Continuing our coverage of last week's MiT6 conference, I'd like to share a paper from Elisabeth Jones, a doctoral student at the University of Washington's Information School. Jones presented a paper last Saturday on Network Television Streaming Technologies and the Shifting Television Social Sphere.

Continue reading "MiT6: Streaming Television" »

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The Cult Media and Global Fandom panel at this weekend's MiT 6 Conference focused a variety of ways that media texts circulate in the global community.

Derek Kompare presented a paper entitled "Time Vortex: Versioning and the Fluid Text," in which he explored the "versioning" that takes place with the arguably "cult" TV series Star Trek and Doctor Who. Kompare graciously made his slides available so we can share them here.

Kompare argues that while US television was once organized around textual reception, it now functions on a logic of versioning, which is based on mobility, scalability, and creativity. Media texts, like Star Trek and Doctor Who, are released in as many versions as the market will tolerate. Versioning does not refer to remakes or adaptations of original series, but instead refers to the ways a single text is remastered, repackaged, and ultimately re-sold to fans.

Continue reading "MiT6 Recap: Cult Media and Global Fandom" »

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Throughout the week we'll continue posting our recaps of the wonderfully intense Media in Transition 6 Conference that just took place here at MIT. On Saturday I had the pleasure of moderating the "New Media Business Models" panel. with participation. Goran Bolin, professor in the Department of Media & Communication Studies at Sodertorn University in Stockholm and Leif Dahlberg, who teaches media and literature in the School of Computer Science and Communication at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, were our panelists.

Continue reading "MIT 6: Marketing for New Media" »

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Throughout the week we'll continue posting our recaps of the wonderfully intense Media in Transition 6 Conference that just took place here at MIT. On Saturday I had the pleasure of moderating the "New Media Business Models" panel. with participation. Goran Bolin, professor in the Department of Media & Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm and Leif Dahlberg, who teaches media and literature in the School of Computer Science and Communication at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, were our panelists.

Continue reading "MIT 6: Marketing for New Media" »

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It's very evident why they choose to mute the entire audio track of a positively ID'd video instead of just the part with the problem audio: The fingerprinter can only reliably say "yes, [one particular song] is in here, somewhere," but it doesn't know exactly where in the video the infringing content starts or for how long it plays. It's far easier to just nuke the entire audio track than try to figure out precisely how to cut into it.

Remember #silentyoutube, when YouTube started switching out "unauthorised audio tracks" rendering videos silent? Well just how does YouTube's audio content ID system work? Slashdot links to an interesting analysis and discussion of the functioning of YouTube audio fingerprinting technology by someone from Rochester Institute of Technology's Computer Science House (sorry, I couldn't work out who the author is).

Continue reading ""Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System"" »

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As we head into the weekend, we here at C3 will be diving into the Media in Transition 6 conference. The full conference spans three days with dozens of panels on a wide array of media topics from Youtube to poetry machines of the early modern period to issues around the archival and transport of media in the digital age.

C3 will be in full representation at the conference. I will be speaking ontransnational audiences and fan-driven circulation of East Asian television dramas on Saturday while Josh will be giving a

Though the bulk of activities begins today, the conference has its official launch last night, with a communications forum on Global Media featuring C3 consulting researchers Jonathan Gray and Aswin Punathambekar alongside University of Georgia professor Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and award-winning African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako, moderated by our own Henry Jenkins.

Continue reading "Media In Transition 6: Global Media panel recap" »

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A couple of months ago I mentioned that I was heading to Belém, home of Tecnobrega (yes, it means cheesy techno) and the apparently miraculous açai berry. I spent around ten days doing participant observation and interviews with various members of the Tecnobrega community, mainly their enthusiastic and generous fans. Although I'm still working on the research, I figured I could share a few of my observations right away.
Tecnobrega has become well known because of its copyleft approach to music production/distribution. In theory, musicians "give" their songs to the "pirates" (who make and sell the CDs) and to the DJs (who promote them at the party). The musicians make money off live concerts. Because the musicians choose to not copyright their songs, all remixing and reselling is completely legal, but tecnobrega does use music from other places as well (I was subjected to Britney Spears more than once). Songs are "used up" every month or two, so they are in constant need for new music, but, for a while now, the DJs have become the center of the tecnobrega scene, concerts are less common and musicians no longer have a secure income even if their songs are popular. Having said that, Tecnobrega's business model has a particularly dynamic quality to it, and hopefully they'll come up with yet another solution that fits their new reality.

Continue reading "Report From the Land of Açai Berries and "Cheesy Techno"" »

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Last Friday, we ran the first part of a piece I wrote about Maureen Murphy, Managing Editor of The Electronic Intifada (EI). The second part of this piece deals with the challenges journalism faces in a spreadable media environment. Murphy explains how being an online-only publication has forced EI to address issues of credibility, crediting, activism, and bias.

