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As promised (to the class), here’s the deck for my presentation on Remix Culture given to the SVA grad seminar last week. My apologies for the formatting – some of the fonts & images didn’t translate well to Slideshare. The audio and video didn’t translate at all, so to watch/listen to the examples, you’ll need to click on the buttons on the slides.
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Written as midterm assignment for Media Studies:Ideas
In their 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman posit a theory of “systemic propaganda” in which the mass media control content in order to serve the ends of the dominant elite. The ingredients of this model are five “filters” used to censor content, which consist of concentrated media ownership, advertising, government news sourcing, flak, and anticommunism. The cultural and technological landscape in which this theory arose is vastly different than today’s, which is characterized by interactive technologies that allow everyday citizens to manipulate media in ways that were impossible 22 years ago. At the same time, interactive technologies pose their own set of challenges to the open distribution of news and other media content. The strengthening of copyright laws benefitting corporate media creators, as well as governmental restrictions on technology, have created a situation in which government is still in control of the creation and distribution of content. Additionally, corporate media producers have engaged in practices of aggressively persecuting fans and citizen producers over intellectual property rights – forcing fan websites to be shut down, and litigating against consumers who share and remix media.
How do changing copyright laws and a participatory media landscape impact the fitters theorized by Chomsky two decades ago? To try to answer this, I will look specifically at Chomsky’s ideas of media ownership and examine how they may be challenged by contemporary media practices. I will examine not only the concept of content ownership, but also ownership of the media companies themselves and try to discern how interactive media both challenges Chomsky’s theory, as well as how it has created an environment in which new censorship filters have emerged, and whether it’s possible for old economic models to survive in the digital age.
[continue reading this post...]
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Moby - photo by Maurice Narcis
With the RE/Mixed Media Festival a week behind me and the ‘official’ post-mortem with the band a week ahead – I need to start recording the experience. Maybe it’s just snips of memory, conversations, thoughts or feelings that floated through. A lot ‘happened,’ but this festival was something that came together between the cracks – that became a living being with breath and movement and thought – when we weren’t looking… while we were occupied ‘doing’ everything that needed to be done. It’s the baby that started growing after a night that started with a feeling – one of love, we hope – who needs your attention every day before it comes into the light, but who you do not ‘know’ until that day it’s born. [continue reading this post...]
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So yesterday evening, I was interviewed by a fellow named Garfield Stinvil who runs an online vidders community called Vidders.net. I haven’t actually listened to it yet, as I cannot stand hearing myself talk, but I give a ton of info on the RE/Mixed Media Festival, it’s background and origin, the formation of LOFI & what we’re trying to accomplish, and the kinds of stuff you can expect to see at the festival on the 30th. It was booked very last minute, so I didn’t have a lot of prep time – hopefully I’m not too ramble-y. If you have an easier time of listening to my voice than I do, you can listened to the archived interview here:
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Introduction
Having worked in digital media for television since 1999, I have taken a keen interest in watching how the perception of digital technology as a threat to traditional media, particularly by large media conglomerates, has evolved. The reactions of the film and recording industries to so-called “piracy” have received the most attention, but there has also been a backlash against sharing technologies and practices within the broadcast television industry as well. Networks have spoken out against fans posting even short clips of copyrighted content on fan sites and YouTube, and have been active in forcing takedowns of such clips and even, at times, of the sites themselves.
The proposed topic of research is the effect these efforts have had on the fans’ relationship to the brand and its franchises. How, exactly, do these networks think these types of activities will affect their revenues, and have those fears been borne out? Is the fan’s affinity with the brand or franchise adversely affected by persecution by the network? How is the fan community at large affected by the networks’ activities, and what effect does that, in turn, have on the brand? What are some potential solutions that would satisfy both the brands and the networks?
