Media, Culture and Society Essay Question

Here is, as promised, the question for the longer essay you will find on the final exam.
Enjoy.

Also, dig cheery, happy Teddy Adorno, as he speak about popular music and protest.

What are you looking at?: Social Networking, Personal Info, Data Collection and Surveillance

Christian Fuchs, "Facebook: A Surveillance Threat to Privacy?"
Christian Fuchs, "Wikileaks: Can We Make Power Transparent?"

Mark Andrejevic, "We are all lab rats online"
Joshua Benton/Nieman Labs, "Facebook wants to be the new World Wide Web"

Julian Assange, "Google Is Not What It Seems"
Henry Giroux, "Selfie Culture at the Intersection of the Corporate and Surveillance State"

If you want background resources relating to the screening of Laura Poitras' Citizenfour here are the related chapters from Glen Greenwald's No Place To Hide:

Chapter 3: Collect It All
Chapter 4: The Harm of Surveillance
Chapter 5: The Fourth Estate



Find below the segment from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver which includes an interview with Edward Snowden which is both funny and unsettling:

Post-Rock, Subcultures and the End of Authenticity

Assuming that at this point you should be on your way to completing the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments for the next couple of weeks:

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.

On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.


On Gender:
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts"
"Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file.



On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.

The Ramones, "Blitzkrieg Bop" Live in Rome, 1980



On sampling, mash-ups and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"
Negativland, "from Wired: Negativland Interviews U2's The Edge"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"

Photoshop For Democracy

Evil Bert & Che

Evil Bert is referenced in Jenkins. 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.

Matt Mason - We Invented The Remix

Henry Jenkins - Photoshop for Democracy

You can find James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind --which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License-- 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 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.




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:

Who Should Own Ideas?

Lessig, "The People Own Ideas!"
Epstein, "The Creators Own Ideas!"
And the winner is...

While you're at it, look at your 'friends' on Facebook and ask yourselves: Who Owns Your Friends...

Here's the complete version of the Larry Lessig talk I mentioned 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.

At the time of the SOPA/PIPA debacle I posted this entry with many links to the discussions fermenting around the issues. Right around the same time the Megaupload takedown happened. Find the post here will all the relative links. The Clay Shirky TED talk which gives the post its title should give you plenty of food for thought.


Lawrence Lessig and The Future of Ideas by Bryan Alexander from Mindjack is an interesting summary article with lots of links.
Finally, here is the site for Creative Commons. Look them up.

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. You don't have to look very heard to find his more recent CDs.

Bob Christgau, the "Dean of American Rock Critics", provides an inter-generational appreciation of Girl Talk on NPR here.

Medium Specificity and Representation

 Lily Allen, "Hard Out Here"

Keith Negus, "Popular Music: Between Celebration and Despair"
Van Zoonen, "Gender, Representation and the Media"
Corea, "Racism and the American Way of Media"

Desjardins, "Cinema and Communication"
Thomas, "Myths in and About TV"
*Articles are from Downing et al (eds), Questioning The Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 1996)

TV After TV: Global Media Trade, Formats and Channel Branding

Brennan, "A Political Economy of Formatted Pleasures"
Torre, "Reversal of Fortune?: Hollywood Faces New Competition in Global Media Trade"
from Oren & Shahaf (eds), Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders (Routledge, 2012)

Chap.1: "Deregulation, Differentiation and Niche Targeting: The Emergence of Branding in the Cable/Satellite Era"
Chap.2: "From Channel Brands to Service Brands: US Television Enters the Digital Era"
from Catherine Johnson, Branding Television (Routledge, 2012)

Bonus Article:
"Why HBO Passed on The Walking Dead" from Mother Nature Blog.

Also, if you are interested in the intersection of technology, creativity, production practices and televisual style make sure you follow Ben Consoli's GO Creative Podcast (and Blog). You'll find episodes in the artchive where Consoli interviews the DP for House of Cards, has an in depth conversation with Shane Reynolds, a true one-man band/jack of all trades who produces, shoots and edits his work all on his own for the Travel Network, Nat Geo and others and also speaks with Chris Manley, the cinematographer and DP for Mad Men. Great insights on how network pressures and studio concerns with the bottom line all line up with technological possibilities and stylistic choices.

Sings, Meaning, Power

Articles related to our discussion on signs, meaning and culture and their intersections with the construction of identity, desire and power. Enjoy.

Kellner, "Advertising and Consumer Culture"

Sut Jhally, "Image Based Culture"

Mieke Bal, Semiotics for Beginners
Scott McCloud, from Understading Comics: Chapter 2, Semiotics
Jonathan Bignell, Media Semiotics: Introduction + The Cinema

TV Podcasts shared for all the family!

The Business on EMPIRE: a conversation on getting a television show off the ground.

Also check out previous episodes of The Business at the programs archives here (scroll down). Make sure you listen to the episodes on the Modern Family episode entirely shot on Apple devices and The Year in Film and Television 2014 episode.

You can find The Spinoff, another program from KCRW, which is specifically devoted to the television industry here. Look at the list of recent episodes and you will find a wealth of discussions on the most pressing issues facing the television industry (production and distribution) today. It's that good!

Remember these programs are also available as podcasts and you can subscribe to them (and download previous instalments) through the usual channels you are used to getting your podcasts from (iTunes, Soundcloud, tunein, Stitcher).

If you want more here's a nice recap of the best podcasts on television. More here.

