on user-led innovation and content creation. I consider the implications and challenges of this hybrid labouring subject for participatory culture networks. Can a reworking of labour theory assist us to grapple with the renegotiations of cultural authority and expertise that the collaborations between market and non-market modes of production raise? Do these emerging labour relations unsettle existing institutional and professional authority? The paper draws on work by Yochai Benkler, Henry Jenkins and Andrew Ross, and discusses examples from the games industry, to consider and unpack these challenging questions.
Digital Self-Fashioning: Creativity, HCI, and Fashion Design in Second Life, Jeffrey Bardzell
Discussions of online identity often center on the psychological or the sociological; from these perspectives, virtual identity emerges as an act of psychological self-care (e.g., Turkle, 1995), as a discursive practice of stereotyping (e.g., Nakamura, 2002), or as a position within a social ecology (e.g., Wenger, 1998). Yet none of these approaches leaves much room for the significance of computer interfaces in the emergence of virtual identity. In a world such as Second Life, its fashion--both its designed artifacts and and their arrangement on our virtual bodies--is mediated by multimedia authoring. This study is a new stage of an ongoing research project (e.g., Bardzell, 2007) on amateur multimedia, creativity, and authoring interfaces, and it offers a systematic, bottom-up study of how Second Life's fashion authoring tools shape the creativity of its fashion designers; and through them, our selves are subtly yet profoundly encouraged to comply.
Five Theses about Creative Production in the Digital Age, Fred Benenson, Peter B. Kaufman
In The Success of Open Source, Steven Weber encouraged his readers to imagine: What would a broader vision of an open source political economy really look like? In this paper, we analyze software, courseware, and publishing to put forward five theses on how media production is, and will be, significantly influenced by the collaborative trends that already have produced GNU/ Linux, Apache, and Firefox. The paper opens by examining FOSS (free, open source software) and the legal, technological, and financial regimes governing its growth today. The paper then analyzes experiments from Wikipedia to Creative Commons to PLoS and Sakai. The paper then describes additional lessons learned from the social production memes at such popular institutions as YouTube and MySpace.
Image, Network, Narrative: Creative Dispersion in the Novel of Digital Culture, Paul Benzon
This paper addresses the dynamics of digital creativity outside of the bounds of aesthetic production as it is traditionally understood, looking instead to the information networks that distribute the material of digital culture. In order to theorize this analytical shift, I examine the ways in which several recent novels imagine the aesthetics and politics of creation and circulation on the World Wide Web. My discussion focuses on William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) and Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004), two texts that explore how digital information activates dispersed, collaborative publics of production and reception.
Deferred Space, or Spacing (Print Media?) and Deferred Times, or Timing (Digital Media?): Modes of Deferral and Movement in Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, Jamie Bianco
John Cayley observes that when digital and print texts are considered, the critical tendency is to produce analogic similitude across media by means of visual comparison: “we still… see and feel and hear the ‘leaves’ using technologies of inscription… temporal complexities represented to us as content while formally virtualized and deferred by writing.” This deferral in the writing is spatial and fundamentally outside of the capacity of coded textualities to defer temporality/ies of writing or to produce “literal time.” What is “literal time” wherein “literal” references reading etymologically? I will consider Danielewski’s most recent novel, Only Revolutions – which Danielewski claims “cannot exist online” – as well as the online marketing site to articulate the modalities of deferral as differential movement and the differential construction of motion across digital media and print text.
A Look at Crudeoils, Wafaa Bilal, Shawn Lawson
This paper will examine the collaborative group Crudeoils with respect to their creative and production process, purposeful reference and appropriation of historical masterpieces, and combination of art and technology in the current visual culture. Crudeoils work combines the familiar act of viewing with a language of interactivity. This fusion extends the meaning of original masterpieces by incorporating current day issues. This triggers a viewer’s imagination and opens new interpretations. Time becomes compressed, as the viewer becomes part of a living historical artwork in present day. Crudeoils is a five-year ongoing collaboration between an Iraqi videographer/ photographer and an American digital media programmer. Crudeoils' works to date are the "Mona Lisa,” "A Bar at the Folies Bergen," and "One Chair.” A new work, "The Death of Sardanapolis,” is forthcoming.
"You shoot, I shoot": Artistic Research and Media Production, Mats Bjorkin
My presentation is part of an ongoing project on ways of making audiovisual material (documentaries, video art, etc) into self-reflective analytical tools for understanding places and events. My point of departure is the events in Gothenburg, Sweden, in June 2001 when the police shot at anti-globalization activists. The event was filmed by many people, and these films were used by the police and TV journalists attempting to argue for their views of what happened. I my presentation, I will present the general structure of the project and show examples of images and texts in a room where the viewer/user can combine audiovisual and written material with theoretical reflections.
Medieval Fan Fiction: the Manipulation of Continuity, Heather Blatt
Historians of fan fiction often cite the fifteenth-century author John Lydgate as the earliest English writer of fan fiction for his composition of the Siege of Thebes, nominally a sequel to the Canterbury Tales, although others do pre-date him. My paper suggests some approaches for considering contemporary fan works through examining the sequels and continuations of John But, John Lydgate, and the anonymous author of a prologue to a popular story of the foundation of Britain, the Brut. In considering the ways in which these authors defined themselves and their writing against the originary works to which they responded, and how they and their contemporaries conceived of media interactivity, I further situate their responses within the medieval tradition of literary creation in which originality was not as highly valued as were skilled appropriation and allusion.
The Production of Value in Media Industries, Goran Bolin
To say that the media have become commercialized has become a standard opening for debates on the changes within the media over the past few decades, not least concerning changes in the European media landscape. Indeed, the media in Europe have seen dramatic changes, some of which have to do with the increased competition between public service and commercial broadcast media (print and music media have long been organized commercially.) However, economic value is but one of the value forms produced within the media and cultural industries, and it might be worthwhile to analyze the conditions for the production of other kinds of value (political, social, cultural, etc.). In this paper, I will discuss a model for analyzing the production of different kinds of value within media and cultural industries based in the field theory outlined by Pierre Bourdieu.
Positive Copyright and Copyleft Licenses: How to Make a Marriage Work
Maurizio Borghi, Maria Lilla Montagnani
Traditional copyright is changing due to the rise of new communication technologies such as Internet and digital tools. The private sector seeks to counterbalance this phenomenon by adopting licenses that “expand” the public domain, such as Creative Commons and GPL licenses. The increasing world-wide shift towards copyleft licensing seeks to transform copyright law into a tool flexible enough to serve authors’ various purposes. This paper seeks to explore an adjustment that will permit authors to take advantage of all the new means of commercial exploitation and non-commercial dissemination of their works offered by Internet. Such an adjustment aims also at realigning positive and normative copyright by encompassing copyleft licensing within the current copyright framework.
Leave the People to their Devices?: Utopian and Dystopian Participatory Media Ecologies from Brecht to Scanner, Martin Boyden
This talk advances readings of Bertolt Brecht's "The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication" as an important precursor to modern theories of participatory media. This talk looks at the work Brecht produced in light of his theory, "Lindbergh's Flight," and a survey of post-WWII works that speak to that Brechtian ideal: John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio;" Ferdinand Kriwet's Hörspiels, particularly "Apollo America;" Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire; and the work of Robin Rimbaud, a.k.a. Scanner. While an echo of what's been theorized as a sort of post-human communion in this survey is acknowledged, this talk is more interested in the anxiety these works pose to the individual subject.
Fair Use? Using Copyrighted Materials in Contemporary Art, Leonie Bradbury, Liz Nofziger, Brenda Reddix Smalls, Winnie Wong
In response to the daily barrage of visual imagery many contemporary artists readily sample, copy and download trademarked content, well-known commercial symbols, and/or copyrighted imagery. Much of it finds its way into cutting edge artwork, making an instant connection with collectors, curators and audiences, but what are the legal, ethical and cultural implications of the unauthorized use of this material? An intellectual property attorney, art historian, artist and exhibit curator will present their points of view and discuss the “fair use” of protected content within the context of contemporary art. Catalogs: Plastic Princess Barbie, A New Order
Virtual Ownership, Brent C.J. Britton
What forms of intellectual property protection are useful or viable in wholly virtual worlds such as Second Life? Should virtual worlds attempt to emulate real-world forms of IP? Do the same theories of ownership apply? Certain IP forms -- such as trade dress -- would appear to translate easily to virtual worlds, while others, such as perhaps patents, may not. This paper considered various possibilities for establishing and maintaining systems of IP ownership rights in virtual worlds.
Produsage, Generation C, and their Effects on the Democratic Process, Axel Bruns
Long before Time recognised them as ‘person of the year’ for 2006, Trendwatching.com described “Generation C” (2005) as interested more in open collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and information than in personal advancement. Generation C drives phenomena from filesharing through blogging to Wikipedia, undermining industrial-age modes of production, distribution, and consumption and replacing them with the hybrid model of produsage (Bruns 2006), where users are producers and usage is almost always already inherently productive in its own right. This paper will outline the processes and implications of a paradigm shift from industrial production to informational produsage, with a particular focus on its potential effects on the democratic process.
Vernacular Photography 2.0: Flickr, Aesthetics and the Relations of Cultural Production, Jean Burgess
The photo-sharing network Flickr is one of the better-known examples of the participatory turn in web business models commonly referred to as ‘Web 2.0.’ This paper demonstrates that Flickr can be viewed as the site of a vernacular ‘relational aesthetics,’ focused not on discrete art objects, but on the modes of social connection that are both made possible by and flow through images within the network. At the same time, those social connections are used to collaboratively construct, negotiate and learn visual aesthetics and techniques. Rather than representing a revolutionary takeover of photography by untrained amateurs, Flickr is a highly heterogeneous ‘architecture of participation’ where the social worlds, technologies and aesthetics of ‘professional’ photography, art and everyday life collide, compete and coexist to produce new forms of intensely social and playful cultural production.
Borrowing Types: Visualising Resistance in Brian Friels' The Home Place and Haddon and Brownes' Ethnography of the Aran Islands, Anne Burke
This paper explores the tension between creative freedom and historical knowledge in Brian Friel's contemporary reworking of the practice of anthropology in late 19th century Ireland. While Friel's critique functions broadly as a form of poetic redress for the impositions of colonial rule, his implication of the anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon points to the specific instance of his ethnographic study of the Aran Islands in 1892, which applied the techniques of anthropometry to fieldwork for the first time in Ireland. This paper uses a close analysis of Haddons photographs to provide an alternative reading of Friel's fictionalised account of the attempt to subject the Irish to anthropometric measuring.
Intense Intertextuality: Derivative Works in Context, Kristina Busse
Mainstream media and self-reflexive fan discourses often conflate amateur fan writing with the professional version of derivative works, which range from mythological adaptations like the Iliad to postmodern rewrites like The Hours. Such conflation often views audience-authored creativity as training wheels, as a stepping stone to becoming a commercial writer. Even as media convergence erodes the dichotomy between fan and professional, fan fiction’s raison d’être must be understood on its own terms, as a very personal—if not intimate—textual engagement. Looking at two case studies (the recent debates surrounding fannish appropriation of fan texts and the problematic responses to the nomination of a fan story for a professional award), I want to suggest a difference in affect between different modes of sampling and remixing textual materials.
Customer Feedback 2.0, Justin Callaway
What happens when a customer seizes upon a uniquely bad consumer experience to exact an intentional negative marketing campaign? If the campaign successfully highlights a universal consumer problem, can the customer exploit the subscriber base into a latent demographic? This is a first-person, empirical case study that tests the vulnerability of brands in the age of user-generated video content. www.feelingcingular.com
Entre Ville: This City Between Us, J.R. Carpenter
In 2006, I was commissioned to create a web art project in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montreal. It was an honour and a challenge for me, as an English-speaking immigrant to Montreal, to collate the cacophony of voices and contradictory histories of my community. The resulting work, Entre Ville, offers a glimpse into my neighbourhood’s jumbled intimacy of back balconies, yards and alleyways. Entre means between. Entre Ville is a walk through an interior city. Though Montreal is well known for its language issues, I tried to present Entre Ville in a neighbourhood vernacular, where cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines criss-cross the alleyway one sentence at a time.
From Media Politics to Networked Politics: The Internet and the Political Process, Manuel Castells, Araba Sey
This paper investigates the emerging interaction between people and democracy in the process of political representation in the new form of networked public space constituted by the Internet, focusing on experiences in the UK and the US, including the Dean campaign. It explores the tension between genuine democratic uses of the internet and uses that are more instrumental and manipulative, arguing that the significant differences in possible outcomes may come down to the internet's uses and its users, and not just the technology itself.
Dawn of the New Listener: Glenn Gould’s “Prospects of Recording” Revisited, Michael Century
During the 1960s, Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist and sound artist, anticipated today’s participatory media culture in several articles on the prospects of sound recording, and in experimental compositions. In his radio documentaries, Gould used then-available technologies of mixing and splicing to create fictive conversations. This paper suggests that in asking listeners to fuse simultaneously active, but distinct verbal streams, Gould put forward an artistic foreshadowing of the kind of multiplicity of identity that now characterizes the phenomenological experience of network culture.
Canon vs. "Fanon": Folksonomies of Culture, Keidra Chaney, Raizel Liebler
There is an often unacknowledged symbiotic relationship between creators and owners of mass media and fan communities inspired by their work. Due to the interactive nature of participatory fan communities, both authors and fans are active agents in collectively determining the validity of the "official" story. This paper will explore the concept of pop culture canon: the official storylines and back stories invented by mass media creators, and fanon: ideas that fan communities have decided are part of the accepted storyline or character interpretation. We propose the idea that fanon is an example of folksonomy, a user-generated classification or "tag"; an aggregation of content emerging through bottom-up consensus by the public/fan communities. We will also discuss the implications of fanon folksonomy for the future of popular culture.
Playing the Margins: MMOs, Feminisms, and Counterpublic Spheres, Shira Chess
In the 19th century, by relaying ideas in sewing circles and other alternative meeting spaces, women were able to not only share ideas, but also use these marginal spaces as a means of forming communities that more specifically met their needs. Now, emerging Internet technologies create similar potential for feminine communities. In this paper, I examine a particularly matriarchal guild in the MMO World of Warcraft. This guild, which is comprised largely of adults over the age of 30 (many of them female) creates a counterpublic sphere that is in many ways holds the same community potential as the feminist counterpublics of the 19th century.
The Politics of Search: Archival Accountability in Aboriginal Australia, Kimberly Christen
In his book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, John Battelle chronicles the cultural transformations ushered in by the seemingly mundane practice of “search.” How does one account for divergent knowledge systems within the dynamics of search? And what difference do they make to a more complex understanding of the parameters of “search”? Based on 10 years of collaborative work with Warumungu community members, this paper examines the production of an indigenous community digital archive and its internal search functionality as a challenge to the dominant narratives of openness and accessibility afforded by a Google-centric view.
Shifting Typographic Conventions: Technology, Perception, and Originality, Laurie Churchman
The Wagner School of Sign Art, founded in 1910 by Charles Wagner, taught hand lettering techniques for signs including boats, store windows, show cards, and displays. Today, Wagner would be amazed by both the complete change in lettering from a hand process to a digital process and the vast number of type styles available. By presenting a history of graphics for boat names, I will compare and contrast the traditional method with that of Web-based boat graphics companies. For boat letterers, technology has opened new opportunities for business and creativity while challenging their skills in a competitive world ranging from do-it-yourselfers to professional designers.
Lowering the Stakes: Toward a Model of Effective Copyright Dispute Resolution, Anthony Ciolli
While lawsuits against both technological innovators and individual file sharers have put a spotlight on the inadequacies of traditional federal litigation as a method of resolving copyright infringement disputes, such problems are not unique to the digital environment. Rather than crafting potential solutions that focus exclusively on digital infringement, policymakers should consider reforming the underlying problems that have contributed to the current situation. The federal government could best accomplish this goal of facilitating an inexpensive, fair, and humane method of copyright enforcement by creating a federal small claims court that would allow litigants to resolve copyright infringement disputes equitably and efficiently.
“We Are Controlling Transmission”: Female Video Editors and the Literary Music Video, Francesca Coppa
With the explosion of YouTube and other venues for user-generated content, many subcultural forms of filmmaking are becoming visible. Unlike machinima's emphasis on original storytelling, or anime vidding’s emphasis on spectacle, live-action vidding is primarily interpretive, a kind of visual argument with the source. Early vidding was embedded in the overwhelmingly female slash community, which had honed a broadly-applied, homoerotic reading strategy. With its paradigm of female editors controlling images of largely male subjects, live-action vidding reverses the traditional scopophilia of the cinema, not only in turning the gaze toward the male body, but by compelling the spectator to see what the vidder wishes them to see.
Digital Insurgency, Jay Critchley
The deployment of millions of disenfranchised citizens onto the Internet is challenging the parallel concentration of media ownership. This panel will examine the digital frontier for artists, musicians and other creative folk and what it means legally, culturally, politically and critically, including innovative ways of sharing -- copy left, reciprocal licenses, Creative Commons. What kinds of digital fuels are being extracted from the masses and the infinite amount of digitally homeless material available for high and low art and kitsch, and what does this mean in the long haul? How do artists justify this “borrowing”? How does this practice relate to art history and to the pre-digital appropriations of Duchamps, Warhol and others? What is commercial and what is non-commercial work?
Tube it Up! Giuliana Cucinelli, Photi Sotiropolous
With the arrival of YouTube in a blossoming participatory culture, amateur producers and active viewers have become the thriving force of new media outlets. The YouTube culture has redefined how media texts are shared, viewed, exchanged and created by shifting the roles of producers, consumers and learners alike in our postmodern condition. Within YouTube's interwoven and mediated landscape, a pedagogical playground is flourishing where a new generation of avid computer users are reappropriating the medium and affixing their own imprint on a slew of previously established media codes and conventions. Subscribers, contributors and onlookers of YouTube are creating a learning community where meanings circulate unfettered by tradition. But what is being taught and learned? We have identified a set of ten principal lessons about media production, some explicit, but most implicit, that emerge from an overview of 300 subscriber produced videos over a 30 day period.
