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 interpr