These are two articles on videogames and their history. Use them in conjunction with the screening of Game On: The Unauthorized History of Video Games screened in class.
The question we have been discussing in class is: What makes mainstream media mainstream? How does this prevent the media from fulfilling the societal roles that liberal democratic theory assigns to it? I am including here readings which should be able to give you a nice understanding of the issues and the problems.
from Bob Lefsetz:
The content industries don't want a distinction between what's legal and
illegal, that bit them in the ass already, with the Home Recording Act
of 1992, wherein it was declared legal to make your own mixtapes, even
share them. That horrified them. So they changed their game, they
decided to go after the sharing itself.
That's what SOPA and PIPA are all about.
And the way they're going to achieve their goal is to put the burden of
policing upon Google and Yahoo and the other portals/search engines that
provide links. If the cost of policing is high enough, they'll just
outlaw the practice. Entirely.
There's a great analogy at the beginning of this clip. A story about a
bakery in Brooklyn that allowed customers to bring in their kids'
drawings so they could be imprinted upon cakes. Only one problem, kids
like to draw cartoon characters, the ones they see in movies and on
television. And this is copyright infringement. So what did the bakery
do? Instead of having someone make a judgment as to the legality of each
drawing, they outlawed the practice entirely. Now you can still get an
image on your cake, but it has to be one of the authorized ones the
bakery provides.
But maybe your kid drew a fish because he likes fish and he's never even
seen "Finding Nemo". He can't get his fish on a cake because the bakery
is afraid of infringement, they're not even gonna make that judgment.
Google is gonna outlaw links to all sharing because it's just too damn
expensive to figure out what's legal and what's illegal. So you'll just
consume pre-approved content, manufactured by the usual suspect music
and movie companies. You can't create your own because it might infringe
and Google doesn't want to make the wrong decision and it takes too
much money to make a decision, so you can create your music, but it
won't be findable, the search engine can't take that risk.
And if you think the above is blown out of proportion, you don't understand how the content companies think.
They want control. The Internet is their worst nightmare. It allows
anybody to create. And under the rubric of preventing you from mixing up
your content with theirs, they want to outlaw sharing completely, they
don't want you making music and movies, they just want you to buy
theirs. This is the concept of scarcity that made them so much dough,
this is the past they're trying to jet us all back into by crippling the
Internet. As Clay Shirky says in this video,they want to "raise the
cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of
the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs."
They think we're dumb. They've got no idea the Internet is all about
smart. They want us to believe in the nincompoops on "The Jersey Shore",
not some egghead with degrees who's actually thought about all this and
isn't in it for the short term money and fame.
TED talks are a burgeoning resource. The brand stands for intelligent
insight. Take the time out to watch this presentation, you'll get it,
you'll be horrified, you'll send it to all your friends.
P.S. You might be unable to do this under SOPA. For fear that you might
be sharing copyrighted material, your ability to share at all could be
crippled, because it would cost too much for the linking service to
determine whether it's legal to share the content or not.
These are the readings for the first weeks of class and discussion. Remember that we are still in the process of investigating the concept of 'new' media and trying to go beyond a mere chronology of new technologies in favor of a more nuanced and specific understanding of the truly 'new' aspects of digital converged media and the social potential/consequences from a politically progressive perspective --the 'what's new for society' question.
The articles here will introduce you to some of the more practical transformations that the appearance of digital technologies have produced in 'old' media like film and television. Please note that as we discussed in class, even in this case, the transformations are both smaller and larger than those one could imagine: on the one hand, the film and televisual experience is for the most part unchanged; on the other, however, the film medium and the specificity of the photo/cinematographic image has been dramatically transformed as it loses its indexicality and the medium goes from a synthetic to an analytic one while television's horizon ceases to be that of a regulated/national context to an open/transnational one.
from Frith & Goodwin (eds), On Record
-Adorno, "On Popular Music"
nb. You can find this essay together with "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" co-written with Max Horkheimer --an essay which if you have not read should definitely do so-- here.
from Even Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa
-Eisenberg, Chapter 2: Music Becomes a Thing
Here is the study guide for your final exam as well as Susan Sontag's "Looking At War". This is the original version of the article as it appeared in The New Yorker. If you like what you read a good suggestion for your holidays is to get the expanded version as it appears in Regarding the Pain Others, the book that Sontag completed right before her death.
I am also including two articles on Enjoy Poverty itself (one of them is an interview with Renzo Martens).
Evil Bert is referenced in the Jenkins article below. Find the original Bert Is Evil website here at WayBackMachine. The story of the Bert Is Evil website is told here at Wikipedia. A contemporary site for all kinds of Evil Bert stuff is 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 those of you interested in copyright and appropriation especially if you are thinking of working on these issues for your final papers. Chapter 6 ("I Got A Mashup") is especially pertinent. Chapter 6 is here, from the 'annotatable' version on the website of Boyle's book.
Finally, for those of you who still don't have it you can download Girl Talk's breakthrough Feed The Animals from the Illegal Art website as a free download. Enjoy the 'official' 372 overlapping samples. You can find detailed info on all of them here.
Bob Christgau, the "Dean of American Rock Critics", provides an inter-generational appreciation of Girl Talk on NPR here.
Please watch the interview with Jean-Luc Godard below. It is a good introduction to his way of thinking in the early sixties and in the procedures of the work he did with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group. He speaks ofTout Va Bien, a 'fiction' film he made with Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, as a more politically effective reflection on political struggle compared to a straight documentary film like Coup Pour Coup by Marin Karmitz or Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, USA which we will be watching a clip in class. Tout Va Bien is the film at the origin of the short Letter To Jane which we will also be screening and discussing in class.
Aoki, Boyle and Jenkins, Bound By Law? This is the comic book on copyright. Don't be fooled by its form: this is required reading. You can also find it free on-line from its publisher --crazy, huh?-- Duke University and The Center for the Study of the Public Domain in a variety of formats. You can also 'remix' it and you're encouraged to translate it. It's all here.
From Technology Review (free registration might be required) read the debate around the question:
Here's the complete version of the Lessig talk we will be watching excerpts from in class. You can download it here. This was Lessig's 'last' talk on Free Culture and it has that sort of summing up about it. You can find his original presentation in a number of different formats (powerpoint, mp3, flash presentation, transcript, pdf, etc.) here.
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