Empowered Poachers or Puppets of IP?: The Emerging Identity Conflicts of Amateur Cultural Production in a Digital Age, Brady Curlew
This presentation aims to elucidate and interrogate the participant identities and subject positions emerging from the culture of modification. I will focus on two central identity positions, the empowered poacher and the intellectual property puppet: the first, it is theorized, is born when creative use and play (during amateur cultural production like computer game modding) is seen as empowering users and creating the potential for pop culture to be a political site of struggle via the appropriation and alteration of corporate properties. Conversely, the same modification activities have also been theorized as creating the IP Puppet, a member of the increasingly exploited consumer base that helps create or contribute to content they aren’t entitled to own or be remunerated for, and which usually gets “sold” back to them.
D’etournement as Civil Disobedience: Mash-ups, Remixes and the Recontextualization of Sound and Images as Political Statements, James Cypher
D'etournement is French for diversion, displacement, the subversion, devaluation and re-use of present and past cultural production, destroying its message while hijacking its impact. Modern trends in subvertising, culture jamming and hacktivism using mash-ups and remixes parallel methods used in the 1930s Avant-Garde and 1960s Pop Art and Situationalist movements. In the digital age, such manipulations are viral, enjoying an environment where they replicate, change and re-replicate like no other time in history. When an artist uses appropriated samples of music or images from popular culture to make social commentary or political statements, is it protected free speech when it violates trademark and copyright laws?
On the Entertainment Technology Center Press , Drew Davidson, Rob Katz, Thinh Nguyen, Charles Palmer
This spring, the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is starting an open source multi-media press, ETC Press. The Press plans to accept submissions and publish work in a variety of media (textual, electronic, digital, etc.). All publications will be released under one of two Creative Commons licenses. ETC Press is partnering with Lulu.com to enable instantaneous multiple versions of publications, create cross-media projects and foster a community of collaborative authorship and dialogue. The panel members from the ETC, Lulu.com and Creative Commons will cover the conceptual, cultural and technical ideas behind the inception of ETC Press, demo the most recent version of the website, and discuss future possibilities.
Australian Artists and Appropriation, Hugh Davies
For the last decade a group of Australian sculptors have been employing aesthetic and artifacts from renowned popular culture in their works. Scrutinizing artistic canons through lenses of sci-fi cinema and museum aesthetics, each of these artists produces miniatures and models in which time, context and cultural hierarchy collapse. Their use of these cultural artifacts is not merely homage, but an adept language accessible to a broader audience. I would like to undertake a discussion of the appropriation of popular culture in the work of Australian artists and the poetics of fandom and politics of culture as played out in the creation, interpretation and popularity of these works. Artists discussed will include Alasdair Macintyre, Ricky Swallow, and me.
New Epistemologies? Ways of Knowing in a Digital Culture, Suzanne de Castell, Jennifer Jenson
Digital media production, that is the construction of digital artifacts like movies, websites, blogs, and MySpace accounts remain strangely sidelined to traditional accountability structures in education, such as essay-writing and the taking of tests. Although digital media production is widely viewed as a multi-literate practice, this perception and awareness has done little to shake loose modernist notions of what counts as knowledge. This paper returns to the earlier works of Jean Françios Lyotard on the changing nature of knowledge under conditions of computerization and details the forms and kinds of knowledge that are represented through the production of blogs, websites, mods, music remixing, video production, and so forth.
The Ben Hur Court Case, Peter Decherney
The film industry was, in a way, the file-sharing network of the early 20th century, largely a distributor of unauthorized productions of Broadway plays and popular novels. My paper will examine the famous 1911 Supreme Court case about the film adaptation of Ben Hur that put a stop to this practice. First, the decision explained in legal terms that film had a visual language analogous to written language and was therefore responsible for its copying of plays and books. Second, the decision accounted of the virtual nature of film performance and the network for film distribution. Rather than putting a stop to the film industry’s growth, these two new legal definitions allowed old media (literature and theater) to begin working with new media (film). The Ben Hur case, I argue, was the tipping point that defined how filmmakers could build on work from other media as well as from other filmmakers. Within a few years of the decision, both the structure of the industry changed and a new film language emerged.
Online Interventionist Projects, Joseph DeLappe
I will present works created since 2001 that have experimentally engaged online digital gaming processes through calculated input of appropriated texts. The most recent project, dead-in-iraq, involves the creation of a memorial/protest within the US Army recruiting game America's Army by typing the name, age, service branch and date of death of each service person who has died to date in Iraq using the in-game text messaging system. This work is the latest in a series of online interventionist projects that started in 2001, when I connected to the Star Trek Elite Force Voyager Online game, in character as Allen Ginsberg, to “recite” using the game’s text messaging system, Ginsberg’s seminal beat poem Howl in its entirety. These works, and others, will be presented and discussed to specifically consider issues of authorship, appropriation, hactivism and the consideration of “public space” in the age of the Internet.
The Death of the Link: Does Attribution Still Matter? Andy Dehnart
There would be no web without hyperlinks, which allow for attribution and connection. The link fuels Google's search algorithm, and blogs began as repositories of links to noteworthy sites. But the link -- or at least the concept behind linking -- appears to be dying. The inhabitants of message boards copy and paste full articles from news web sites, blog posts, and other content into their posts with no reference to the original source. As a result of these behaviors, information is becoming detached from sources. This happens offline, too, as journalists borrow ideas, information, and quotes from each other without attribution. Students in writing classes copy and paste from Wikipedia into their own essays and consider that action different than outright plagiarism. In this paper, I'll report on evidence of this shift, attempt to understand what's causing it, and examine its effects.
Mapping the Digital Prohibition Movement, Dion Dennis
Exemplified by "The Pirate Party" and the EFF, resistance to restrictive digital patent and copyright laws is crystallizing. Prominent FLOSS spokespersons such as Lessing and Stallman claim that a new era of "Digital Prohibition" has emerged. As the latest iteration in the family of American prohibition movements, the moral and legal supports for "Digital Prohibition" are supplied by a coalition of not always compatible agendas, actors and interests. Advancing viable political alternatives requires that the agendas (and points of confluence and tension) of the constituent parts of these de facto coalitions be explored. This paper proposes just such a mapping project. Realms of inquiry include exploring the role of competing moral discourses, demographic tensions, econometric and legal redefinitions of property and cultural production and the political ascendance of risk-minimization and threat-preemption discourses and strategies in the early decades of the 21st century.
'Digital Natives' and Future Audiences for Professional Film Production: An Australian Perspective, Julia de Roeper, Susan Luckman
With the successful maintenance of an Australian drama industry dependent upon its appeal to future audiences, this paper reports on a study being conducted to provide crucial information about changing media consumption patterns amongst the young people who constitute Australia’s future audience. This paper will discuss young people’s digital media consumption and its implications for future cultural policy and legislation. In particular, it will report on the Australian film industry’s perception of threat from both off-shore (especially US) content, and shifting patterns of media consumption (especially the move to mobile technologies by young consumers). These industry perceptions will then be checked against the actuality of young people’s mobile media consumption, as revealed through an MMS/SMS survey.
Semantic Guerilla War in Runet, Elena G. Dyakova
Stuart Hall’s model of ‘semantic guerilla’ in the communication process may be easily adopted for the analysis of communication through sites, forums and blogs of Runet. Radical-nationalist opposition makes semantic guerilla war in Runet against globalisation, westernization and modernisation and such. The users of Runet are trying constantly to organize radical oppositional geurilla beyond the bounds of the Net. For example, the users of the “Livejournal” protested against the creation of Orthodox TV channel by putting their signature for the creation of all-Russian porno TV. The provocative nature of this action correlates well enough with the style of radical oppositional decoding.
Contemporary Media Practice in Turkish Architecture: From “Arkitekt” to “Arkitera,” Meral Ekincioglu
This paper focuses on the recent digital media practices in Turkish architecture, the emergence of the network society, and its social process. More specifically, this presentation analyzes (a) the new profile of the media owners and readers; and (b) their new roles in reshaping the architectural media in Turkey by considering a comparative perspective from the past. At the beginning of the 21st century, the new dynamics in Turkish architecture include the interactive identity of the readers, collaboration among architects, a new kind of participatory culture and media ownership. Within this framework, this paper will discuss new possibilities that emerged as a result of the digital media practices in Turkish architecture with regard to other social challenges, such as the modernization process of this changing society and its impact on the network culture; and how the digital media is technologically powerful to generate creative connections between this society and the rest of the world.
Feminism, Cynicism, and the Return of the Pinup, Nathan Scott Epley
The classical illustrated pinup of mid-century North America largely disappeared during the seventies and eighties, victim to both the increasing explicitness of sexual images and the success of anti-pornography activism in stigmatizing public display of objectified women’s bodies. At the turn of this century, the classic pinup was back, increasingly common both in reconsiderations of the original prints and in contemporary “neo-pinups” that mimic vintage pinup styles. This research explores how pinup recuperations negotiate Camp and performative drag on the one hand and cynical consumption of irony on the other.
Moving Story: Mobile Narrative Development, Michael Epstein (organizer), Denise DiIanni, Matt Dunleavy, Jan Egleson, Chris Hastings, Eric Klopfer
How are stories told on mobile devices? While "mobisodes," video games, and podcasts are rapidly and richly migrating to our cell phones from fixed media platforms, little is known about how mobile storytelling will gain its own voice. This multi-disciplinary panel will examine specific production sagas from mobile education, television, film, and travel projects. Stories include: GPS handhelds with location-based narrative about alien invaders, filmmaking on Nokia phones at Boston University, mobile narratives for exploring Venice and Boston, and WGBH's short form video lab.
Brand Communities in a World of Knowledge-Based Products and Common Property, Andrew Feldstein
Computer operating systems demonstrate how our burgeoning knowledge-based economy has changed the concept of “product” and “brand ownership.” Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Mac OS are both proprietary, commercial products. The non-proprietary, user-driven, open-source Linux distributions challenge conventional notions of ownership and branding. This study asks: Do community members exhibit significantly different types and levels of participation: when a brand is proprietary as opposed to common property?; when a product is knowledge-based as opposed to manufactured? In this “netnographic” analysis of help forums for Mac OSx and Ubuntu Linux user’s groups, which pays particular attention to “newbie” questions and “expert” answers, I see behavioral patterns that should provide insight into these issues.
Media Exposure and Fans, Anthony Fellow, Joan Giglione, Robert Gustafson
Have the changes in new communication technologies over the past 50 years changed a star’s ability to keep a safe social distance from his/her fans or a fan’s ability to connect face to face with the person they idolize? Though today's photojournalists may have satellite trucks and instant developing, they still have to find their subject. The fan culture remains static since there is no closer route to a face-to-face meeting to requite their idol worship—no closer than purchasing a ticket or DVD for the star’s latest film. Yet on the fan level, the relationship changes through social networking with other fans who share the same interest through message boards and chat rooms. The Claymates are an example; David Bowie controls his own image on the Internet etc. Theories to examine: gatekeeping, parasocial relationships, social distance, behavior of fan cultures.
Media Literacy and the Ethics of Participatory Culture, Paolo Ferri
The paper is based on the first findings of an ongoing, four-year research project studying how children and adults explore the potentiality of the new technologies in family and in preschool. The research field consists of five primary schools in Milan. Aims of the paper are: a. Discussing the ways in which children use and explore digital technologies and interpret their meanings and functions in the family and in preschool; b. Exploring ideas and representations of teachers and educators in regard to the use of the computer in preschools and in families and to their educational roles; c. Working out a methodological video-ethnographic approach for the study of these issues in early childhood settings; and d. Outlining some pattern for a new method of digital media education with teachers of primary school.
Sex and Politics at the Point of Media Convergence: An Ethnography of a Queer Culture of Media Production, Adam Fish
This paper will describe recent ethnographic research into the prolific film/ television/ webisode documentary production company World of Wonder. By interviewing the producers and observing the company's corporate environment, I will detail a media company at the forefront of media convergence and the broad- and narrowcasting of sexual politics. WOW produces documentaries on sex, media industries, and celebrities. As a media corporation as well as members of the gay community, the producers at WOW participate in the culture they examine. This produces intimate, applied, public ethnographic media, and, simultaneously, economizes further developments of increasingly more mainstream and subversive material—which WOW selectively distributes on one of its three converging media.
The Changing Modes of Discourse Between Fan Communities and Soap Opera Producers, Sam Ford
The daytime serial drama is one of the oldest television genres in America, a carryover from radio soap operas that have remained a staple of daytime programming since the late 1940s. However, a series of developments have changed the relationship between media producers and the genre’s fans through the decades, including the earliest letter-writing campaigns, the launch of organized fan clubs, the birth of the soap opera press, and the many changes brought about by the formation of various online fan communities through discussion boards. This presentation aims to trace the history of these fan interactions through various media forms in order to understand how contemporary online fan communities have appropriated and transformed the former roles of the soap opera press, fan clubs, and traditional mail communication with the network and producers, as well as how those other forms of communication continue to survive in a digital era.
Copyright in Transition: The Expansion and Transformation of the Copyright Discourse in 19th Century Europe, Martin Fredriksson
In his groundbreaking essay “What is an Author?,” Michel Foucault questioned the traditional view of the autonomous author and introduced the emergence of the ‘author-function’ as a new area of research. Since then, many scholars have shown how the ideas of literary ownership and artistic creativity merged into a common copyright discourse in the 18th and 19th century. In my paper, I will take a closer look at how this discourse was mediated to the cultural periphery of Europe: in this case in Sweden. The purpose of this is two-fold: apart from simply providing an empirical overview of early Swedish copyright law it also serves as a theoretical case-study of how copyright functioned as a discursive formation in the 18th and 19th century.
The Story of Train Man: Transforming Contemporary Japanese Books, Visual Media, and Men, Alisa Freedman
Train Man (Densha otoko) – Internet book, film, play, television series, and graphic novels based on a real event – is a significant Japanese popular culture phenomenon and represents the interrelationship between new media and publishing trends, Internet communities, and changing notions of masculinity. Train Man was collectively written through anonymous posts on the 2-Channel Internet forum in 2004. The story began after an awkward twenty-two-year-old, known as “Train Man,” protected a woman from a drunk on a Tokyo train. After the woman thanked Train Man, he asked 2-Channel subscribers for relationship advice. Train Man and his supporters are self-identified “otaku,” or nerds, and the story shaped a new male hero, different from the businessman who represented twentieth-century ideals. I discuss how Train Man has transformed literary production, book forms and authorship and demonstrate the power of media to create social roles.
Talking Back: Sport Media in the Digital Age, Yair Galily
From its explosive development in the last decade of the twentieth century, the World Wide Web has become an ideal medium for the dedicated sports fanatic and a useful resource for the casual fan as well (Real, 2006). The aim of this study is to shed light on a process in which the talk-back mechanism, which enables readers to comment on web-published articles, is (re)shaping the sport realm in Israeli media. The current study sampled, studied, analyzed and compared more than 3000 talkbacks from the sports section of three daily news websites, Ynet, NRG & Walla, and argues that talkbacks serve not only as an extension of the journalistic sphere but also a new source of information and debate.
Sampling & Remixing: Is Hip Hop a Descendant of the Broadside Ballad? Sean Galvin
Broadside ballads, also know as broadsheets, were popular from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, in England, Europe and America. The subject matter was often a current event, with printers rushing to get them distributed by the next day. They could also be subversive—Robin Hood was first popularized in a ballad. Hip Hop, a.k.a. Rap Music, began in the 1970s in NYC and was popularized in the 1980s. It is characterized by sampling from other songs and remixing music or lyrics from other songs. Rap not only exhibits assonance, alliteration, and rhyme schemes that are reminiscent of ballads, but what is also particularly noteworthy is how a rap song can be released within hours or days of recent events. For example, within 24 hours of Sean Bell’s being shot 50 times by NYC police in November 2006, a rap song titled 50 Shots was released.
Innovation and Creativity in the Digital Age: Practices, Iterations and Reflections, Cristobal Garcia
In this series of videos, we explore, through interviews and observations, the ways of doing and thinking as well as the underlying inspirational nuances of a select group of individuals who currently perform work within the so-called creative industries. We interviewed and observed eight workers in the media, entertainment, architecture, music, advertisement, design, and technology industries, and co-reflected with them on the processes and practices for going about their work. Through a method we called “practice reflections,” we explore the methods, artifacts, environments, socio-technical networks, and strategies these individuals or teams successfully enact to produce creative outcomes, i.e., interfaces, buildings, songs, art concepts, prototypes, and software, respectively.
YouTube as Archive: Who Will Curate this Digital Wunderkammer? Robert Gehl
In this paper, I argue that despite the seemingly democratic features of YouTube, it is better understood not as opposed to traditional corporate media but in the same genealogy as previous archival technologies and techniques. In archives, all content is flattened and has equal weight, so it is up to a curatorial authority to present content to audiences. While YouTube promises to democratize media, its lack of a centralized “curator” actually sets the stage for large media corporations to step into the curatorial role and decide how each object in YouTube’s archives will be presented to users. This paper draws on political economic and historical critiques of museums, collections, and archives in order to connect the emergent technologies in YouTube with earlier attempts to organize and present information, objects, and images.
History and Recycling Cultures: Fiction or Nonfiction? Rahilya Geybullayeva
The focus of this paper will be history in an old and renewal context. The main problem in new historical reality is related with borders between truth and fiction. For this, I look at the epic The Book of My Grandfather Gorgud and its interpretations in modern literature, historical facts depiction in deconstruction trend in literature with special reference to Post-Soviet Azerbaijani Literature. The novel Uncomplited Manuscript by K. Abdulla forces the reader to think about history as science and as realities, the ways between truths and fiction. This novel has been translated into French, Turkish, Russian. We are going to discuss the following: Where are the margins between reality and opportunity, between historical truth and art fiction? What is the history? The fact or its perception? How does time express and recontextualize the history?
Learning to Consume Culture: Presumptions about Media, Technology, and Participation in Industry-Sponsored Anti-Piracy Campaigns, Tarleton Gillespie
To curb unauthorized downloading, the major film, music, and software corporations have developed public education campaigns aimed at children, extolling the virtues of copyright and the immorality of piracy. Some were designed to be shown among movie trailers in theaters, others are made available online; some are delivered to schools as curricular materials to be incorporated into K-12 classrooms. Through an examination of the materials themselves and through interviews with their designers, this essay examines not only their characterization of copyright law, but their implicit claims about how, why, an by whom culture is produced, circulated, and consumed.