Definitions of Fans and Fan Activities
In order for us to examine the question of whether or not corporate media’s persecution of fan activities has been helpful or harmful to the media properties, we must first define what exactly we mean by fans, and what we mean by “fan activities.” In a research study by C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby, and documented in their article “Global Fandom/Global Fan Studies,” participants were asked to define the difference between fans and ordinary consumers. The results were that most participants agreed that fans are a subset of consumers, but ones that have a greater “emotional, psychological, and/or behavioral investment in media texts,” (186) and whose level of active engagement with a text is substantially greater than average consumers, who are generally passive in their consumption. This jibes with Henry Jenkins’ definition of fans from the introduction of his book, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, in which he describes fans as “active, critically engaged, and creative.” (1) Jenkins goes on to say that digital technology is allowing fan cultures to thrive and grow, by providing people who may have, in the past, only been passive consumers, the opportunity to “archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.” (1) By this definition, even the simple act of “recirculating,” – posting a video clip of a TV program onto YouTube or a blog – constitutes fan behavior. Taking clues from these two definitions, we can safely define fans as anyone who has an affective relationship with a media text beyond passive consumption, and ‘fan activity’ as the active engagement with that media text such as sending it to a friend or sharing a segment of it online. However, there are a number of fan activities that have gone beyond these simple acts of engagement, one of which is fan fiction, which I will discuss in a moment, in which fans create entire alternative narratives based on the objects of their fandom. [continue reading this post...]
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On February 26 2010, in a piece called “The Free-Appropriation Writer,” The New York Times’ Randy Kennedy reported on the recent controversy over German novelist
Helene Hegemann, and whether the use of another writer’s work in her novel was theft or an allowable form of “sampling” or “remix.”
In this piece I’ll try to show how Kennedy’s article misses the central issue around the copyright/appropriation debate – the idea/expression dichotomy – and further,
Helene Heggmann: plagiarist or remixer?
how the article misrepresents the interests of artists and copyright activists. I will demonstrate that while Helene Hegemann’s actions were, in fact, plagiarism, Kennedy’s presentation of the issue reflects a cultural bias towards ownership of expression, and away from the idea of copyright as a trade agreement designed to encourage creativity and serve the public good. His article proposes to examine both sides of the appropriation issue, but the result of Kennedy’s bias is a report that uses the Hegemann story as a platform to condemn an entire area of critical thought and opinion, based on the actions of one proverbial bad apple.
The Idea/Expression Dichotomy
In a 1996 article in the Yale Law Journal, Neil Netanel wrote, “As all authorship involves a degree of borrowing from earlier works, an overly broad copyright represents an unacceptable burden on creative expression.” At the center of the controversy reported in the Kennedy’s article is a concept that he only barely acknowledges in his piece, known as the “idea/expression dichotomy.” This is essentially a legal construction, dating back to the founding of the United States, which differentiates between an idea and the explicit expression of that idea. In Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidhyanathan claims “James Madison and others insisted that American copyright clearly protect distinct expressions of ideas for a limited time, while allowing others to freely use, criticize, and refer to the ideas that lay beneath the text.” (28) The question of ideas vs. expressions that has gained attention in the past 20 years is typified by the legal conundrum over digital sampling in hip-hop, i.e. is sampling an idea or an expression? What is the language or the alphabet of sound? These is just two of many difficult questions, ones that should seem significantly clearer in cases of literature. [continue reading this post...]
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This is repost from my main blog, but completely relevant to media studies so I’m posting it here as well.
Some of you may have heard me complaining lately that I want to attend SXSW this year, but cannot for a variety of reasons – mostly limited funds. Well, Open Video Alliance is holding a contest for a 60-second video, expressing “what open video means to you.” My solution was to juxtapose media giants (Murdoch, Valenti) to Cookie Monster learning one of the first things we are taught about as kids: sharing. As Adi at OVA said, “it’s very meta” which I think is GOOD if you want to try to make an all encompassing statement in less than a minute. I actually borrowed the idea from my friend Elisa Kreisinger who suggested I remix the work of the other contestants (uber meta). Ultimately, I felt the narrative was better served if I were able to use recognizable icons rather than simply snips of other underground filmmakers, although I did use a few. I used a CC licensed audio tack plus a number of the other contestants’ videos as sources for the remix. Attributions are below the video. Enjoy.
Music by Briareus.
Featuring source material from thesingingnerd, David Köhlmeier, papyromancer, Qasim Virjee, Josh Levy and MissMadDawg.
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Me: Tom Tenney: producer, performer, artist, digital media professional, student, and director of the annual RE/Mixed Media Festival in Brooklyn. Yeah, I wear a lot of hats, and spend a lot of time thinking about the complex relationships between art, culture, media, consciousness, education… I have a rich and varied (albeit somewhat checkered) past in the underground performance scene, and currently play around a lot with sound.