Generation Like + YouTube Anthropology

Here's the link to the PBS Frontline site where you can watch

GENERATION LIKE


Embedded below is Wesch's "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube" for those of you interested in watching the second half.

The Language of New Media

From Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media. Reflect on the qualities that he identifies as pertaining to 'new media' as we integrate our encounters with the technologies and changed social contexts of digital converged media.

Manovich, What Is New Media?

plus:

Wark, "The Hacker Manifesto"

Audiences

Ang, "The Nature of the Audience"
Gandy, "Tracking the Audience"
Meehan, "Don't Blame The Viewers"
Nussbaum, "What Would Tina Fey Do For A SoyJoy?"

Digital Culture: Participation and Collective Intelligence

Jenkins, "Worship at the Altar of Convergence"

Jenkins, "Spoiling Survivor"

from Convergence Culture

Marshall, "Forms of Interactivity: The Disappearance of the Audience"

Jenkins, "Interactive Audiences? The Collective Intelligence of Media Fans"

Lessig, "Building Blocks: Commons and Layers" + "Commons on the Wires"

from The Future of Ideas

Himanen, "From Netiquette to Nethic"

from The Hacker Ethic

For Those About To Rock: Return of the Aura

Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart

"I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

-Jack Kerouac

-Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

Here are a couple of articles to integrate Keightley's Reconsidering Rock article. The first Frith article is required; the second article is a highly recommended read. Enjoy the Lester Bangs reviews from Creem. Reebee Garofalo's article on Soul ("Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement") is required.

Simon Frith - "Rock and Popular Culture"
Simon Frith - "The Magic The Can Set You Free": The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community
Paul Clarke - "'A Magic Science': Rock Music as a Recording Art"
Lester Bangs - Various Record Reviews from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Reebee Garofalo - Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement

Also, here is Andrew Chester's "For A Rock Aesthetic", Richard Merton's response, "Comments" and Chester's response to the response, "Second Thoughts on a Rock Aesthetic: The Band". It's all here at this link --the whole epochal exchange in one handy location.

Please read in 'Rocking Out' up to and including Chapter 8.

AC/DC, Let There Be Rock (1977) 

Reverend Bon tells you all about it. As you can see the 'aura' is back around Angus' head.

Audience Heatmaps: Assessment, Interactivity, Analytics and Chatter

The Audience Response Heatmap from Bluefin

Andrejevic, The Twenty-First-Century Telescreen
Marshall, Screens: Television's Dispersed 'Broadcast'

McChesney, What is the Elephant in the Digital Room? from Digital Disconnect

Refer to Jon Gertner's epigraph in Chapter 6 of The Television Will Be Revolutionized:

"Finding out whether ''C.S.I.'' beats ''Desperate Housewives'' is just the beginning. Change the way you count, for instance, and you can change where the advertising dollars go, which in turn determines what shows are made and what shows then are renewed. Change the way you count, and potentially you change the comparative value of entire genres (news versus sports, dramas versus comedies) as well as entire demographic segments (young versus old, men versus women, Hispanic versus black). Change the way you count, and you might revalue the worth of sitcom stars, news anchors and -- when a single ratings point can mean millions of dollars -- the revenue of local affiliates and networks alike. Counting differently can even alter the economics of entire industries, should advertisers (thanks to the P.P.M.) discover that radio or the Web is a better way to get people to know their brand or buy their products or even vote for their political candidates. Change the way you measure America's culture consumption, in other words, and you change America's culture business. And maybe even the culture itself."

The complete Jon Gertner (from The New York Times Magazine), "Our Ratings, Ourselves" here.

A recent Toby Miller blogpost, "TV is Dead" chock full of nice links and statistics about TV consumption

The following are good background readings about network and transition era audience assessment methods. They also offer a good reflection and analysis of the ways in which audience assessment are used in developing a political and regulatory environment for media systems in general and television in particular.

Meehan, The Blame Game
Meehan, Don't Blame The Viewers

Ang, The Nature of the Audience
Gandy, Tracking the Audience

The In-Between Years (or The Empire Strikes Back)

The Folk Revival:

The Kingston Trio - Tom Dooley
Pete Seeger - Turn Turn Turn!
Joan Baez - Silver Dagger
Bob Dylan - Masters of War
Lyrics here.

Surf & Hot Rod Combos:

The Beach Boys - Surfin USA
Dick Dale & The Del-Tones - Miserlou
Link Wray & His Ray Men - Rumble (Outtake)
The Stingers (Jack Cole) - Mustang

Uptown R&B from Motown/All songs by Holland-Dozier-Holland:

Martha & The Vandellas - Nowhere To Run
The Four Tops - Reach Out I'll Be There
The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love
Marvin Gaye - How Sweet It Is

Girl Groups/Phil Spector Wall of Sound/Songs by Weill & Mann:

The Ronettes - Be My Baby
The Crystals - Then He Kissed Me
The Crystals - Da Doo Ron Ron

Cynthia Weill & Barry Mann songs NOT produced by Phil Spector:

Lesley Gore - It's My Party

The Wall of Sound in full-effect:

Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep, Mountain High

The Righteous Brothers - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling

Readings:
Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

nb. You will not be responsible for this reading for the midterm. We will discuss the issues and concepts raised in it after the exam. I do however urge you to read it as it offers a lot of points that would help your review of material that will actually be covered on the midterm.

In Garofalo you should read up to and including Chapter 6.