Remix Goes Mainstream: Emerging Attitudes about the Reappropriation of Media Content, Marissa Gluck, Mark Latonero, Aram Sinnreich
Emerging "configurable" cultural practices such as music mash-ups, video remixes and video game modding are often painted rhetorically in absolutist black-and-white tones. Entertainment industry representatives tend to use the language of intellectual property, theft and piracy to make their arguments, while champions of the creative commons argue that reconfiguration is de facto innovation. In this paper, we analyze the self-reported attitudes about configurable cultural behaviors from a survey of more than 1,700 American adults. The resulting data indicate that our society is currently undergoing a tectonic shift regarding the definition of "legitimate" cultural production, consumption and reappropriation.
The Playful Spectator: Kodaking and Mobility, Eric Gordon
Eastman Kodak’s release of its $1 Brownie camera in 1900 made the technology available to a much wider population than before. Kodak’s rapid success can largely be attributed to its advertising campaign, which aligned the image of the amateur with exploration and playfulness, often using women and children to enforce this association. The “Kodak Girl” became the face of leisure and adventure for the newly mobile American public. The representation of the “Kodaker” as feminine and childish, however, was continuously decried in the pages of photography magazines, as “real” amateurs struggled to distance themselves by constructing a binary between craft and play. The amateur produced art, while the Kodaker played. I argue that the construction of the feminine, playful Kodaker, has continued to influence the culture of mobility from iPods to cellphones.
Honesty, Ownership and Justice: Understanding the Cultural and Social Mores Influencing Students’ Perceptions of Copyright, Michael Grabowski
The digital media environment poses new problems for dealing with student honesty in college classrooms. One way to approach these problems is to first understand students’ own conceptions of intellectual property and copyright within this environment. Through in-depth interviews with undergraduate students, the paper examines how students construct new meanings of plagiarism and honesty when both consuming and creating work in digital media formats. The paper also examines faculty efforts to create academic honesty policies that respond to the challenges presented by the digital world.
Movie Trailers and the Creation of Meaning, Jonathan Gray
One of the most common uses of video-sharing sites as YouTube has been to circulate trailers for Hollywood film and television. Meanwhile, many cable providers fill their on-demand channels with trailers and “sneak previews.” And though most of these trailers are “official,” occasionally the latest viral video takes the form of an alternative mashup parody or fan tribute trailer. Long seen merely as advertisements for a forthcoming media product, this paper argues that, more importantly, trailers are frequently the very place where textuality begins – where genre, tone, appropriate audience, mode of engagement, and meaning are first proposed. The power to create a trailer can represent the power to create the text, and this paper will examine how creative power and authorship are wrestled away from writers and directors both by marketing teams within the industry, and occasionally by fans outside of the industry.
A Name in Vain? Or, Why Do they Call it TV when it’s not on the Box? Joshua Green
This paper examines a set of key “new television” projects and their relationship to existing understandings of the object of television. The rise of both BitTorrent and YouTube has been surrounded by discourse about the decline of broadcast television’s role for content delivery and advertising revenue. This paper relates new television services to existing understandings about the form, use and function of television. It looks at what distinguishes these services from television, particularly in terms of audienceship, branding and scheduling practices. Interrogating how the term “television” succeeds or fails to describe these services helps to contextualise the object of television itself, as well as exploring the insights new services provide into questions of cultural labor, audiencehood and the community forming roles television has played.
“Let Me Tell you a Story about the Hypothetico-deductive Theory of Science”: Storytelling as a Method for Teaching Research Methods, Tor Grenness
The use of storytelling has the potential to facilitate understanding of complex matters as it converts complex messages into a simple and understandable form. Storytelling has also been described as a potentially empowering pedagogical tool because it promotes the creation of a “shared experience in the classroom”, both with peers and with the teacher (Hogg, 1995). The purpose of this paper is to share the author’s experiences with storytelling in a compulsory research methods course for executive students. Based on an exploratory study of a sample of students attending the course, perceived benefits as well as obstacles to implementing storytelling as a pedagogical method will be discussed.
A Digital Rights Management System Based on Social Networks, Slawomir Grzonkowski (Stefan Decker, Brian Ensor, Adam Gzella, Sebastian Ryszard Kruk, Bill McDaniel)
Fair use policy allows legal owners to share products they bought with their friends; it is based on the assumption that the owners pass an original product and they cannot use it at the same time. In the digital world, we can hardly apply this assumption since it is based on a physical availability. Digital content providers want to have control over the distribution of their products; digital rights management (DRM) systems, however, do not account for and even forbid sharing. In this paper, we describe a DRM system that takes advantage of a social network. We will describe how a model of an existing online social network, which includes users’ roles and trust relationships, can be applied. We will discuss if our solution introduces the fair use policy to the digital world.
"You can change the story. You are the story.": Textual Interface in Jeanette Winterson's The Power Book, Elizabeth Guzick
Jeanette Winterson may be best known as a contemporary British lesbian writer. Her novel The Power Book raises pressing questions about sexuality by moving those concerns into cyberspace, along the way raising the question of how literary narratives may be changed by the technology of the information age. In the first chapter of the book, entitled "language costumier," our semi-named narrator spins stories for a client who sends specifications through email. The story seems to get away from them both, and the relationship between them takes precedence as the narrative recedes -- an apt description of narrative in the digital age and its highly collaborative nature if ever there was one. In this sense, her narrative is very much the kind of hyperreal hypertext that Silvio Gaggi describes when writing that “narrative is not a clearly delineated path but a textual space available for exploration.”
Identifying Online Experts, Paul Ham, Adam Seldow
Our research involves building a community of experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education around a socio-semantic networking web site, Edtags.org. Through our work with the web-site, we have come across a recent set of questions regarding the make-up of the community and culture. How do we ensure that populations of participants are "experts" in a field? Is it a matter of "numbers" or must there be a screening process to verify the users for participation? Should we screen the content for our specific field, and if so how? What is the critical mass of endorsed sites on a socio-semantic network that changes it from a place where educators save bookmarks to a place where educators save bookmarks and discover new ones? Lastly, how can search engines best distinguish "credible" sites from "socio-spites" (socio-semantic networking spam sites)?
From Little Women to Gossip Girl: The Multimodal Literacy Cultures of ‘Tween Girls, Naomi Hamer
Contemporary tween books, marketed to female readers between the ages of 8 and 12, provide rich texts to explore the changing relationships between print and digital cultures in the new media age. This paper explores how information and communication technologies have profoundly affected the production, design and reception of tween books. Recently published books aimed at Anglo-American tween girls integrate multimodal features from a range of media, including video games, blogs, and instant messaging. Drawing on my research with 8 and 9 year old Canadian children, I examine how interactive readership practices of tween girls exemplify creative interactions with textual franchises, mirroring their production and design.
Traditional, Collaborative and Mixed Forms of Authorship, Jessica Hammer
By examining the processes and products of composition, we can begin to understand writing as a form of meaning-making. However, new technologies have changed the emphasis of composition practices: from solitary to collaborative, from planned to improvisational, from expository to genre-bending, from written to multi-modal. This talk presents the results of a series of in-depth interviews with role-players (representing improvisational, collaborative composers), traditional fiction authors, and individuals who create in both mediums. It investigates the similarities and differences between the groups in terms of their compositional practices, with particular attention to the role of collaboration, shared decision making, and social cognition. Questions of audience awareness and genre positioning are also discussed.
Producing, Distributing, and Reproducing Music Videos: (Re) Constructing the Adolescent Experience On and Off MTV, Darlene Hampton
MTV, masked as a channel of irreverent rebellion, has always been an arena for the continued colonization of the youth as avid consumers of both products and dominant cultural paradigms. I explore in this paper the ways that MTV attempts this work by producing and promoting a packaged and commodified version of Goth—which I locate here in the music and videos of the rock band Evanescence—that deliberately co-opt its image in order to fuel the consumption of insecure adolescents seeking an identifiable community. My goal is to examine the ways that those attempts are negotiated, and potentially thwarted via cultural productions (videos, slide-shows ‘tributes’ etc.) that are produced by Evanescence fans and distributed to other members of the fan community via Internet sites such as YouTube and MySpace.
The Web 2.0: Response to a Social Crisis, Christine “xtine” Hanson
In his 1992 article, “Remaking Social Practices,” Pierre-Félix Guattari wrote, “The current crisis of the media and the opening up of a post-media era are the symptoms of a much more profound crisis." Social networking strategies and user-generated information are popular and commodified strata of the Web 2.0. While traditional mass media benefit from selling online advertising space and collecting user information, user interactivity is also conducive to collecting other voices. Activists utilize the proliferation of the subject on the Web to address our current stage of social crisis and challenge or change social practices in the offline world. This paper will examine the Web 2.0 inspired phenomenon of user interactivity and control of the mass media within the frame of Guattari’s critique.
Lost in Translation? Remaking Horror, Remaking Cultural Specificity in Ju-On and The Grudge, Marina Hassapopoulou
This study not only deals with discrepancies between the original Ju-On (2003) and its American remake The Grudge (2004), but also examines the rationale behind the creative process, the cast selection, U.S. promotion and script variations. I am exploring the differences in the production, consumption and product that occur between the two versions, in hopes of discovering where artistic initiative ends and international marketing considerations begin. The Grudge is pioneering in the sense that the same director was used for this remake. The fact that Shimizu directed both versions complicates the notion of “transnational cinema” and the question of whether a foreign film (like Ju-On) can truly be considered as transnational by American mainstream standards.
Repatriation and New Media in Northeastern British Columbia, Kate Hennessy
The use of digital archives and multimedia to bring language resources and cultural history home to First Nations communities constitutes a form of repatriation that can facilitate self-representation and control over language and culture-education initiatives. Canadian museums have looked to digital media and Internet technology as a way to make collections more available to communities, to rebalance relationships with source communities, and to address core issues of power, authority, and control. However, little ethnographic work has been done at the community level to determine how effective these multimedia practices are in furthering language and culture education and in fostering self-definition and greater socio-cultural authority. This paper explores the complex afterlife of a digital archive that was created and repatriated to the Doig River First Nation in 2004.
Dead Traders, Not Dead Traitors: The Online Politics of Trading Grateful Dead Bootlegs, Bill Herman
The Grateful Dead were perhaps the first to allow their fans (Deadheads) to make audio recordings (bootlegs) of their live shows and trade them with friends, encouraging behavior that is increasingly viewed as piracy. This practice foreshadowed peer-to-peer (P2P) trading. This paper examines Deadhead bootleg trading as described on several fan websites in two parts. The first part, conducted in fall 2003, finds an apolitical, celebratory discourse that elides the revolutionary technological and economic implications of Internet trading. In November 2005, the band demanded that the Live Music Archive prevent fans from downloading and saving the band's soundboard recordings. Yet part two of the analysis, conducted in the fall of 2006, again discovers a surprisingly apolitical, celebratory tone in which fans consider themselves privileged to be Deadheads. The revolutionary view of music traders as loyal fans rather than pirates has survived on all sides.
A Hole In the Blanket: The Gap Between New Media Delivery and Institutional Licensing, Todd Herreman
Over the past decade, intellectual property issues created by technological advances in media have produced a plethora of legislation, court rulings and settlements. Regulatory controls and legal battles are forced to play “catch-up” with the capabilities of new technology, as witnessed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, landmark court decisions in both the Napster and Grokster cases, and the out-of-court settlement with Kazaa. As the speed of technological advances in media delivery and access increases, so does the gap. This paper examines current technologies not yet covered by PRO licenses, limitations these licensing issues may pose to institutions, and measures the institutions should take to protect their interests while minimizing liability.
From Tapes to YouTube: Video Bootlegging and the Question of Copyright, Lucas Hilderbrand
Videotape was introduced as a bootleg technology for home users; decades later, web video has taken off, with even greater user enthusiasm for access and ambiguity for liability. Thanks largely to the high profile "Betamax case," Sony v. Universal, much of the formative public awareness of home video was articulated in relationship to copyright law. The Court’s more recent decision in the peer-to-peer lawsuit MGM v Grokster reappraised the Sony decision while ruling against Grokster. The streaming video site YouTube has renewed concerns about everyday users’ copyright infringements. Although it is undeniably a corporate entity, I suggest that YouTube may be central to achieving equilibrium between users and the content industry. In this paper, I will examine the judicial precedents set by home video and peer-to-peer networks and the ways in which YouTube complicates and compromises the legality of appropriated content through online video streaming.
Fighting Back in the War on Share: Transgressive Reactions to Copyright, Benjamin Mako Hill, Elizabeth Stark
Our paper will examine the work of groups attempting to counteract the copyright system through civil disobedience. We will look to the peer-to-peer group EarthStation 5's declaration of war on the MPAA, Downhill Battle's campaign to encourage illegal sharing of copyrighted works, Illegal Art exhibitions, Sweden's political Pirate Party, and the work of scholars like Lawrence Liang who have argued in favor of copyright infringement. In our examination, we explore the reluctance of the free culture community to embrace such approaches, describe the nature of the transgressive critique to copyright law, and argue that this form of political action should be given greater deference within the community.
Audience Incorporated (Inc.), Michael Hoechsmann
Time magazine recently proclaimed that “the empowered audience has emerged as the newest actor in the mediasphere, helping to determine and create content and seemingly balancing out increasing corporate control, the other major development in our mediascapes. Even so, Time warns, “Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom." I will argue that differing conceptions of audience - incorporated into the act of media creation - produce different outcomes, that there are strong residual communicational and cultural elements in contemporary “participatory” media production, and that as young people are drawn into new forms of media practice, they draw substantially on a pre-existing repertoire of cultural meanings. I will contextualize these claims in relation to my research on Web 2.0 applications, community youth media organizations, school-based media literacy programs and youth participation in the traditional new media.
Ethics and Romanian Journalism, Alina Hogea
After the fall of communism (1989), Romanian media had known an impressive and fast development, characterized by the appearance of thousands of publications, and hundreds of audiovisual outlets. This contributed to a rapid and uncontrolled increase in the number of people working in media, but it doesn't mean that the number of professional journalists increased. As Peter Gross stated, Eastern-European journalism lacks the essence of professional journalism: objective verified information for the public to draw correct conclusions as regard the surrounding world. The aim of this paper is to present a concrete way of changing the Romanian mass media system, which is still in transition, into an accountable and democratic one. From a historical approach, and using systems theory and cybernetics, the essay tries to identify a way in which an ethical behavior can be adopted without being perceived as a restrictive, limitative action upon media activity.
The Knowledge Gates to Second Life, Mary E. Hopper
For better or worse, pornography typically drives the early development of new media forms. Second Life, a successful virtual world, poses no challenge to this observation—in fact, the developers play to it. However, there are many sites with educational content that receive little traffic and never appear in the popular places list. The goal of The Knowledge Gates to Second Life is to expedite the transformation of a new media form from a pornography-driven state towards a form recognized for educational content. The Knowledge Gates are two strategically located virtual spaces that employ a “theme park” metaphor. The parks are populated with “magic gates” that link to hundreds of other sites. The objective is to increase the traffic of those places enough to impact the makeup of the popular places list and thus the perceived make-up and purpose of SecondLife itself from a place for pornography to a land of knowledge.
The Competence of Framing Media Literacy and Media Literacy as Framing Competence, Theo Hug handout
There are various ways of conceptualizing media literacy: As the enhancement of traditional literacies in the light of processes of medialization, as the expansion of information and communication skills urgently needed in the knowledge society, as the ability to move between different media and realities, as a mode of fusing information competence with digital fluency, as the capacity for understanding the nature of (post)modern media communications, or as the ability to access, analyse and evaluate the images, sounds and messages which interpenetrate our contemporary culture. But what does it mean to be competent in conceptualizing and framing media literacy? The paper seeks to elucidate the relationship of this competence with an understanding of media literacy as framing competence itself. Furthermore, it will consider some consequences of this relationship for media ethics and media education.
A Coder Becomes a Political Activist, Aldon Hynes
Aldon Hynes was a professional systems analyst who volunteered for the Dean campaign, and, among other things, founded Connecticut for Dean and helped start the social coordinating software system hack4dean and DeanSpace. His story also nicely illustrates how the Internet's evolution as an alternative news source during the 1990s created a context for both different and more interactive relations to politics to develop. Finally, Hynes' paper points to a little understood fact about the character of the campaign: the campaign offered a kind of supportive community that was not just about youthful bonding, or some kind of heroic or radical vision of change, but that was very broadly humane and welcoming.
Traditional and Contemporary Culture in Lithuania, Bjorn Ingvoldstad
In 2004, Lithuania became an official member of the sociopolitical collaboration-in-process known as the European Union. In the years immediately preceding accession, Lithuanian popular culture was a key site of national negotiation between its brief period of re-independence from one (Soviet) union and its uncertain future in another (European) union. I argue that this negotiation can be found across a range of media texts produced and consumed in Lithuania—in particular, my paper will discuss the Lithuanian compilation CD Folkšokas (Folk Shock, 2000) and its use of folk singing, music, and costume, all performing a kind of linkage between traditional and contemporary society.
The Internet Search Engines: Centralizers of a Decentralized Me, Ismael Isfandiary
Almost all academic works about the Internet assume that it is a decentralized and decentralizing medium. But the almost-neglected-point is the problem and expense of gaining more audience on the very horizontal network of World Wide Web. Internet use can be categorized in two general forms: source-oriented and subject-oriented Internet use. In the first form, information such as news is received from familiar Internet sources. In the second form, the user wants to get information about a specific subject while not aware of any particular Internet source concerning that subject. Now, the search engine chooses (prioritizes) among billions of pages the ones you’ll most probably face. This article is intended to examine the centralizing (gatekeeping) role of the Internet search engines.
