Monday, December 15, 2008
Broadband Universal Service
Given that President-elect Obama has always been a strong proponent of the idea of a democratic access to broadband, there might actually be a chance that this will happen sometime in the near future. The fine print of the deal should be read carefully.
Friday, December 12, 2008
The...Web Sheriff
"So here's the newest soldier in the other Bush-era war with no end in sight: the arbitrary and unseemly battle over music piracy. What began with Metallica calling out Napster (and the Recording Industry Association of America suing a 12-year-old for illegal downloading) has now led here, to a London-based organization of "Internet policing specialists" whose website claims to combat everything from libel to pornography. But the Sheriff has become most notorious for unusual efforts to prevent album leaks, which, until recently, mostly involved leaving ominous comments on personal blogs."
If the majors have the RIAA and the IFPI pressuring ISP's and blogger services directly to do their bidding for them, the indies have the "web sheriff". The Village Voice tells all. Make sure you take a look at the web sheriff's own web site and check out the 'Outlaws Gallery' which will tell you all about the things that you're doing on the web that the sheriff finds 'disturbing'. If it weren't real, this would have been a perfect Yes Men prank.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Visualization
(click on the image)
The artist Andrew Kuo dissects every moment of the new Kanye West single, "Love Lockdown".
(from The New York Times)
Posted using ShareThis
Monday, December 8, 2008
(Viva La) Rip Off?
Is this the difference between sampling/mashup/remix culture and ripping off/stealing/plagiarizing? This has nothing to do with copyright issues. Coldplay are in trouble: legally and morally.
How embarassing.
Filippo Minelli, Contradictions
"what i want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies."
("Facebook", spray paint on scrap-yard, Bamako - Mali, 2008 )
("Microsoft", Paint on barrels, Bamako-Mali. 2008)
("Flickr", Paint on wall, Phnom Penh-Cambodia. 2007)
("Myspace", Paint on wall, Phnom Penh-Cambodia. 2007)
More pieces in this series and artist's statements here.
More of Filippo Minelli's work here.
Also take a look at the Wooster Collective's website: A Celebration of Street Art
Nollywood Credit Crunch
We talked about Nollywood, the thriving Nigerian film industry, working in an alternative 'copyright' regime a while back. Here is an article from Modern Ghana about the credit crunch in that national film industry. Love the comparison of the cash crunch to a biblical plague --can you imagine the New York Times leading a story with this paragraph?
"Though it is cheery news that the cash crunch invading the world like the biblical plague in the time of Moses is showing signs of subsiding, the effect of the global cash crunch has, however, changed the power equation and landscape of the Nigerian movie industry otherwise known as Nollywood."
Saturday, December 6, 2008
On The Media Bits
(click on image for readability)
Some interesting features on this week's On The Media as usual courtesy of the good people of WNYC and the listeners (like you) who live there.
An interview with James Boyle on his new book, The Public Domain:Enclosing the Commons of Mind. See previous post on Boyle and his chapter on mashups.
The insanity of "terms of service agreements" that we all accept without ever possibly having the time to read them. Did you know that they turn us all into prosecutable hackers?
A reflection on the ways in which Indian media covered the Mumbai attacks. If you are looking for an analysis and an image of a particularly complex media system with a characterizing history look no further.
On a related note, the role of Twitter and other social media in reporting the crisis in India. Be sure to look at Gaurav Mishra's Gauravonomics Blog where he reflects on "The Role of Citizen Journalism in the Aftermath of the 11/26 Mumbai Terror Attack"
The flipside of course is how the attackers used an array of commercial technologies --from Blackberries to GPS navigators to anonymous e-mail accounts-- to organize their deadly attacks.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Critical Race Studies and Digital Media
"This imagery has a history."
"Like many white liberals, I had viewed the absence of explicit racial markers in cyberspace with some optimism-seeing the emerging "virtual communities" as perhaps our best hope ever of achieving a truly color-blind society."
Henry Jenkins reflects on the myth that the online world is essentially color-blind. In this article he reflects on what is wrong with this argument. He also interviews Sarah N. Gatson (Part One & Part Two") on why the myth carries such persistent force.
Plus on the gaming side, Black Professionals In Games: N’Gai Croal Talks Stereotypes, Finding Video Games’ Spike Lee + More N'Gai Croal: Interview on the Resident Evil 5 Trailer.
"This imagery has a history. It has a history and you can’t pretend otherwise. That imagery still has a history that has to be engaged, that has to be understood … If you’re going to engage imagery that has that potential, the onus is on the creator to be aware of that because there will be repercussions in the marketplace.
"The point isn’t that you can’t have black zombies. There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery. What was not funny, but sort of interesting, was that there were so many gamers who could not at all see it. Like literally couldn’t see it. So how could you have a conversation with people who don’t understand what you’re talking about and think that you’re sort of seeing race where nothing exists?
"There was stuff like even before the point in the trailer where the crowd turned into zombies. There sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance, they’re sort of “othered.” They’re hidden in shadows, you can barely see their eyes, and the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who’s coming to help the people. It’s like they’re all dangerous; they all need to be killed. It’s not even like one cute African — or Haitian or Caribbean — child could be saved. They’re all dangerous men, women and children. They all have to be killed. And given the history, given the not so distant post-colonial history, you would say to yourself, why would you uncritically put up those images? It’s not as simple as saying, “Oh, they shot Spanish zombies in ‘Resident Evil 4,’ and now ‘black zombies and that’s why people are getting upset.” The imagery is not the same. It doesn’t carry the same history, it doesn’t carry the same weight. I don’t know how to explain it more clearly than that."
More reactions to these images here and here (make sure you read --some of-- the comments section and relate them to Croal's comments above on 'those who can't see it') and here.
N'Gai Croal's Blog on Gaming: Level Up
Resident Evil 5 Trailer
Related: A copy of DS title Animal Crossing Wild World sent out to media yesterday by Nintendo came loaded with most of the game's secrets unlocked, it also included a surprise: a racial slur.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
The Public Domain
James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. It available for download from Yale University Press here.
"Musical styles change over time and so do their techniques of appropriation. Sometimes musical generations find their successors are engaging in different types of borrowing than they themselves engaged in. They do not always find it congenial. It is striking how often musicians condemn a younger generation’s practice of musical appropriation as theft, while viewing their own musical development and indebtedness as benign and organic. … [Sampling] is a different kind of borrowing than the adaptation of a chord pattern from a gospel standard to make an R&B hit. But which way does the difference cut as a matter of ethics, aesthetics, or law?"
This is good material for people working on copyright and appropriation for their final papers. Chapter 6 ("I Got A Mashup") is especially pertinent. Read it together with Matt Mason's "We Invented the Remix" chapter from The Pirate's Dilemma posted a few weeks back. Chapter 6 is here, from the 'annotatable' version on the website of Boyle's book.
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