Though the internet allows EI to reach--and possibly enlighten--a very large audience, Murphy also has some frustrations when thinking about the internet as a medium. "I think people take web media a little less seriously," she says. This is especially frustrating because the brand of journalism EI offers readers is much more complex--and arguably more serious--than much of what's found in the mainstream press. Still, the internet as an aggregate isn't governed by standards as strict as EI's editorial policy, so the same Google search can direct a reader to EI as well as other sites with varying levels of journalistic credibility. Of course it can be argued that many major newsrooms may have questionable journalistic standards, but there is an implicit level of trust that comes with the colophon of say, the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Continue reading "The Electronic Intifada and the Challenges of Online Journalism (Part 2 of 2)" »

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With the recent announcement that the Boston Globe might fold if it can't cut $20 million in union costs, the state of print journalism seems to be in a state of flux. The print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer also folded to budget concerns, but the paper has continued to publish as an online-only news source. Are online editions the future of journalism? And how does online publishing differ from print journalism? As part of an assignment for Henry Jenkins's Theories and Methods class, I recently interviewed the managing editor of The Electronic Intifada, an online-only news source dedicated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to get her opinion on the state of online journalism. Below, you'll find portion of my report.

Maureen Murphy is the Managing Editor of The Electronic Intifada (EI), a nonprofit online publication--found at electronicintifada.net-- that features news, opinion, and analysis about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Disclosure: Maureen Murphy is also my cousin.) EI was founded in early 2001 by Ali Abunimah, Nigel Parry, Arjan El Fassed, and Laurie King--four activists who had never met in person. Murphy explains: "The Electronic Intifada project started as a reaction to the corporate media narration of the second Palestinian Intifada. It was started by a bunch of activists who didn't know each other, but who were able to find each other through the internet." EI was originally conceived as a supplement to the mainstream news media's coverage of the conflict, but it has quickly grown to a news source in its own right. EI averages 3000-5000 unique visitors daily, and they got as many as 30,000 visitors a day during the recent crisis in Gaza.

Continue reading "The Electronic Intifada and the Challenges of Online Journalism (Part 1 of 2)" »

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Here then is part 3 of the full interview transcript with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the founders of the Asian Media streaming site Dramafever.This section deals with issues of audience measurement and engagement metric, as well as the challenges and opportunities licensed online video platforms face in light of the many unofficial sources of content out there.

Part 1 and part 2 of the interview are available, and the rest will be up soon.

Continue reading "Dramafever.com full interview (part 3)" »

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Unless you had real compelling plans for this Easter Sunday,and even if you did, chances are that you caught wind of the "twitstorm" surrounding Amazon's de-ranking of books that could allegedly fit the "adult content" category. Whether this indefensible act was intentional or not, caused by a glitch, sabotage, hackers or aliens, is still not clear. Lucky for us, that is of no concern to this post, the reactions elicited by the event, are. More specifically, I'm interested in looking at how users leveraged the different roles they play in relation to the store and how obfuscating discoverability has come to be synonymous with censorship.

Continue reading "Spread of #amazonfail" »

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Here then is part 2 of a multipart full interview transcript with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the founders of the Asian Media streaming site Dramafever. In this section, Seung and Suk talk about surprising audience demographics that reveal that the audience for Korean dramas might be more broad and more diverse in the US than previously imagined by the Broadcast networks.

Part 1 of the interview was posted last week. Keep an eye out for more of the interview in coming weeks as I get around to transcribing the recording.

And again, for an introduction to this case check here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Continue reading "Dramafever.com full interview (part 2)" »

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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend South by Southwest Interactive in Austin. Between panels, parties, and the constant stream of Tweets, I'm still processing everything I took in at the conference.

For those of you who couldn't make it to Austin last month--and even for those of you who could--I wanted to share the slides from one of the best panels I attended: "Engagement 1.0: Understanding the History of Fan Interactivity," featuring Ivan Askwith, Henry Jenkins and Abigail De Kosnik. Since these three are affiliated with C3, I may be a little biased, but I am sincere when I say that this panel was the most useful discussion fan practices saw at SXSW. I left the presentation with a basic but broad understanding of how fan communities create value and worth. The slides:

As these slides suggest, Askwith began with definition of "fans" that served to frame the discussion.

Continue reading "Wrapping up SXSW: Jenkins, De Kosnik, and Askwith on Fans" »

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Earlier this year, I conducted an interview with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the brains behind dramafever.com, a fully-licensed, ad-supported online streaming site for Asian media content much in the style of Hulu (for an introduction, check out this previous post). While I have already written a fairly extensive summary of the key take-aways from that interview (posted here), I thought some might be interesting in seeing the full transcript.

Below is part 1 (of 4 or 5, depending on the final transcript length), and deals mainly with a quick history of how the site came to be and its general premise.

Continue reading "Dramafever.com full interview (part 1)" »

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