"From Ozans to God-Modes": Cheating in Interactive Entertainment from Different Cultures, Digdem Isikoglu, Tonguc Brahim Sezen
In this paper will compare methods and objectives of cheating in low-tech and high-tech interactive entertainment. Oral story traditions are one of the oldest forms of interactive entertainment. In the Middle East it's not uncommon for the audience and the storytellers (i.e. naqqals or ozans) to try to influence the interactive storytelling process (i.e. changing the fate of a story character) by external dynamics, such as gifts and money. As one of the newest interactive entertainment systems, computer games are based on an interaction between the player and game system regulated by rules. These rules can be broken by several types of computer-game cheating. It is interesting however to see the similarities of methods and objectives in these interactive systems from different centuries and cultures. Digital Resources and Users: Advancing Critical Pedagogy and New Technologies, Helen Jackson
What we are currently witnessing online is an emergence of resources and practices that are seen by many as returning the web to its early potential to facilitate collaboration and social interaction. Do the subsequent cultural mores that are emerging from these interactions offer instructors new and more meaningful opportunities and possibilities for advancing a critical pedagogy in educational practices? This paper will investigate current e-learning strategies in Northern Ireland that are attempting to integrate mediated environments into teaching and learning methodologies, and discuss whether the emergence of social networking technologies that are facilitating collaboration and social interaction, have the potential to support knowledge-building networks.
Make Mix Tapes!: Digitization and Nonprofessional Music Aggregation in the Network Economy, Josh Jackson
Digital technologies and computer networking have facilitated music users' capacity to redact and expand upon commercial media artifacts in ways that widen the public imagination and produce popular culture. For this presentation, I will concentrate on the utilities provided by centralized commercial sites such as the iTunes Music Store. Firstial media artifacts in ways that widen the public imagination and produce popular culture. For this presentation, I will concentrate on the utilities provided by centralized commercial sites such as the iTunes Music Store. First, using the audiocassette as my primary example, I argue that computer technology and web accessibility are only relatively new means in a chain of efforts that have attempted to challenge or modify the configuration of music delivery systems prescribed by the media enterprises of sound. Second, I contend that digitization and networking have increased users' ability to recompile commercial recordings into novel narratives and texts.
Modernity, Postmodernity, Convergence: What’s New? Brian Jacobson
While “convergence” has emerged in popular and academic lexicons as a favored descriptor for all that is new in a diverse set of social, cultural, technological, and economic practices, two no-less ambiguous and widely applied concepts—modernity and postmodernity—have previously been used to describe many of the same contemporary practices and their historical precursors. This paper will trace the continuities and discontinuities between the emergent idea of convergence and its conceptual predecessors by examining key points of historical and theoretical intersection. How, for instance, does the repurposing of content that characterizes cultural practice in modernity compare to similar practices described as convergence today? Similarly, how does cultural convergence differ from the cultural logic of late capitalism?
Open Source Content Creation, Ravi Jain
How are artists embracing "open source" content creation models with blogs, vlogs, mashups and other forms of collaboration? Boston artist Ravi Jain presents two recent projects within that context: Drive Time, an ongoing video blog talk show he produces from inside his car as he commutes to work, and Wikake, an open source cake produced for the Art Cake show at Axiom Gallery in November 2006. Both of these projects have relied on user submitted comments and content as a natural part of their production flow with the use of Creative Commons licensing.
Franchises, Convergence, and History: Rethinking Transmedia Theory, Derek Johnson
In convergence culture, franchised content produced, marketed, and consumed across media platforms becomes increasingly prominent—culturally and academically. The franchised exchange of content across media platforms is not unique to digital culture, and therefore has a history to be explored by transmedia theory. To that end, this paper elaborates a three-part research model, accounting for the specificities of digital, multi-platformed franchises while recognizing transmedia trajectories in historical practices of franchised storytelling and merchandising.
The Politics of Machinima: Video Game-Based Filmmaking as Visual Rhetoric, Robert Jones
In November of 2005, a French designer by the name of Alex Chan released a 13-minute machinima film on the web entitled The French Democracy in response to the riots in the suburbs of Paris. The film served as a critique of the racial tensions leading up to the riots and quickly garnered a huge audience response of over a million viewers online. This represents a significant moment in the history of this art form as utilizing this new technology as a tool for constructing a visual rhetoric for one of the first times and finding such a large audience. This paper proposes to examine this instance of machinima being used for a political purpose as potential new form of visual rhetoric.
Emulators, Romhackers, Speedrunners: A Survey of Digital Power Plays, Will Jordan
Although software emulation of classic computer and video game systems on modern computers is a relatively well-known (though legally ambiguous) practice in game communities, lesser known are the associated practices of romhacking, in which game software is dissected, manipulated and reconstructed at the level of machine code, and tool-assisted speedrunning, in which the temporal progression of an emulated game is artificially distorted, spliced and recorded to demonstrate super-human skill and reaction times. This paper will address the aesthetic of these digital “power plays” and its influence on mod community-oriented game design, and the legal issues surrounding console emulation.
Correlation Between Word-Of-Mouth Effects and New Media: Simulations of Japanese Media Environment Using Artificial Neural Network, Masahiko Kambe, Yosuke Kinoshita, Naoki Tominaga, Yuichi Washida
This study tries to discover new correlation patterns between word-of-mouth generation and other media effects through a computer simulation model by artificial neural network. First, authors conducted an empirical consumer survey in Japan regarding purchase behaviors of compact automotives, an example of typical consumption behaviors. Authors focused on each consumer’s media contact including conventional mass media, Internet media, and personal communication media. Second, based on this survey result, a computer simulation model was built to examine a variety of virtual settings of media environment surrounding current Japanese consumers. Today, although advertisers notice that the word-of-mouth effects can have a great power in building an effective marketing strategy, they do not sufficiently understand collaborations between conventional marketing communication media and consumer-generated-media such as blogs and word-of-mouth activity. This experimental simulation study provides some basic hints to understand this collaboration.
Child-Centered Design of Game-Based Learning Environments, Marja Kankaanranta, Antti Kirjavainen, Tuula Nousiainen
Currently, our research and design work is focused on the development of game-based learning environments for young learners. According to the ideas of living lab movement, we emphasize the methods of user-driven design in the different phases of game prototype development. The design of quality game-based learning environments means, at its best, combined use of best practices, design principles and methods from entertainment games, earlier e-learning solutions and also from academic research and good practices in the fields of potential game user groups (e.g. students and teachers at schools). This enables the design of game prototypes that attract both for their utility and entertainment elements.
Bold Caballeros and Noble Bandidas: One Hundred Years of Iberoamerican Popular Culture, Gary Keller
This paper profiles a multimedia project on Latina/o noble bandits envisioned to run for decades and attract a worldwide scholarly community interested in noble bandits in popular culture, as well as the related social science construct, “social bandits.” The paper profiles the following: 1. A Web site still in its initial stages but with the help of many participants it will continue to develop over the months and years; 2. book to be published in 2008 with the provisional title, Bold Caballeros and Noble Bandidas: The Good, the Bad, the Beautiful; 3. a DVD-ROM to accompany the book; and a video DVD that will anthologize relevant films either in the public domain or for which permissions are available at reasonable costs. participate in project
"White and Nerdy": Current Meanings of the Nerd Stereotype, Lori Kendall
Previous research on the stereotype of the nerd has found that nerd identity is connected to issues of masculinity, race, and the ability of women and minorities to participate in science and technology education and occupations. This paper entails a detailed analysis of three areas of nerd references: newspaper articles from the early 80s to the present, materials from the Geek Squad website, including promotional videos and television spots, and Al Yankovic’s White and Nerdy video. These analyses demonstrate that while many modern references to nerds are ironic and playful, continuing negative aspects of the nerd identity point to important issues regarding identity and relationships to computers.
Democracy Aid '04 as Example of Cross-Border Appropriation and Parasitism, Kajsa Klein
The Internet facilitates cross-border political participation and activism. The topic of this paper is the Democracy Aid '04 campaign – a Swedish web-based initiative encouraging world citizens to donate money to the US group MoveOn.org. With a simple link to MoveOn's donate page, and a message stating that the world could not afford another four years with Bush, it managed to stir up quite a bit of controversy. A Washington Post columnist talked about how the vast left-wing conspiracy had gone international and within days MoveOn decided to exclude its 700,000 international members from further participation. The paper makes use of excerpts from the web sites as well as email exchanges between non-US and US activists. Ultimately, it concerns the more general intersection between art, activism, and academia.
Creativity and the Not-Alive: Influences on our Behavior by Electronic Creatures, Nick Knouf
Human creativity is intimately bound with the objects used in the creative process. Creation, creator, and tools exist as actors in a constantly undulating assemblage, both the weight of each component and the connection between components adapting to present circumstances. What changes in our understanding of creativity, then, need to occur when one of the actors is a non-human object with at least presumed agency? What is the role of authorship when an object can act on its own? What relationship forms between the creator and his or her tools? I will describe early work with a robotic creature called “syngva,” designed to encourage reflective and expressive behaviors in the person interacting with it, responding through motion to vocalizations from user.
Battlestar Galactica and the Reimagination of Contemporary American History, Melanie E. S. Kohnen
The 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica is both a remix of the 1978 series with the same title and a reimagination of American culture and politics after 9/11. But what about the original series, set shortly after the Vietnam War? How far does it reflect and comment on the American engagement in Vietnam (often compared to the current conflict in Iraq)? In a comparison of the current and original versions, I analyze how Battlestar Galactica isn't simply an example of televisional recycling, but rather an exploration of America's mindset in times of war.
Fan/Producer: Cult Television Authorship, Derek Kompare
Accounts of television authorship, though rare in television studies, flourish in industrial, journalistic, and fan spheres. The category of “author” distinguishes particular individuals (mostly writer-producers) from complex configurations of creative talent. This is especially the case with “cult television,” where viewers not only devote considerable resources into analyzing programs, but also extend this attention onto ostensible authors. This paper examines the current revival of Doctor Who, as “authored” by lifelong fan Russell T. Davies, as a significant example of the “fan/producer” phenomenon. Along the way, Davies and the BBC have utilized extensive publicity channels (including standard press interviews, video diaries, podcasts, DVD extras, and blogs) to perform his authorship, actively shaping the public construction of not only the series, but himself as a key node of fan authorship.
Online Tool for Heritage Languages Preservation and Learning, Nariyo Kono
This project describes a model of integrating language preservation techniques with leading-edge technology to develop a web-based on-line tool for heritage language preservation and learning. The model uses Chinuk Wawa as its data source from which to gather language samples, grammar descriptions, and other resources. These are integrated into an enhanced version of an existing computer software package for adult ESL classroom research ('ClassAction'). This software stores multi-media language clips, which synchronize audio, video and text (illustrating pronunciation, translation, grammar explanations, etc.), and presents these in an interactive session using the common web interface for access by students, faculty, and affiliated heritage language communities.
All Artists Are Thieves, Koosil-ja
Artists create works always in collaborations beyond time including the works in the history. They kidnap others works and put them into their womb. They give a birth without organs. In the digital age, this could be done without pain. What is original? How far in time we have to go back to find it? Artists study and respond to the creations in the history and build technique and concept, appropriating the forms or permeating them into the artists’ field of imminence. No matter how recognizable the result would be, no one artist could make a work without other authors’ creations. Where shall we draw a line for theft or legitimate creation? Who shall draw this line? Who would police this? Artists?
Ownership and Desire: Fans' and Producers' Manipulation of Fictional Love Triangles, Anne Kustritz
Although heralded by critics as a sophisticated reinvention of science fiction, Battlestar Galactica reserves significant time and receives significant fan devotion for its portrayal of love triangles. However, as Battlestar Galactica continues to make itself (in)famous for launching drastic changes in cast, location, purpose, and characterization with no notice, its writers and producers walk a fine line, both depending upon and toying with viewers' affections as they manipulate beloved characters' romantic destinies. Thus producers' and fans' negotiation of the ownership and control of present-day popular culture and mythology manifests in parallel triangulations through the shared romantic object; as fictional characters vie for libidinal fulfillment, they also stage larger struggles over the value and validity of viewers' libidinal investments.
Classrooms as Living Labs: The Role of Digital Games, Pilar Lacasa (Sara Cortes, Rut Martinez)
One of the challenges facing us when we try to use commercial materials in the classrooms, i.e. video games at the moment, is to identify appropriate strategies of collaboration with designers, creators and distribution agents. We are working on a collaborative project with Electronics Arts to introduce specific video games to classrooms so that they can be used as educational tools by teachers and families. We create multimedia contexts, where children turn into active participants in a digital universe in which multiple technologies are present so that video-games are just one of several digital tools.
The Wagnerian Website of the Future, Kurt Lancaster
In 1849, Richard Wagner argued that when the various arts in drama are collectively realized onstage “through a mutual parleying with the other arts” in creating a “common message,” then one has created a “universally intelligible Art-work” which “transplants” the spectator “upon the stage, by means of visual and aural faculties.” What is the state of our dramatic stage of the future, the digital website? In my presentation, I will map out the Wagnerian website of the future by defining the story experience in the past (through theater) as well as the Wagnerian potential of the future: the holistic integration of a variety of media elements to tell a single story.
Representing the Crowd: From Silent Film to Digital Cinema, Lori Landay
Mass culture always acknowledges the crowd, implicitly at least, that it hopes forms its audience. At the same time, American consumer culture privileges individualism. This contradiction has been central from King Vidor’s silent masterpiece The Crowd to the present. This paper argues that the technological changes in representations of the crowd in film reflect and shape transformations in discourses about participating in mass consumer culture. Examples include The Ten Commandments (1923), The Crowd (1927), It (1927), Footlight Parade (1933), The Apartment (1960), Star Wars (1977), Gladiator (2000), and The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003).
Sampling Real Life: Creative Appropriation in Public Spaces, Elsa M. Lankford
Appropriation in some form is essential to creative works as creativity is often sparked by others. As an interdisciplinary artist, the ideas for my works primarily come from my role as observer, collector, and appropriator. My current project is entitled Eight Ways to Find and Tell a Story. The end result will be eight multimedia narratives formed and informed by what I hear and see while riding the bus. In the piece, I acknowledge the importance of others and public space in my creative works. This paper will touch on the ethical issues of appropriation within my work and in my classroom, public appropriation by other contemporary artists, how we choose to communicate within a public space, and a specific narrative from Eight Ways.
Gathering Strength through Teknannajii, Catalina Laserna , Sandra Indian
To address the twin challenges of cultural discontinuities between Ojibway and Canadian modes of education and the need for high quality wholisitc education, the Mikinaak Onigaming school, a Native Band operated Ojibway school, located at Onigaming First Nation, Ontario Canada engaged in a three-year project to infuse digital media into key schooling practices. Based on the values of Anishinabeemowin as being-and-becoming-Anishinabee, a group of local educators, students, elders and university researchers set out to reinvent selected educational activities. In this paper we present four such activities: the introduction of online professional development for teachers, a unit on traditional beaver trapping, digital storytelling and the organization of a technology fair.
It’s the End of the World as We Know it: Anticipation and Anxiety over a Closing Canon, Aubree A. Lawrence, Rebecca Herr Stephenson
Fiske (1992) describes three types of productivity simultaneously undertaken by fans: semiotic productivity (making meaning), enunciative productivity (expressing meaning), and textual productivity. Fan production is, according to this framework, a complex process of identity building, communication, and expression dependent on engagement with both canon materials and memes unique to the fandom. What happens, then, when the canon closes? What impact might a lack of new canon materials have on fan identity, expression, and production? Further, how might conceptions of authorship and relationships between fans and industry producers change as canon and fanon materials age? Certainly, these are questions we cannot yet fully answer. However, changes in response to the impending end of canon are already evident in fan communities. This paper will present case studies from two media fandoms--Lost and Harry Potter—each facing a closing canon.
The Graffiti Writer, Mathew Lincez
Le Confiture is a scenario-based exploration of future Graffiti practices demonstrated by a highly adaptive, connected and technology enabled Graffiti Writer. The scenario follows the Graffiti Writer as he establishes and maximizes empowering relationships and alliances with people/ avatars, media, mediums, and technologies in order to bypass and subvert the barriers to his actualization. In doing so the main character demonstrates how new forms of cultural-media literacy and expression might occur within a multi-contextual and transmediated (Plural) landscape -- where even the subtlest forms of temporary presence and participation can guarantee new forms of permanence, fame and legacy. Additionally, this scenario explores how the Graffiti Writer is inspired and motivated by a new cultural logic, sense of purpose and self-awareness based on the changing nature of audience, spectacle, performance and entertainment.
The Role of Traditional Shadow Play on Creativity in Interaction Design, Rikard Lindell, Oguzhan Ozcan
Interactive design in the computer medium is a product of the last half of twentieth century. However, some argue that interactive design has been a part of the human experience much longer. Throughout the history, different cultures had different techniques for the art of interactive performance, in parallel with the technology. One of them is the technique of “shadow play” which is quite parallel to interactive media. In this paper, by looking into the typology of the traditional “shadow play,” the question of developing new concepts for interactive media is examined by 10 projects which belong to 40 European design students.
Last or Latest? The Plagiarism Controversy regarding Graham Swift’s Last Orders, Anastasia Logotheti
In 1968 Roland Barthes famously declared the author dead; a few years later Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence” (1973) suggested that through the ages poets wage Oedipal wars against their literary forefathers. Yet no graver insult exists against an author than the charge of plagiarism. In 1996, Graham Swift won the prestigious Man Booker Prize with his sixth novel, Last Orders. In 1997, he was accused of “borrowing the plot and formal structure” for his book from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Using this example, I will discuss the notions of originality and plagiarism in the context of contemporary literature.
Tools for Transmediation and Adaptation: Radial Narrative Maps in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Geoffrey Long
The development of transmedia franchises around popular properties often differs according to the philosophies of the property's creators. Some creators maintain close control over each element of their works (Wachowski brothers, George Lucas). By contrast, graphic novelist Mike Mignola has a much more open policy when it comes to his Hellboy franchise. This paper offers a conceptual model for plotting out extensions of a franchise across multiple media. By developing radial narrative maps that place key points of varying narrative threads in a series of concentric circles, it becomes possible for critics, storytellers and producers to model narrative franchises, expanding and collapsing them in such a way to illustrate areas ripe for examination, discussion and expansion.
A Way of Remixing and Transforming Science-Technology-Society Materials into an E- learning Software, Yu-Ling Lu (Shu-Hua Cheng, Chi-Jui Lien)
Science-Technology-Society Education has long been regarded as a mega-trend in educational renovation. This approach offers a wider perspective to see learning and to free that from boundary of existed school subjects. Many experiments have shown positive results of this approach. This report will introduce our recent work on developing a role-playing game (RPG) type E-learning software, named Formosa Hope, to allowing learners to play and to experience science, technology, and society as a whole in a game learning environment. Using this as an example, we would like to share some experiences of the collaboration among creative director, content designers, animators and programmers, and to demonstrate the differences between traditional cultural expression and that in a RPG virtual environment.
Future Audiences for Local Content in an Un-regulated Global Market: What Tomorrow’s Australian Audiences Will Watch in the Digital Age, Susan Luckman, Julia de Roeper
With the successful maintenance of an Australian drama industry dependent upon its appeal to future audiences, this paper reports on a study being conducted to provide crucial information about changing media consumption patterns amongst the young people who constitute Australia’s future audience. This paper will discuss young people’s digital media consumption and its implications for future cultural policy and legislation. In particular, it will report on the Australian film industry’s perception of threat from both off-shore (especially US) content, and shifting patterns of media consumption (especially the move to mobile technologies by young consumers).
The You in YouTube: The Emergence of Collective Identity Formation Through Online Video Sharing, Debora Lui, Huma Yusef
YouTube has redefined the basis according to which identities are constructed by supplanting individualism with a process of collective identity formation. On sites such as YouTube, identity creation becomes a process of negotiating authenticity and performance in public by taking into account the commentary of an audience of strangers. Moreover, identity formation on YouTube is no longer grounded in the real world on the basis of race or social class. Rather, personas begin to exist within parameters of the website itself in moments of self-referentiality, in relation to other videos, popular You Tube “characters,” and by-now-familiar spaces such as the quintessential, transnational sparse bedroom.
Me and Music Makes 2.0: Socially-Driven Music Sharing and the Adoption of Participatory Media Applications, Mary Madden
Music has dominated, and in many ways, fueled the development of the 2.0 space. Distributed networks of socially-driven music sharing helped lay the foundation for mainstream adoption of participatory media applications in the U.S. MySpace is perhaps the most iconic example of a “Web 2.0” application whose audience was incubated through music, but the existence of an online community bound by a shared interest in music and content sharing is arguably nothing new. This paper will demonstrate, through an historical analysis, the influence of music on the adoption of Web 2.0 applications, while also highlighting some of the most compelling applications that now fall under the "Music 2.0" umbrella.
Using Wiki in Education: A Book about Wiki, Inspired by a Blog and Published on a Wiki, Stewart Mader
In May 2006, I started work on a book about using the wiki in education. Over the past six months, I worked with 10 collaborators to develop the book on a wiki, and on October 24, the book was published as one of the first-ever wiki-based books. I'll discuss the book in greater depth, and explore the logistics of running a collaborative, wiki-based project which requires a new approach to intellectual property, the new digital media strategy of integrating & publicizing it using the existing blog, and the new relationship between the producers and consumers of this information since parts of the book are editable by its readers.
Volatility, Instability, Ambiguity: The Evolving Digital Record, Marlene Manoff
The world is awash in new digital objects that resist our attempts to describe and categorize them. These new modes of cultural production are posing extremely interesting and challenging questions to the library community. I will describe the ways in which new media are forcing us to see more traditional physical artifacts in new ways and I will describe some of the challenges libraries face in reinventing bibliographic systems to map the vast decentered information spaces in which we operate.
I Can Make You a (Net) Celebrity Overnight: Fan Production and Participatory Culture in Online Reality Shows, Alice E. Marwick
Online reality shows pit average users against each other, emulating the conventions of television franchises like American Idol and Project Runway while substituting user-created content for television episodes. An outgrowth of the popularity of both reality television and Internet fandom, online reality contests are fan-driven and made possible by free publishing tools such as Google Video and YouTube. This paper uses three online reality competitions, Google Idol, LiveJournal’s Next Top Model, and Project Designer to discuss participatory culture in the context of audience reception studies.
People of Color and the Moving Image, Michelle Materre
Throughout the history of the moving image, representations of people of color were embedded with stereotypes. This continued unabated until the late 1960s when mainstream media began to pay attention to the social issues at hand – poverty, discrimination and racial and social injustice – and began to broaden the media’s depiction of people of color (specifically African Americans and Asian Americans) in more realistic, diverse ways. This paper and accompanying audiovisual presentation will examine some of the earlier media representations which were traditional in their presentation modes, as compared to more contemporary media images which borrow from this history while evoking creativity and imagination to create a new and unique style and format that current technology affords.
Human-Computer Interfaces and the Emergence of E-Authors, Artur Matuck
As the computer enlarges its range of action, human expression has been increasingly determined by hybrid systems of authorship. As the process accelerates, a series of questions emerge. How are artists and writers reacting to forms of artificial intelligence, media technology, and software, that can actually be seen as new “authors”? How has culture been responding to the dislocation of human centrality in the creative process? Are the paradigms and concepts presently utilized to understand creative processes becoming obsolete? This paper will present reports of interdisciplinary collaboration in the production of hybrid authorship; the process of designing artificial “authors” in art or literature; and the actual production of artificial “authors.”
Balancing Emotion and Technology: In Defense of the 30-second Commercial, Michael L. Maynard, (Alison C. Carey)
Statistics show that over the past 10 years, despite accelerating changes in digital media technologies, the 30-second television advertising spot has actually increased in frequency. And its prominence as a favored unit of commercial length shows no signs of diminishing. This paper argues that the 30-second commercial will continue to endure and prosper because (1) it best exploits the emotional appeal, which is key to persuasion (2) its length is ideal for short term memory, combining affect with propositional information. Additionally, (3) fierce competition from DVR technology and other digital forms will force ad-makers to create more engaging, entertaining and thus more effective 30-second commercials.
Archiving Prison Memories, Cahal McLaughlin
This paper draws on recordings made in June 2006 from 30 ex-occupants of Armagh Gaol, which housed mostly women prisoners during the political conflict in the North of Ireland, known as the Troubles. These recordings were the first stage of a Prisons Memory Archive project aimed at creating an audiovisual, digital archive of four of the prisons used by the British state during the conflict. Key themes of the paper include the significance of the acknowledgement of authorship – the material is owned by the individual participants and copyright is ‘leased’ to the PMA; the negotiation of recording politically sensitive material; and the nature of an archive that allows multiple and contested versions of the recent past in a post conflict society.
Compulsory Licensing and the Collective Ethics of Creative Compensation, John McMurria
Video has increasingly circulated over the Internet through a variety of business models. I-tunes and the movie studios have used pay-per-video models while the broadcast and cable networks have used advertising-supported video. But these models do not lend themselves to video sharing sites where a wider array of citizen video makers share work alongside the recirculation and appropriation of copy protected corporate produced content. Compulsory licensing has provided an alternative copyright regime. This essay surveys the history of compulsory licensing as a more collective ethics of compensation for creative work and relates this to current movements to provide alternative models for compensating video makers in the digital age.
Document: An Oral History of Washington Square Park, Karl Mendonca, Marcus Pingel, Charles Yust
Document is an interactive storytelling installation placed in New York’s Washington Square Park constructing a polyphonic oral narrative through the assimilation of historical images and stories recorded by individuals in the park. This paper will introduce the project briefly covering the design process and the public response to the installation. Further, we will discuss the ethical implications of documenting and (re)presenting appropriated material and argue for the elimination of any form of editorial intervention or an internal / external system of categorization / ranking. Lastly, given the recent decision by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to redesign the park, the project will be assessed in terms of its affordance as a counter-hegemonic platform for contestation.
The Lessons of Generation Dean, Amanda Michel
Amanda Michel was national director of Generation Dean (GenDean for short), the official youth outreach arm of the Dean campaign, which at its height had more than 26,000 active members. (In comparison, at the start of the 2004 race, the Democratic Party’s college network, College Democrats, numbered 2,000.) This paper illustrates the techniques that made up the "grassroots" character of the Dean campaign. As Ms. Michel makes clear, GenDean happened, to a large degree, because staffers noticed and, in a break with campaign tradition, welcomed outside efforts, especially the autonomously formed "Students for Dean."
Academics By Any Other Name?: Pseudonymous Blogging and New Functions of Authorship, Kim Middleton
Recent articles map the practices and possibilities of a growing community of bloggers who work in, around, and occasionally against academia, sometimes doing so pseudonymously. The coin of the academic realm is the identity attached to intellectual property: a scholar, by rights, is little more than the sum of her publications. As pseudonymous bloggers, however, the academics described above cede this primary component of their roles qua academics. In essence, their intellectual work is published outside the author functions dictated by the norms of the academy. In this paper, I articulate the ways in which the practice of pseudonymity in blogademe is revising the traditional notion of autonomous academic/ scholarly identity on the Internet and, reciprocally, across the academy.
Appropriation and Collaboration in Digital Writing, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Jill Walker
Panelists will discuss how collaborative and appropriative writing has transformed their own writing practices and their engagement with digital media. Collaborative writing practices and literary works based on appropriation have existed since the oral tradition and into manuscript culture and print. Shakespeare rewrote plotlines and characters from historical and literary works; he also allowed his players a free hand in the modification of the plays as they were performed. Economics, not literary practice, dictated that authorship should be attributed to a single individual. What is "new" in new media writing is not the collaborative concept itself, but new contexts of production, reading, and participation. Citing projects they have written or collaboratively written, the panelists will look at how digital media technologies, communities, and institutions support collaboration and appropriation.
Beaver Knowledge Systems: Narrative, Place and the Internet, Patrick Moore
This paper examines the use of the landscape by elders from the Doig River First Nation in British Columbia, who have assumed a central role in the production of locally produced digital media for distribution via the Internet. This paper is based on three years of collaborative research with Dane-zaa (Beaver) elders and community members from Doig River B.C. working on language documentation for the Volkswagen Foundation’s Endangered Languages Archive and a Virtual Museum of Canada website project. The paper identifies ways of working with community members to facilitate culturally appropriate uses of new media.
Repetition with a Difference: Lost as Makeover of The Prisoner, Joanne Morreale
This essay considers the television series Lost as a makeover of The Prisoner, a British series first broadcast in 1967. Lost and The Prisoner share key thematic, stylistic, and structural similarities. Lost's third-season opener (“A Tale of Two Cities”) makes its connection explicit through allusion to and direct quotation from the first episode of The Prisoner. Invoking The Prisoner places Lost within a particular generic tradition and invites complex readings across both texts that speak to their place within an ongoing cultural dialogue.
Personal Essay Documentaries: The First-Person Approach to Digital Nonfiction Filmmaking, Dustin Morrow
When a documentarian appears in his/ her own film, the movie is often categorized in the nonfiction subgenre of “Personal Essay Documentaries.” My lecture begins with a look at my own film, Matchmaker, and how I came to think about my contribution to this subgenre. It then examines the literary origins of this approach to documentary filmmaking, and provides a survey of how this subgenre has changed over three decades, from its emergence as a counterpoint to the Direct Cinema approach of “no filmmaker involvement,” favored by such legendary documentarians as Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers, to its development by film memoirists like Ross McElwee in theDirect Cinema approach of “no filmmaker involvement,” favored by such legendary documentarians as Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers, to its development by film memoirists like Ross McElwee in the 70s, to its massive growth in the 80s and 90s resulting from the widespread availability of low-cost video equipment and the vision of young artists like Sadie Benning.
From Amateur to Pro? Standards for Vodcasting According to Online How-To Sources, Eggo Mueller
Any amateur can record a clip. Follow these steps to look like a pro, Wired magazine’s website promises its readers and teaches them how to create their own videos or vodcasts in only a few steps. This paper investigates the normalizing strategies of such online how-to manuals for vodcasting and compares them to how-to books for film amateurs from the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that, like handbooks for film amateurs, the vodcast manuals can be read as professional interventions that help amateurs to avoid the typical beginner’s mistakes and at the same time define aesthetic norms for amateur production according to more professional standards. The crucial question here is whether these normalizing discourses function the same way within their different historical and cultural contexts.
Media Sense: The Production of Sense at the Interface between New and Old Media Technologies, Warwick Mules
This paper examines the transformation of the visual image in print media in the late nineteenth century, at a threshold of the new photographic age. It locates a point at which the new photographic technology had not quite supplanted the earlier method of woodcut reproduction, and instead formed a complex image-text relation that can be detected in the very form of the printed image, its layout and accompanying text. Employing Walter Benjamin’s ideas about aura and reproduction, I propose a theory of media, media texts and images, in which the human subject is constituted through a complex interplay between visual and textual traces played out through the struggle between competing media technologies, written directly onto the image-texts themselves.
Digital Archives and the State, Colm Murphy
Recording the history of Northern Ireland’s 30-year conflict poses many problems for the media, academics, governments and those who took part. While new digital media technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to tell the story of a modern civil conflict, traditional problems associated with a post-conflict society hinder this. This paper analyses the effect that government secrecy, threats of prosecution against sources, copyright restrictions and the need for sensitivity to victims has on recording the period.
The Tragically Ludicrous and the Ludicrously Tragic: Appropriation and Creation in Queer Cinema, James Nadeau
Queer filmmakers have appropriated the narratives and forms of mainstream Hollywood cinema and pop culture for years. From John Waters and Fassbinder to the New Queer Cinema of the early ‘90s LGBT cinema was notable for taking mainstream aesthetics and “queer-ing” them. My paper will look at the way that LGBT filmmakers appropriated both form and content as a means of creating a cinema that stood apart from Hollywood. By comparing examples of the former (romantic comedy genre films like All Over the Guy and A Family Affair) with the more experimental work of Bruce La Bruce, Peter Spears and J.D. Disalvatore, I hope to show that appropriation can be a device that aids both assimilation and revolution.
E-Cultures: Interrogating Copynorms and Copyright Non-Compliance in the Realm of Cyberspace, Keerti Nagappa
The research paper interrogates the phenomenon of large-scale, non-compliance of copyright laws in cyberspace. The paper begins by examining relevant socio-economic theories regarding what makes people obey the law. The gatekeeper regime of copyright would be examined. The second part of the paper would deal with the architecture/ design of the P2P technologies that enables greater group cooperation. The final part of the paper will apply some of the lessons gleaned from the foregoing discussion to the policy choices that courts, legislatures, and private actors must confront in regulating copyright infringement. This will include an examination of alternative strategies that have emerged within the IPR regime such as the Copyleft and the Open Source movement.
Copyright in Transition, Meera Nair
In this paper, I examine a nineteenth century literary form, the cento, as emblematic of contemporary legitimate practices of cultural borrowing. The cento was a poetic work, composed of passages taken from other authors and arranged to give new meaning. “Non-protected” is determined not by some quantitative or temporal measure against the original work, but by that work's capacity to foster new creation. Today, as in the nineteenth century, a cento would be a legitimate cultural creation by way of fair dealing. I conclude the paper with reference to a 2004 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada regarding fair dealing. While unanimously upholding fair dealing, the justices cautioned that its legitimacy relies upon its continued use.
From Hyperfiction to Extrafiction, Alok Nandi
“Extrafiction” is a conceptual framework encapsuling research, design and development coined by this author. In a networked environment where architecture meets storytelling with or without technologies, what narratives and imaginary spaces are articulated? How functions are extrapolated, remediated into fiction? What are the emerging patterns in praxis? This presentation will discuss the contributions and conversations emerging and connected to two exhibitions, D-Design (Centre Pompidou, Paris summer 2005) and Africamuseum (Belgium, in progress). These exhibitions contained set-ups allowing their audiences to propose stories. Overall, this approach could be called “Exhibition 2.0,” allowing visitors to comment, tag and annotate.
Personal Narratives, Uncontrolled Events, and Non-Fictional Representation in Online Communities, Vinicius Navarro
This paper looks at the way documentary conventions have been used and transformed by online communities. It focuses specifically on personal testimonies and confessional narratives, and explores the idea that non-fictional representation now includes events and situations that exceed the traditional boundaries of the social-historical world. Using these personal narratives as examples (i.e., LonelyGirl15) of how new media have redefined traditional genres, this paper addresses questions such as: What is the status of non-fictional representation in online communities? How can documentary theory account for the particular forms of events generated/represented within these communities?
Leadership and Digital Communication in the 21st Century, Elizabeth Neely
Within the past 15 years, Internet-based digital communications have become ubiquitous venues for information sharing, e-commerce, collaboration and communication. How has the growth of digital communications affected theories of leadership? Most digital communication relies on text-based language without the benefit of body language or tone of voice for interpretation. Digital groups are generally informal and communication is asynchronous (with the exception of instant messaging). What leadership qualities and strategies emerge from the opportunities and limitations of digital communications collaborations? To examine these questions, this paper looks at research conducted on leadership in electronic collaboration of both adult virtual teams in the workplace and teenage virtual groups.
The Community as Artist: The Show With Ze Frank, Michael Z. Newman
The Show With Ze Frank is a web video that has appeared on weekdays since March, 2006. In addition to making The Show, Ze Frank also maintains a website (including a forum and wiki) where viewers interact with him and each other. Fans not only watch The Show, but collaborate on projects by making videos to be incorporated into it, scripting segments, and staging stunts. "The show's format," Frank writes, "is a conversation between the host and the viewers of the program." This paper considers The Show as an instance of the new participatory culture that solicits the creation of collective intelligence. My paper considers the aesthetic of collaborative authorship that is the product of this interaction.
Swoosh Time: Nike’s Art of Speed Ad Campaign and the Blogosphere, Anna Notaro
This paper deals with what I define as the new dromology of consumption by discussing Nike’s Art of Speed ad campaign. In May 2004, Gawker media designed a blog micro-site for Nike to promote the project wog micro-site for Nike to promote the project which consisted of a short film series showing 15 digital artists interpretation of the concept of speed. The paper discusses not just the impact of the contemporary culture of acceleration on the phenomenon of Internet branding, it also engages with the issue of commercialism and artistic creativity in the context of today’s new media practices. The short films produced by the 15 digital artists are contrasted with the new discourse of speed by the Australian artist David Noonan.
Battling for Rights: Determining the Criteria of Fair Use in Academic Institutions, Azuka Nzegwu
New media technologies are blurring the line between copyright violation and fair use. This line was recently blurred at Binghamton University, after an art exhibition spurred the creation of an online parody exhibition by a graduate student. The university summarily shut down the exhibition after a few hours even though it had deployed the argument of free speech to stem the controversy arising from its own official exhibition. This paper will examine the circumstances of the case. The two questions that frame this essay are: how are administrators drawing the distinction between network violation and fair use? And how do administrators tell the difference between official and non-official websites?
Mixed Messages: Independent and Collaborative Console Video Game Development, Casey O'Donnell
What can the everyday worlds of video game developers teach us about the technical and social processes involved in the production of media and technology? How do these worlds differ across national and cultural boundaries? How do diverse forces and activities -- laws, technologies, collaboration, and workplace cultures, for example --shape the development of video games, and console games in particular? This presentation uses video game developers and video game development in the United States and India as an index into understanding these complex issues. In particular this presentation examines the ways in which the multiplicity of forces swirling around console game systems shapes and alters the available spaces of collaboration and production of media and technology.
The Hoax That Leads To Learning: How the “Truth Context” in Digital Media Stimulates Critical Discourse, Jamie O’Neil
This paper reflects upon an elaborate hoax targeting executive management students at the Norwegian School of Management BI in Oslo, Norway that culminated in a video mockumentary entitled Truth [in theory]. As opposed to the more direct style of the Sokal hoax (which resulted in many backfires) the “hoax-that-leads-to-learning” leverages the depth of involvement and participation found in much of today’s subtle new media humor. When educators assume a more subtle engagement with “the truth context” it places the burden of discerning truth on the learner, who, via digital environments such as YouTube, is ever more familiar with the critical messages and anti-aesthetics of new media hoaxes, parodies and possibly-true narratives.
Exploitation of Traditional Cultural Knowledge in Contemporary Societies: The Need for a New Equity, Adejoke O. Oyewunmi
The paper explores whether the fair use defense can be used to justify the exploitation and utilization of cultural knowledge and practices, particularly where it involves reproduction, communication to the public, adaptation and other forms of exploitation carried on for commercial purposes, or outside their traditional or customary context. As rights deriving from the cultural and traditional practices of the people, are they best protected under customary laws? Or is a more globally widespread and recognized system likely to be more effective? With particular emphasis on the African experience, it examines the suitability of such initiatives, particularly given the inherent difficulties in fitting cultural property, which is often non-exclusive and communally owned, into existing legal frameworks for the protection of intellectual property.
The Career of the Online Motion Picture Maker, Elliot Panek
This paper charts the transition in the motion picture maker's career from spec scripts, agents, and reels consisting of several short films to series of short online videos accompanied by evidence of sustained or growing popularity. I examine the discourse surrounding online videos as well as recent attempts by the motion picture industry to make use of burgeoning online talent. By comparing this information to existing histories of motion picture making, I offer an account of a career in transition and, in doing so, provide a standpoint from which the legal, ethical, and commercial interests of the present-day motion picture maker can be considered. I argue that the abundance of online video blurs the line between video-as-conversation and video-as-art/entertainment. As such, online motion pictures are not as liable to be restricted in terms of their use as subsequent versions. At the same time, digital distribution allows for a high level of transparency and a thoroughly efficient networking system that may shrink the gap between insider and outsider, creating a middle management class in the motion picture industry.
Suffering and Seriality: Memory, Continuity and Trauma in Monthly Superhero Adventures, Martyn Pedler
This paper will explore recent shifts in the ongoing interaction between text, audience, continuity and memory in long-running superhero narratives. Why are some stories remembered, and others happily forgotten? A superhero's monthly adventures used to be stand-alone stories, but once the market could guarantee fans each issue in sequential order, ongoing storylines became expected. Closer attention had to be paid to the past, collected over years of publication, both encouraging character development and creating continuity glitches. Whereas a ludicrous plot twist could previously be ignored into oblivion, now it requires active explanation. I will explain how writers currently plunder old stories, finding new pleasure and trauma in narrative variations, and spelunk for unexplored gaps in decades-old stories to thrust more pain and drama into the next issue of the hero's ongoing adventures.
Celebrity Juice, Not From Concentrate: Perez Hilton and the New Star Production, Anne Petersen
The gossip blog Perezhilton.com currently boasts 4 million unique visitors daily. Hilton and the Internet gossip phenomenon he popularized represent a significant shift in the manner in which stars are produced and consumed in the age of new media. His persistent campaign against Tom Cruise is acknowledged as significantly diminishing the success of Mission Impossible 3; he is likewise credited with outing former boy band member Lance Bass and routinely insinuates the homosexuality of dozens of others. Using Richard Dyer's landmark study on stars as my framework, I assert that Hilton, gossip blogs, and new media make visible the machinery of Hollywood production, effectively altering the way that stars are consumed today.
Opening the Gutenberg Parenthesis: Media in Transition in Shakespeare’s England, Thomas Pettitt
We are experiencing a media-led closing of a four-century “Gutenberg Parenthesis," characterized by the dominance of original, autonomous, and stable cultural products. The attendant confusions may be better appreciated by juxtaposition with the exact reverse process, the opening of the Gutenberg parenthesis, strikingly documented in Shakespeare’s parallel careers as poet and playwright. While his non-dramatic works belonged to a cultural system which had made the transition, Elizabethan theatre was still “pre-parenthetical." Dramatisations of existing narratives, plays were partly constructed from ready-made dramatic materials, and followed current fashions. Usually published and performed anonymously, many were collaborative, production-line creations, subsequently adapted to suit a variety of contexts, and vulnerable to the overstretched memories or opportunistic improvisations of players. The gap between the two systems is registered in the 1592 attack on Shakespeare for plagiarism, but within his lifetime campaigns against derivative writing, meddling players, anarchistic clowns and defective printings mark significant steps into the Gutenberg parenthesis. On the model of Ben Jonson’s innovative publication of his plays as “Works," Shakespeare’s were crystallized and canonized in the 1623 First Folio, to be misconstrued as literature ever since: juxtaposition with our post-parenthetical media will enable a more historically alert appreciation of his real achievement.
Awesome: I Shot That!: User-Generated Content in Documentary Film, Jennifer Porst
In the 1950s, Jean Rouch believed polyphony created by allowing the subjects of his documentaries a voice in the production of his films would enable his films to more fully reflect that which he was trying to represent. In 2004, the Beastie Boys pushed the limits of polyphony by using footage shot by 50 different audience members to create a documentary film of their concert at Madison Square Garden. Awesome: I Shot That! suggests that limits to the effectiveness of polyphony do exist and, when crossed, result in an indistinguishable cacophony; that the democratic intent of user-generated content is ultimately usurped by the editor in documentary films; and, finally, that the innovations of this type of documentary filmmaking necessitate a reconsideration and revision of the language and categories currently used to discuss documentary film.
Glenn Gould’s Electronic Future, Jeff Porter
In 1964, at the age of 31, Glenn Gould the virtuoso pianist turned his back on live performance. He had fallen in love with microphones and tape recorders. Thanks to the tape splice, for instance, it was now possible to recombine elements of a studio performance into a new composition. If splicing threatened the aura of the musician as an artist, so much the better, wrote Gould, who saw in mechanical reproduction a release from what Benjamin had called a parasitical dependence on ritual. Gould’s radical approach to authorship was remarkably prescient and was most fully realized in his series of radio documentaries, The Solitude Trilogy (1967-1973). Focusing on this work, I argue that Gould’s invention of contrapuntal radio disavowed prevailing notions of authorship by challenging the author-centric assumptions of mainstream radio and traditional documentary production.
Latino Culture and Ugly Betty, Henry Puente
This paper spotlights the new and surprising ABC hit Ugly Betty. This sitcom features on Betty Suarez (America Ferrera), a working hard Latina woman, who has no sense of fashion ironically, trying to succeed in a trendy fashion magazine Mode. I briefly will talk about how the American version differs from its Mexican and Columbian predecessors in terms of casting. Simultaneously, I discuss the Latino cultural elements that producers kept within the sitcom. Next, I explain how this program may influence Latinas as well as Latinos positively, since Betty represents the first successful TV series that centers on Latina heroine in recent memory.
The Musical and Audio Creative Process: An Inspiration from the Common Materials, Alexandre Quessy
Cultural reusage is not new. It made the success of several composers such as Bartok who borrowed many themes from Hungarian folk music. Also, the meeting of Debussy with the Balinese music led him to create his own impressionist style. Using the free software Pure Data, we will demonstrate how audio sampling of familiar materials can be reused and transformed in ways in which it can be recognized or not, which is essential for copyright law to be valid. If illegal, is reusing patterns that are now part of the popular culture an illegitimate act? Libre audio repositories like the Freesound Project are a platform for digital artists and ethnomusicologists to share their audio testimonies to the multitude. Freeing a work in the public domain should also be considered when an extract actually comes from the folk culture.
The New Great Game - The New Colonization in Globalization, Sarina Khan Reddy
With the intersection of capitalism, technology and the media, appropriation is the standard practice of today. Globalization via multi-nationals and Free Trade organizations legitimizes appropriation. WTO/GATT legitimizes the colonization of the intellectual heritage of the Third World through Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). As a media artist, educator and activist, I seek to reshape, rethink and reinvent our responses to globalization, the media and appropriation. My video work explores this New Colonization embodied in globalization. I use appropriated footage from documentaries, news, and Hollywood movies to expose the media apparatus and to explore the collapsing boundaries between news and entertainment.
Harlequin Meets the SIMS: A Comparative History of Interactive Narrative Media for Children and Youth from 1770 to the Present, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh
This paper sketches the outline for a comparative cultural history of mediated forms of interactivity for English speaking children and youth on paper and digital platforms. Intended for instruction and amusement examples include 18th century flap books, Regency paper dolls and domestic play sets, Victorian toy theatres, and contemporary websites such as Barbie.com and computer games such as the SIMS. Interactivity will be approached within a historical context beginning with Enlightenment educational theory (such as by John Locke 1693) and a counter tradition from the popular theatre.
Convergence and Transformation of Contemporary Art and New Media, Francisco Ricardo
An astounding number of new art forms emerged in every decade of the 20th century, each form bursting into prominence and immediately seen as a radical event without pedigree or legacy. Often, however, the emergence of a new style was cosynchronous with new technology. To what degree is new media art informed by technological advances, often sudden in appearance, versus by historical continuities, extending existing contemporary forms of art? I present cases in three genres of new media art – interactive sculpture, video art, and interactive games – and examine how such new media can be understood both as revolutionary work as well as extending pre-existing contemporary art practices and concerns.
Trickster Reality, Thomas Riccio
How does a performance artist live and work in an ironic, examined, self-aware, performative space, in a world of permanent liminality? Chance. Like primeval chaos, things are revealed not created. Chance is useful—no, central—to my objective/ method/ philosophy as a post-cultural performance artist. Chance is the essence spinning the world. Accidents are happening. Why? Chance is the source of every innovation and evolution. And the way to survive and facilitate chance in a permanently liminal, performative world? The gist: appropriation and collaboration, insider and outsider, being and belonging nowhere, my problem and opportunity working the detritus of so many cultures.
Programmable Media and Open Platforms for Creativity and Collaboration, Michelle Riel, Helen Thorington
We observe that artists, designers and researchers working in digitally networked and programmable environments are increasingly making projects that are media platforms, tools and services which are open and contingent on participation and the contribution of content to realize them. We present case studies exploring two forms of current practice. Firstly, the creation of original software to create tools and services for creative and social use, such as a 3d drawing tool and musical instrument freely available, or a public commons meta layer conceived as a continuous public space for collaboration. Secondly, the creation of original work using the tools available within open platforms such as SecondLife and MySpace to build community and raise awareness.
Architecture and Control: “Natural” Constraints on Cultural Production in the Networked Society, Benjamin J Robertson
In Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig argues that the Internet will have whatever characteristics we give de and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig argues that the Internet will have whatever characteristics we give it, limited only by the physical properties of the materials that comprise its physical layer and the ingenuity of the coders who design its parameters. My paper argues that, although Lessig is right about the nature/ essence of the Internet, technology is capable of becoming what theorist McKenzie Wark calls a second nature, a “naturalized” set of moral codes that constrain how we operate in the world. Like Nature, this constructed set of rules delimits how we interact with objects, namely cultural productions such as texts, music, and images. Unlike Nature, however, the process by which these rules are constructed is susceptible to capture by institutionalized power. This paper will investigate what this capture means for the future of cultural production as well as make suggestions about the manner in which this trend may be averted.
Media Convergence, Masculinity, and Militarism: Analysis and Strategic Planning for Contesting the Hegemony of War, Vincent F. Rocchio
Convergence of media technologies in the last 10 years has redefined media practices and media distribution. This paper examines the convergence of representational strategies across media—specifically TV news coverage, Cinema, and Video Games—in the ideological updating of masculinity within the War genre. Using aspects of Lacanian theory, this paper examines how militarism conducts itself through signification, with entertainment media as one of its core venues—and masculinity as one of its primary signifiers. It examines the popular appeal of its discur. It examines the popular appeal of its discursive practices as a means of obtaining consent. Moreover, it deploys the analysis towards developing strategies for the peace movement to contest the hegemony of militarism.
Lowering Cartography: PPGIS, Map Hacks and Location Aware Hybrids, Rebecca Ross
This paper reviews a selection of recent cartographic practices that I have brought together under the rubric of "lowering." This entails the consideration of both mapping activities that engage with a vantage point situated relatively nearer to the ground as well as those that open mapping to a wider scope of participation. These vernacular, unofficial or informal practices interact with cartographic convention to produce a variety unanticipated forms and applications. These include strategies for involving community members in spatial data, alternative graphical and interactive languages for describing space and place, methods of "freeing" spatial data from the control of institutions, and the exportation of location notation to objects traditionally situated outside of cartography.
Creative Rights? The Informatisation of Labour, Networks of Expression and the Legitimation of Culture, Ned Rossiter
This paper questions the notion of ‘cultural’ or ‘creative rights’ as they figure within the practices of network cultures. Key, here, is the problem of scale. In order for rights to be upheld, legitimated and affirmed in ways that hold meaning and political-economic traction at the level of the everyday, a scalar movement is required from the denationalized realm of international institutions to the renationalized territory of the sovereign state. Such movement is rare for a host of political, economic and legal reasons. Given this predicament, this paper asks what use are rights, especially as they pertain to culture and creativity within information economies? My interest is in how to think the challenges of network governance within social-technical systems that have a tendency to privilege horizontal, open flows as the precondition of innovation and invention.
Identity and Cross-Platform Gaming, Dan Roy
We play videogames in part to see ourselves differently. Games provide safe spaces for experimentation with multiple identities. Multiplayer online games, in particular, allow us to take on new social roles fluidly, building on identities that make us feel good and abandoning those that don't. This presentation will examine the ways we view ourselves through games. We will look at cutting-edge case studies from the game industry, including how cell phones can change the way we experience virtual worlds, how Microsoft and Nintendo are helping gamers create identities that persist across games and platforms, and how educational games are reframing learning as playful and social.
The Space In-Between: Collaborative and Speculative Authorship in Cross-Sited Narrative Franchises, Marc Ruppel
This paper will explore the dynamics of online audience interaction, participation and interpretation in cross-sited narratives, also known as transmedial, cross-media or franchise narratives. More specifically, I will introduce the concept of narrative capital, which positions story information as a good exchanged online as social and cultural currency. Drawing upon narratology, new media theory and cognitive science, and examining narratives as diverse as NBC’s Heroes, Lost and the recent crossover between Marvel Comics and the soap opera Guiding Light, I will argue that it is the space in-between cross-sited narrative media, the space where stories are decompressed, expanded and created, where we are witnessing a new type of authorship, a new fan fiction, one where speculation is tantamount to sophisticated fictive creation.
Case Study: Emotional Design of the Video Game Silent Hill, Restless Dreams, Doris C. Rusch
With an in-depth analysis of the horror survival game Silent Hill - Restless Dreams (SH2) I hope to illustrate the following keystones of emotional videogame design: 1) Reality Status: what are the factors that lend the game verisimilitude and help the player to willingly suspend her disbelief? Human Source Concerns: what source concerns is the game addressing on the operational levels of fiction, interface and the game as system? 3) Regulation of Player Interest: how is the player kept playing, and what prevents the story from slipping into the background?
Labors of Love: Capitalizing on Fan Economies, Julie Levin Russo
In our contemporary climate of accelerated media change, it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with extra-broadcast content, offering television new opportunities to intensify its intercourse with fans and the proliferation of its texts. At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unofficial fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and labor in an increasingly unstable consumer/ producer opposition. Taking Battlestar Galactica as a case study, this paper explores the interrelationship between collaboration and reappropriation in TV production - as the show is recycled and diffused in a smorgasbord of official tie-ins like blogs, podcasts, webisodes, deleted scenes, interviews and trailers.
CTRL/DELETE: The Necessity of Collaboration, Conversation, Complexity and Conflict in the Constitution of Digital Culture(s), Jon Saklofske
Comparing differing models of authorship and ownership assumed by three types of interactive computer databases highlights the multiplicity of expressive and collaborative opportunity in the “digital age.” Multi-user, object-oriented domains (MOOs) encourage active participation in the creation of linked communicative spaces, but inherently curtail collaboration by defining everything as an owned object. Although blogs appear to circumvent such commercialist exclusivity, the structure of the blog database retains the romantically charged idea of unalterable products of authorship. However, wikis, allowing any entry to be added, edited, supplemented or deleted by their users, significantly decenter authorship, redefining it as essentially collaborative. While the concurrence of these database opportunities necessarily undermines the reductive idea of a unified digital culture, such diversity also confirms the appropriateness of the constitutive multiplicity modeled by the wiki paradigm.
Signification and Naming, Virve Sarapik
My paper will discuss the problems related with the author’s name and singularity in visual art. Today, both aspects are conceived as a social and cultural construct rather than the requirements that have immanently originated from art or representation. Authorship includes the aspects of responsibility and evaluation (cf. with M. Foucault’s idea of the authors function): works of an anonymous author are received with certain caution. In a wider context, it has, due to the development of modernism, also caused the appreciation of clear categorical status rather than intermediate forms. The paper examines the author’s name as the way of signifying the work, proceeding from three criteria: a public biography, metonymy of the name and pseudonym.
Revisiting the Case of Interactive Audiences and the User as Producer, Mirko Tobias Schaefer
Research on consumers, users and audiences was limited to entities such as the individual consumer and user or the audience and the community. The question of participation was measured on the consumers' ability to influence the cultural product itself. Participation has to be questioned in terms of agency and relations. The network metaphor helped to establish a view of collaborating communities, but was veiling the interdependent relations between a socio-technical ecosystem consisting of a plurality of users and technological systems. This paper revisits the user participation in the extended culture industry in terms of user agency, media specificity and interdependent relations between users, corporate companies and the surrounding socio-technical ecosystem.
So Many DJs: Creative Flourishing on the Fringes of Networked Media, Stephen Schultze
The remix duo 2 Many DJs stands on both sides of some emergent borders of contention the legal and the illegal, the old and "new" media, and the for- profit and non-commercial. 2 Many DJs represents a case study of how creativity can flourish or be suppressed depending upon which side of these contentious boundaries an artist dwells. This paper will examine the ways in which 2 Many DJs builds upon the "illegal art" legacy of artists such as John Oswald, the Evolution Control Committee, and Negativland. It will discuss the ways in which the duo has made use of broadcast media to win a broad audience and to avoid copyright liability that is applied more aggressively to recorded media.
Killing the Facts by "Creating" the News: Creativity, Ownership and Collective Collaboration in the News Business, Claudia Schwarz
Journalism is a craft rather than an art. Yet, it is creative in the sense that the reproduction of some fact is shaped so it fits a story that is short, easy to understand, and attractive. If we strip a news item of all its creative (and created) surroundings, what remains are 10 to 30 per cent of actual news value. The obvious question that arises from this observation is: How much of a news broadcast is creative work? However, a further and maybe even more important angle to the whole idea in the creation of news might be the issue of ownership. In connection with recent developments in news technology (blogs, collaborative local online news forums, online news broadcasts, real-time news, etc.), the "they" in journalism is just about to be replaced by a "we.”
Bubble 2.0: Online Organized Critique of Web 2.0, D. Travers Scott
This paper examines "Web 2.0" as it finds itself stretched from marketing buzzword to umbrella for larger social phenomenon involving collaborative uses of technologies valorized for participatory, egalitarian, and democratic potential. The triumphalism of Web 2.0 proponents is examined in light of Jodi Dean's concept of “communicative capitalism,” in which message contribution dilutes and substitutes for actual social conflict, as well as my 13 years experience in corporate advertising and name-creation. From these perspectives, Web 2.0 is contextualized within familiar tropes of treating technology as semi-autonomous, monolithic, discrete, and ahistorical. I will present online Web 2.0 critiques, such as those of Wikipedia and the Bubble 2.0 Snark Group. The irony of Web 2.0 detractors using Web 2.0 technologies for their critique is not lost, but examined as a possible conceptual route out of dualistic technology debates and struggles over meaning.
The Psychology of User-Generated Content Ownership, Yun Sejun
The paper is focused on measuring Korean Internet users' attitudes towards user-generated content, in other words, the psychology of ownership in the digital age. The research questions are: how strongly ugc contributors pursue the fun and freedom of cultural production, compared with legal rights and economic benefits derived from ownership?; how influential the just-for-fun attitude is in motivating them to produce personalized media content?; and how consistent their attitude is even after their cultural product becomes popular? From the research, it is shown that being enjoyable and sharable is dominant, necessary, and even sufficient for the individual content creators, You (Time magazine's Person of the Year), to willingly contribute to generating cultural products.
Educational Simulation: Practiceware, Game, Artificial Intelligence, Simone Seym
At the intersection of learning and simulation, Virtual Leader, a leadership simulation, creates a whole new genre of media that can simultaneously engage, educate, entertain, and enlighten. Clark Aldrich, an international acclaimed visionary of the industry, wrote more than one hundred leadership rules that formed the deep logical structure for Virtual Leader‘s artificial intelligence. A key element is the insight that educational simulations work better when they interpret reality instead of trying to reproduce it, to be “realistic.” That requires designers to analyze the base learning called for in any given didactic situation, rather than blindly modeling real-life. Simulations need to be about learning rather than about the simulation. The communication model of the Virtual Leader does not focus on what was said, but instead why it was said. Understanding simulations helps us understand all educational experiences. It is about experiential learning.
Bollywood: India's "Global" Self-Representation, Nada Shabout
India's film industry, long known in most of the Third World and some European countries, was suddenly discovered in the US in the past decade. Of particular significance is that successful Bollywood films remain true to traditional Indian film conventions and format, despite various adaptations from other cultures and the recycling of the old. The three-hour long Indian film offers an intriguing space of debating various issues of ethics, originality and creative license. Through discussion of the popular film Main Hoon Na, I argue that appropriating well known Hollywood antics, and quotations from blockbuster movies (such as the Matrix and Mission Impossible) are not only efforts to define India's identity and status in relationship to its own tradition and technological capacity to rival Hollywood, but results in a creative "Indian" expression that offers an alternative model to the world.
Anime Pleasure as a Playground of Sexuality, Power, and Resistance, Lien Fan Shen
This paper argues that the pleasure of viewing anime (Japanese animation) enables anime otaku’s playful practices and engenders an imperceptible politics in viewers’ own favor. First, by examining two anime works, Fooly Cooly (2003) and Revolutionary Girl Utena (1999-2001), I argue that anime images embody the pleasure of evasion and the pleasure of transgression as a form of resistance to the regulatory power and the normative sexuality. Further, these evasive and transgressive pleasures empower anime otaku (commonly referring to obsessive fans among English speakers) to go beyond image consumption, actively and constantly changing, manipulating, and subverting anime images in their practices, such as creating amateur manga, peer-to-peer networks and websites, and anime cosplay (costume-roleplay).
All the Good Stories: Intergenerational Digital Storytelling as Process and Product, William Shewbridge
The Charlestown Digital Stories project brings together students from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and residents of the Charlestown Retirement Community to produce short digital movies for personal sharing and broadcast on the Retirement Living Network, a national cable outlet. As the digital stories are constructed, they are transformed from a one-to-one oral experience into a one-to-many fixed-format that is shared beyond the personal interaction of the production team. As stories move through this transformation, what is lost or gained in terms of the “me to you” experience of oral storytelling? How is the experience impacted for the listener and the teller as stories move from being a personal interaction to being a “product”? This paper will explore these aspects of the digital storytelling in a cross-generational and cross-cultural context.
Defining Media for a New Era (again), Shawn Shimpach
This paper will take up the question of audience, reading the active and creative audience of today's new media in the context of the cinema's early audience at the turn of the 20th century. Both the new media and the early movie audiences have come to represent, in their own ways, new modes of relations to the products of rapidly transforming culture industries, symbolizing the difficulties of negotiating economic transformation. This paper will demonstrate that the Progressive Era "discovery" of the motion-picture audience defined it as a problem in need of reform. This construction of the audience as a problem and the strategies employed to address this problem have continued to form the basis of cultural, legal, and entertainment industry understandings of the audience for commercial culture.
Effects of Mass media Ownership on Serving Public Interest, Ekaterina Shmykova
This paper addresses the question: What is the relationship between ownership structures and the media’s service of the public interest in Russia? A content analysis of television programming schedules was used to determine the amount of time devoted to different types of programs and examine diversity. Three channels were selected for analysis. These channels have status of “federal” channels and have the same type of content in general: news, analytical programs, entertainment, etc. The expectations of the author were that government-owned channels would have more educational programs and would have more diverse content. Analysis showed these expectations to be correct. All the differences found in this study were statistically significant. As situation in Russia is similar to situations in former USSR countries, result of this study may also describe situation in those countries.
Dot.mil and Web 2.0, David Silver
If we define Web 2.0 in terms of software applications, then the U.S. military has certainly drunk the kool-aid - there's intellipedia, there's the CIA on facebook, there's the US Army on myspace. If, however, we define Web 2.0 in terms of cultural practices - including open source, public collaboration, and transparency - the military efforts are nothing new. This talk presents recent and not so recent examples of the militarization of the internet, or dot.mil, and seeks to reinsert discussions of war and militarization into our collective discussions of Web 2.0's perils and potentials.
Claude Shannon, ReMixed, sam smiley
Mathematician and information theorist Claude Shannon co-wrote with Warren Weaver the Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948. This non-contextual theory of information (and its graphic representation) shaped discourse in art, science, and popular culture in the 20th century, and into the 21st century. Media artist sam smiley will present two short videos in which Shannon's likeness and his theories are alternatively juggled and sampled. The first piece, "Juggling Shannon," shows remixed archival footage of Claude Shannon and his juggling machine. The second piece, “OK Information,” samples from Alta Vista's database of Internet images using the words "accurate," "thank you," "OK," and "information.”
The Reconceptualization of the Puppets Theater Performance in the Digital Domain, Adriano Solidoro
Tthe exact definition of "digital puppetry" is still subject to debate within the puppetry and computer graphics communities (performance animation? motion capture technologies?, SecondLife simulation?). Nevertheless, digital puppets theatre can be the medium of an intergenerational communication and a field for the investigation of the relationship performance arts/ digital media. Digital puppets also provide a chance for learning, and for social inclusion, augmenting both communication and technological competencies, retraining educators and stimulating youngsters’ manual, storytelling, and teamwork skills as they perform stories of the folk tradition or develop their own original works. This paper will explore the cultural aspects of digital puppetry and appraise how it is new and distinctive, as well as the key issues which arise in the comparison with the tradition.
Envisioning Cross-Cultural Grassroots Digital Spaces: Methodologies and Examples, Ramesh Srinivasan
How can multiple knowledge traditions and epistemologies be reconciled via digital technology systems without either sanitizing these traditions or privileging one vs. another? I will present briefly the National Science Foundation-funded project ED2 and discuss a lineage of indigenous media (Turner, Watson/ Verran) that this project builds on while continuing to push forward critical theories of knowledge production (Latour, John Law, Bowker and Star – for example). I discuss this applied field project that is a collaboration between myself (as PI), the Zuni of New Mexico, and Cambridge University (UK) to build a digital knowledge commons around cultural objects, and point to the potential of creating information systems that are authored by multiple, culturally diverse voices.
Machinima + Vid?: Interface and Gender in Unofficial Authorship and New Media Studies, Louisa Stein
On the surface, films made from videogames (machinima), and fan-authored music videos (fanvids) seem to emerge from different worlds. Whereas the aesthetics of machinima have evolved out of hacker videogame culture—out of forums and behaviors that have been discursively gendered male, fanvids have evolved out of the more overtly female media fan communities, in which participants are concerned with exploring characters and romantic relationships in greater depth by authoring their own derivative texts. Although cultural and gendered discourses may seem to separate these two emerging derivative art forms, if we move past these culturally-enforced divisions, we can see inherent similarities in their modes of creativity, if not in the communities within which they have developed.
Motives for Working with Found Footage, Ann Steuernagel
My motives for working with found footage are many. Of course, there is the aesthetic element -- the grain, dirt, and scratches that come with the territory. But what does it mean that I can now buy this “patina” as part of a software “plug-in” package? There too is the historical value. Whether or not the footage comes from one’s own time the human gestures always seem to be familiar. Found footage, for me, is the unexpected path that leads me to inconceivable imagery and surprising juxtapositions. By colliding disparate images, looping clips and manipgestures always seem to be familiar. Found footage, for me, is the unexpected path that leads me to inconceivable imagery and surprising juxtapositions. By colliding disparate images, looping clips and manipulating time, I accentuate the gestures and quotidian rhythms of my subjects. Thematically, my work is concerned with loss, memory and secret languages (inaudible whispers, children's babble, Morse code, humming insects, warbling song birds).
The NML New Media Exemplar Library, Maggie Burnette Stogner, Margaret Weigel (organizers), Yi Chen, Paul Kim, Steve Schultze, Maura Ugarte
The NML New Media Exemplar Library will result in a collection of short documentary profiles of media makers, how they produce their work and the questions and context around the work. The New Media Literacies group at MIT intends to encourage external creators to contribute their own exemplar profiles, and are currently partnering with the students and faculty of the Center for Social Media at American University as a beta test of remote collaboration. Our panel will address the creative, editorial, and ethical issues weve encountered, fair use and intellectual property concerns, long-distance collaboration and production challenges. We intend to share our experiences and stimulate discussion on creativity, ownership and collaboration in today's collaborative and networked new media environment.
Three Funerals and a Wedding: Art Education, Digital Images and an Aesthetics of Cloning, Robert W. Sweeny
In this paper the author describes how contemporary digital technologies have changed the way in which images are constructed, distributed, and appropriated. This analysis begins with a discussion of the relationship between technological development and authorship as proposed by Benjamin and Barthes. These forms of authorship are then compared with contemporary practices of appropriation: replication and remix (Miller). Cloning best describes this process, one that is dramatically different from images produced through mechanical means. Outlining an ‘aesthetics of cloning,’ the author proposes three shifts associated with the increased use of digital images in art educational spaces that might lead to a better understanding of contemporary issues related to digital technologies as they relate to the teaching of art, specifically, and the reception of art in general.
Spanish Tech Girls: The Struggle for Self-Definition in Novels by Care Santos, Parissa Tadrissi
This essay evaluates how in the context of present-day Spain, Care Santos has taken the lead in writing for and about teenage girls. In an era where women’s roles are ever changing; are influenced by mass media and shaped by technology, Santos addresses this underserved group in two ways: a) through more than 16 novels that reflect their realities; and b) through live chat sessions and Internet communication with her readers through her web page. I argue that through these two mediums, Santos offers teenage girls a sense of belonging, allowing them to understand that they fit into a community despite an increasingly globalized world, disintegrating families and transient friends.
Theories and Internet Politics: From Echo Chambers to Interpretive Communities, Zephyr Teachout (with Thomas Streeter)
Zephyr Teachout was director of online organizing for the Dean campaign. This paper discusses some theoretical issues relevant to understanding the campaign. It argues that what are often referred to as “echo chambers” should not be assumed to be pathological or removed from the truth. Instead they are best understood as interpretive communities, as human communities engaged in struggles over the construction of shared realities. Political campaigns are in the long term best judged, not on how "practical" or "realistic" they are, but in terms of the degree to which they can bring their (often implicit) interpretive frameworks to fruition.
Ocean Island: Land from the Sea, Land from the Sky, Katerina Martina Teaiwa
This presentation discusses Ocean Island, a DVD project currently in the research and development phase. This project is a collaboration with the Banaban community, filmmakers, artists and scholars across the Pacific region including Esther Figueroa, Gary Kildea and Sheyne Tuffery. The multi-sited project explores the history of phosphate mining on Banaba, or Ocean Island, in the central Pacific connecting it to landscapes and histories in Kiribati, Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. The indigenous Banaban and I-Kiribati concepts of land as simultaneously “home, body, people and rock” inform the narrative structure of the DVD and are in dialogue with Maori, Fijian and indigenous Australian as well as broader geological, chemical, economic and political concepts of land.
Beyond Creativity, Originality and Fair Use: Collaborating, Mixing and Bartering in the Studio for World Peace, Diana R. Thompson
My paper will show that collaborating and mixing sounds from different cultures is a socially healthy and necessary way to bring peace to a world torn by conflict. In the recent past, James Brown merged a Gospel sound with secular lyrics in American English using Euro-American instruments. Sometimes, his goal was to bring inner peace to a person who had learned that a friend was actually an enemy, as in "The Big Pay Back," or to encourage self-respect in the members of an ethnic group, as in "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud." Presently, we can easily find and purchase the albums of Johnny Clegg who endured being arrested and jailed three times for entering the neighborhood of a different race during South Africas apartheid era. He collaborated with master Zulu musicians and produced several highly respected bi-cultural recordings. His collaborations helped bring peace to a nation. In the future, we will listen to more sounds such as those in The Idan Raichel Project. For this album, numerous musicians from three different religions and various ethnicities collaborated to produce uplifting music. These collaborations inform us that we can create a peaceable world. We can barter our cultural possessions to spread peace.
The Well-Dressed Geek: Media Appropriation and Subcultural Style, Jason Tocci
In a new media environment characterized by sharing and creative repurposing, some fan practices and texts once labeled as "geeky" or "nerdy" seem much less stigmatized. Now, self-identified geeks and nerds must negotiate between a subculture built in part on marginalization and a new-found acceptance by the cultural mainstream. A particularly notable site of this negotiation is in fashion,where t-shirt designers, online cartoonists, and computer programmers have constructed a market of identity apparel for their fellow geeks. This paper takes an ethnographic and textual analytic approach to the clothing marketed to and worn by the "smart masses," to quote one online store's tagline.
Reimagining Fan Culture: The Long Journey of Battlestar Galactica, Sarah Toton
Battlestar Galactica (BSG) was received enthusiastically by a broad American audience when it first aired in 1978-1979. In 2003, SciFi Channel and the British channel Sky One began airing a remake of Battlestar Galactica. Both versions spawned loyal fan bases with some members of the fan community flocking to the new series without necessarily being devotees of the old. This divide in fan communities coupled with second generation Internet-based services ("Web 2.0") has encouraged new means of communication amongst fans of the reimagined series. This paper will examine two instances of fan-generated community and communication: the Battlestar Wiki and some of the many BSG communities on the online community LiveJournal.
Producing and Consuming Lonelygirl15: Presence Play in the Multimedia Blogosphere, Craig Trachtenberg
This study examines how users selectively present content through text and video to an evolving, shared story in the blogosphere. In the context of producer-consumer relationships, users struggle to control a story from their unique perspectives. Based upon three months of observations and coding of user contributions to the Lonelygirl15 vlog on YouTube, this article examines how interactive storytelling through new media ultimately blurs the line between producer and consumer, between fact and fiction, and between multiple media forms. The results indicate that the converging media landscape demands new conventions for assessing how and when to interact and what to believe.
Traditional Russian Political Discourse and Digital Communication, Anna D. Trakhtenberg
Discursive practices used by the Russian Internet users uphold traditionalism. Using the newest means of communication, participants of the discussions translate Western and Slavofil discourses that are traditional for Russia. So, in the ‘patriotic’ blogs of the ‘LiveJournal’ the whole set of characteristics of this very well-known discourse is present: Russia is suffering from ‘devastation,’ ‘starvation,’ ‘the country is dying out’ and at the same time is on the brink of revolution. Even when users try to create an alternative to the dominating mass media they gave birth to the same traditional discourse. The alternative discourse of the Internet is alternative not because it exists in the virtual space but because it reproduces the typical for Russian intelligentsia tradition of opposing the Russian state as a system phenomenon.
Media Adventures Outside of their Cultural Boxes, Soren Triff
Herbert L. Matthews was right when he declared that he “invented” Fidel Castro in 1957. Matthews’ rendition of the leader for the Times was strong enough to resist challenging information. While Cuba history represented nonconformist views in U.S. mass media, media also had unintended results in Cuban youth subculture. Both U.S. and Cuban “deviants” used media in a symbiotic way--parasitic to mainstream. Cuban violent actions--inspired by newsreels, gangster and war films images--supplied representation in support of a narrative against U.S. foreign policy while print and TV coverage of the “guerilla theater,” as Tad Szulc called, supplied Cuban violent groups with the legitimacy necessary to present their actions as the right manner to achieve modernity. These groups frame images according to their views and this media coverage helps members of the subcultures to gain legitimacy before their audiences.
Hollywood Remixed: Movie Trailer Mashups, Five Second Movies, and Cinematic Knowledge, Chuck Tryon
One of the more popular genres of online media is the movie trailer mashup. Mixing two very different films or recasting a canonical Hollywood film in a different genre, these short clips offer a quick, humorous "snack," to use Wired Magazine's recent metaphor. This paper seeks to explore the role of these trailers within Web 2.0 culture and within film culture more broadly. As Jonathan Gray points out in his MIT 5 abstract, "trailers are frequently the very place where textuality begins." Movie trailers function to convey the genre, tone, and anticipated audience for upcoming films, often presenting themselves as tools for enabling consumers to identify films they will want to see. However, parody trailers have a much different orientation with cinematic narrative, usually coming after a fan has seen the film in question. Thus, parody trailers can be seen as testing the limits of the trailer itself as a genre by combining two films with vastly different audiences while also affectionately parodying the original films, and by doing so, reestablishing their centrality to the different taste groups who are familiar with the original.
Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology and Collaboration in Cold War America, Fred Turner
In 1952 was a watershed year in the history of digital peer production, thought it has rarely been recognized as such. In the business world, 1952 was the year that John Diebold introduced the word “automation” to the public. In the art world, it was the year that John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and others staged the first “Happening.” Though these two events might seem to have little to do with each other, this paper will draw on archival research, interviews, and a rich survey of secondary sources, to show how in fact bohemian collaboration and machine-based factory labor came together in the early 1950s. The paper will then follow John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg into the 1960s, when they worked closely with engineers from Bell Laboratories in an organization called Experiments in Art and Technology (or E.A.T.). In 1970, at a Manhattan mansion christened “Automation House” and packed with electronic technology, E.A.T. ultimately modeled the fusion of artistic collaboration and automated labor to the captains of American industry. When it did, the paper concludes, E.A.T. helped set the stage for a re-imagining of computing in the workplace as a bohemian practice and of computers as tools for creative, peer-to-peer collaboration.
Fandom, Fair Use, and Technology: The Uneasy Relationship? Rebecca Tushnet
Exceptions to copyright law allow some unauthorized uses that would otherwise fall within the owner's rights; the most well-known and flexible of these exceptions is fair use. In recent years, two major strains of fair use have developed. One category is technological fair uses, such as time-shifting television programs for later viewing at home and aggregation of online materials in order to create useful search engines. The second category is creatively transformative fair uses, in which a second-comer targets a particular work and changes it in ways that reflect critically on the original. This paper examines the ways in which copyright law has so far failed to come to grips with the overlap between technological and creatively transformative fair uses.
SHARE: A Multimedia Collaborative Forum in Emergence, Keiko Uenishi ( organizer), Carl Skelton (moderator), Jim Bell, John Hopkins, France Jobin, Adam Kendall, Martin Koplin , Katherine Liberovskaya, Michael Liegl, Anton Marini, Geoff Matters, Marie-Helene Parant, Morgan Sully, Elsa Vieira, Dan Winckler
The idea of following the "Billboard Top 100" is long over – the future is for people to choose their tools to make their own songs, images and ideas. SHARE is an open community, forum, and jam session for audio/ visual artists that provides a basic infrastructure and helps people to use it to perform together. As a result, it becomes a big uncontrolled multimedia openjam. SHARE is a space for people to meet, chat, and play together. In these two panels, members of the SHARE community will share their experiences and field questions about this global initiative. Now nearly seven years old, SHARE has spread to eleven cities worldwide, with three more chapters expected to launch in 2007.
Video Sharing as Cultural Practice and Peer Production, Jose van Dijck
Websites for the exchange of moving images have become widely popular as instruments for attracting vast numbers of user communities. Established media giants like Murdoch and Google pay astronomical sums for startups like MySpace and YouTube to buy into the still-developing cultural practice of video sharing. But, who are the users? What is their interest in developing and establishing a new cultural practice? And will these users allow commercial companies to exploit their essential labor that increases the value of online properties? This paper will theorize about the nature of creative consumers in new cultural practices such as video sharing.
Politics of Game Space: The Video Game Vocabulary and the Production of Meaning, Joost van Dreunen
Video games serve simultaneously as a point of entry into digital literacy, and as a place to challenge the authority of existing media vocabularies. The aesthetics of video games contain important clues with regards to the sociopolitical conditions of contemporary experience and the production of meaning. This essay will argue that video games offer a new vocabulary with which we give meaning to the lived experience in a technologically saturated society. As this vocabulary is largely based on the syntax of traditional media, the video game ‘dialect' is a contested space. In it, manifestations of cultural autonomy and identity struggle with existing notions of copyright.
Panorama NL: Designing the Interface of Highways, Nanna Verhoeff
I wish to present the project Panorama NL through which the independent bureau for spatial planning has been assigned to advise the Dutch government on the design and preservation of highway panoramas. This case is an intriguing example of how spatial design of public spaces is becoming more and more an interdisciplinary enterprise, which involves architectural design, spatial planning, and legislation, but also the reflection from the perspective of media scholarship. The project has raised invaluable questions about the conceptual consequences of bringing together different discourses (architecture, spatial planning, legislation, media history and theory), different historical media forms (from the circular, painted panorama or 19th Century optical toys, to interactive, immersive environments, and digital panorama technologies), and different visual paradigms.
Web 2.0 Characteristics and the Situationist Legacy, Astrid Vicas
Using a Situationist framework, this presentation proposes that user-generated Web 2.0 content can be characterized as follows. It is conceptualized as 1) a way of acting rather than a form of reflection, which 2) confers authority or plausibility to available cultural material by reusing it and that 3) points back to a coa collective pattern of interaction. Qualifications that can be added to these points are that the reuse of available cultural material 1) confers authority or plausibility probabilistically, 2) has a behavior- and value-shaping impact, and 3) has the function of expressing summary preferences typical of liberal democratic practices of voting. Examples to illustrate these points will be taken from currently popular user-generated content on the Web.
Innocence Revisited: The Possibilities of Fan Fiction, Piret Viires
The paper examines fan fiction, which is one of the most intriguing border
areas of digital literature and is related to the expansion of the concept of literature during the postmodern era. Fan fiction as a literary phenomenon immediately poses several problems. Firstly, the traditional role of the author has changed. Secondly, the role of the reader has changed as well - readers directly interfere in the writing process with their comments. It is stated that one feature of postmodernist literature is ironic re-writing of earlier texts; postmodernist literature is characterised by "the loss of innocence" (Eco). In fan fiction, on the other hand, the re-writing of the original texts is not ironic, but ardent. It could thus be said that fan fiction reveals "an innocence revisited" - and this shows a return to an innocent literature devoid of play.
A World Obsessed with Searching for Words: Why is a Minimalist Text-Based Interface a Cutting-Edge Technology of Today? Philipp von Hilgers
The most advanced technological interface today, at least in terms of its market position, is Google's nearly empty, white page. Since the media discourse of the 90s was mesmerized by the images of the digital realm, this seems to be a rather surprising shift back to a somehow text-based media culture. In my paper, I will focus on Google's interface complexities, which are hidden behind its minimalist graphical design. The paper distinguishes between two main aspects, which seem to be crucial to understand, how such a text-centric enterprise as Google's search engine could sustain and further empower Internet activities: The first discussion concerns the rather short, but intriguing history of the computation of textual data. The other focus of the paper will argue that a minimalist graphic appearance does not necessarily imply a simplistic interface.
A Strategic Perspective on the Use of Digital and Enhanced ITV as Brand Extension, Zvezdan Vukanovic
Due to audience fragmentation, cable television companies have used brand-extension strategies involving the use of enhanced TV features. In order to more specifically address the potentially useful parameters affecting the assessment of interactive enhanced CATV as brand extension, the author examines some of the most important use of enhanced TV features: news/ weather update, background for news, polls, program preview, TV guide/schedules, video clip archive, information about stars, play-along games, multi-angle TV, etc. The author argues that by efficient convergence of versatile technological assets such as broadcast video, computing power and broadband Internet access, digital television, cable lines and fiber optic telephone lines and use of enhanced TV features that essentially extend the tangible as well as intangible value and image of the brand, enhanced interactive cable TV networks are in the position to achieve sustainable competitive advantage over its competitors.
The Painters and the Miracles: How Morse and Daguerre Created the Idea of Media, Peter Walsh
Samuel F. B. Morse and Louis J. M. Daguerre were prominent painters who unveiled the two most sensational new technologies of the 19th-century. Both Morse and Daguerre created and promoted their inventions in close collaboration, formal and informal, with friends, partners, rival claimants, government agencies, newspapers, political powers, and an enthusiastic international public, who acclaimed photography and the telegraph as miracles of modernity. This paper will show how the photograph and the telegraph grew directly out of the creative aspirations of their artist-inventors, both of whom understood the potential of modern science to transform society. It will explain how the core ideas in these two inventions -- and the same aura of art and the miraculous -- still underlie the media today.
Gamer Theory, McKenzie Wark
In a collaborative, networked culture, what is the future for theory? How can a critical, reflective and untimely process of writing inhabit the web? Since Plato’s Phaedrus, theory has taken its distance from the prevailing methods of cultural formation. However some, such as Walter Benjamin, stressed the theoretical possibilities of new over old media, but not as something innately given. In this presentation I want to describe my own experience in attempting a collaborative theoretical process for writing the book Gamer Theory. I will discuss the problem of designing an interface, creating a community in dialogue and the problems of ownership and authorship for both the online and print versions of Gamer Theory. If critical theory is to avoid becoming hypocritical theory, it needs to concern itself with its own methods of production and means of distribution.
ReMixed: Exploring the Social and Political Aspects of Hip-Hop’s Digital Underground, S. Craig Watkins
More than 30 years after it emerged from the poor and working class boroughs of New York City, hip-hop culture continues to stand out as a vibrant experience in the everyday lives of young people. This paper addresses some of the ways in which new technologies are enabling new kinds of public participation in what I call hip-hop’s digital underground, a dynamic sphere of participatory culture made up of social networking, video file sharing, and independent musical production. I argue that driving the digital underground is a resilient rejection of the corporate and entrepreneurial elite that severely restricts the cultural content, artistry, and commentary produced by the hip-hop industry. Like the larger media landscape in general, participants in the digital underground represent the move away from consumers to publics.
Appropriation, Fair Use, and Creative Commons: Views from an Artist and an Educator, Craig P. Webb, Heather Tillberg Webb
This paper contrasts perspectives on appropriation and fair use from the point of view of an artist and that of an instructor preparing educators to create instructional multimedia materials for online use. In the artistic tradition, copying the technique of masters; reiterating themes, such as a crucifixion; and referencing preceding artists is deeply rooted in the history of art making. The educational arena, while not rooted in a tradition of appropriation, relies heavily on the ability to view and reference important existing works in our culture. Through examples both historical and personal, we explore the gray areas of using and referencing the works of others and making our own works available for use by others.
Subversively Discursive Digital Communities of Contemporary Craft, Courtney Lee Weida
What is the nature of online studio craft communities? This paper examines the construction of counter-discourses, creative collaborations, and revised identities within digital forums for ceramics and other studio crafts. Communities of people working with studio craft and folk art media might seem unlikely netizens, however, Internet forums for craftspeople are rapidly emerging. In many ways, web forums such as message boards and tutorials offer alternative social and teaching spaces. Web
dialogues, exchanges, and collaborations offer opportunities to reclaim and/ or revise artistic identities and conceptions of past and present craft communities.
Territory Internet: Deleuzian Perspective on Ownership and Identity on the Web, Agnieszka Wenninger
Modern Internet technologies have not only changed the ways of communication, but they have also destabilised the traditional notions of ownership/authorship and identity. Emergence of such phenomena like SecondLife, blogging, chats, YouTube, wikis etc. only fortify the difficulties in grasping the identities of the users as well as the ownership claims. The work of Gilles Deleuze – especially such keywords like “nomads of the Internet” or the notion of rhizome – has already been applied for pointing at the structural similarity of hypertext or www to a rhizomatic structure. Following Deleuze, this contribution, however, will seek to reflect on the questions of the ownership and identity – which are constantly being under siege – while focusing on the notions connected with territoriality.
The Context: The Digital Challenge to Traditional Scholarship and Pedagogy, Andy White
Traditionally, students have constructed knowledge through the use of scholarly canons. However, the rise of postmodernism in the academy, along with the growth of the World Wide Web, has posed a fundamental threat to traditional forms of knowledge construction. This paper will use digital archives of documents relating to Irish history and politics that the author has developed in the past to interrogate whether canonicity is required in this new digital environment and, if so, how designers may go about achieving this. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the reading strategies needed to engage with non-linear scholarly resources.
Hoarding and the Lifehack: Re-Imagining Accessibility in Participatory Culture, Mark Willis
“Hoarding and the Life Hack” explores cultural practices, both learned and improvised, that drive a blind writer’s pursuit of lifelong learning, literacy, and access to media technology. Literacy and media accessibility for blind people is discussed most often in terms of enabling technologies, with little attention given to contending social, economic, and cultural forces that shape the development and use of such technologies. This talk asserts that: 1) people with disabilities are engaged actively in making adaptations and negotiating accommodations to gain access to media; and 2) the work of adaptation and accommodation itself represents a significant form of cultural production. From this disability perspective, the notion of participatory culture – cultural practices tooled by new digital media that promote the individual user’s appropriation, manipulation, and redistribution of media content – opens a new frontier for re-imagining the means and meanings of accessibility.
Libratory Law: (Un)making Knowledge, Eva Wirten
My paper outlines a forthcoming research project on the multiple ways by which the law interacts with and impinges on the creative practices of two specific domains: the research library and the laboratory. The aim of the study is to understand how and why it is that the law increasingly seems to circumscribe rather than encourage creativity in these two domains through an instrument once intended to act as incentive and reward: intellectual property rights. By considering the making and unmaking of creative practices in these two CKEs from their respective legal frameworks—in the case of the library, copyright law, and in the case of the laboratory, patent law—the overall ambition of this paper is to discuss possible approaches whereby the relationship between creativity, knowledge and the law can be problematized and analyzed.
A Lockean Critique of Our So-Called Lockean Intuitions, D.E. Wittkower
Despite direct dismissals by the court of natural rights and sweat-of-the-brow claims (e.g. Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal, Feist Publications Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.), Lockean justifications of copyright appear in computer ethics textbooks, media campaigns, and in lay public discourse. By returning to Locke, and actually taking his argument seriously on its own terms, we can see that the Second Treatise lends only conditional and partial support tointellectual property rights in general. When we use this more nuanced understanding of the Lockean argument for property rights to consider contemporary copyright issues in particular, a careful consideration shows that Locke would in fact actively oppose right of exclusion over digitized media.
New Media, Ethnography and Discourse of "Ke:"Youth Internet (Sub) Cultures in China, Weihua Wu
Discussions of digital globalization and (post) modernity have tended to take a top-down view in China, emphasizing the role played by computerization and the flows of consumerism in the emergence of Internet ethnographic spheres. This research documents the emergence, practices, the linguistic representation, and sociological implication of Internet tribes such as Hacker, Flash animator, Blogger, Podcaster, and WikiWriter ( all named as " Ke" in Chinese language) to understand the interactions between new media and youth subculture. By focusing on the analysis of their thematic and discursive fluidity among the cultural identity, Internet ethnography, and the problematic of new media, this research aims to reveal a cultural system remarked by the cultural movement of the five neo-tribes.
YouTube Journalism and Grassroots Storytelling in Asia, Joanne Teoh Kheng Yau
The Asia Pacific is home to the world's largest TV audience and the fastest expanding Internet market. In the past decade, TV channels have proliferated, and digital technologies have come into wide use. In post-tsunami Asia, we are seeing a powerful process of communities taking media in their own hands to create, collaborate and advocate. New modes of expression with uniquely Asian perspectives have risen to the surface as amateur artists take advantage of cheap media production tools and push them in unanticipated directions to create new forms of digital cultural expression. This paper presents evidence that the public and the mainstream industry have embraced this new style of grassroots media and meaning making. It explores the role of emerging Asia-based online meeting places for filmmakers, broadcasters, educators and activists to share information on using media to promote sustainable development and social justice.
Fountain Remediated, Yannis Zavoleas
The paper draws upon the relationship between artistic documentation and content over Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. Artworks documenting evidence is examined, in various media formats. The original Fountain was lost soon after it was created in 1917. Since then, Fountain has been reproduced in photographs, descriptions and replicas. It may be argued that the mediated Fountains were treated as artworks of their own, meanwhile holding and aiding to increase the artistic aura of the original. Rather surprisingly, a comparative examination of the mediated Fountains shows substantial differences in the objective information they present, to such an extent that
artistic characterizations to which Fountain is tied in principal, become questionable. A reverse relationship among the mediated Fountains and also the original may be weaved, so that in documenting the artwork, artistic content would be modified in order to comply with the concurrent artistic standards.
Research on China’s Creative Industry: Based on the Witkey Business Model, Rongting Zhou
As creative industries are booming globally, China is welcoming one of its latest online business models—Witkey. This paper describes the current situation and value chain of China's creative industries and introduces the Witkey business model which is developing fast in China. It then discusses the Witkey-based value chain of creative industries, and analyzes its components and characteristics. The paper finally introduces a series of strategies for the development of Witkey and China’s creative industries.
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