From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (IV of IV)
This is the final portion of the interview I recently ran on my blog with Queensland University of Technology's Axel Bruns.
Is it appropriate to apply the same concepts to talk about our new roles as consumers/producers of culture and our shifting roles as citizens?
I think so, yes. It's not far to go from active cultural to active political participation, and we're seeing more examples of using the tools of produsage for political effect every day. Building in part on Pierre Levy's discussion of "molecular politics" in his Collective Intelligence, I've tried to develop a first rough sketch of this produsage politics - or perhaps produsage of politics - in my paper at the MiT5 conference last year, and extended this further for one of the later chapters in the book.
One thing, I think, is certain in this context: a produsage-based approach to politics would look significantly different from the current mass media-driven and ultimately industrial model of politics as it exists in the US, Australia, and many other developed nations. To bear any resemblance to produsage as it exists in other domains, to begin with, it would have to operate on a much more deliberative, open, and inclusive basis than political processes have operated during the height of the mass media age - and groups such as MoveOn in the US, and a href="http://getup.org.au/">GetUp in Australia may be early indications that such shifts are now being attempted by interested parties, if haltingly and uneasily.
One of the major obstacles to moving further along that road, however, are the mainstream media, who have oversimplified our understanding of politics to an eternal contest between left and right - this is politics as a sport, scored in opinion polls and delegate counts, and analysed from the sidelines by pundits and commentators. This leaves little room for nuance, for broad, constructive, and open-ended deliberation; such deliberation may take place (we hope) in parliamentary committees and party rooms, and (we know) in grassroots political communities from MoveOn to the central hubs of the political blogosphere, but the media play a very effective spoiler role that prevents these two sides from connecting successfully.
From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (III of IV)
Earlier today, I ran the first two installments of this interview with Queensland University of Technology's Axel Bruns, who discussed his core thesis about the blurring of the role of consumer and producer in the new cultural economy. In the final two posts, he extends this concept of "produsage" to explore its implications for knowledge production, citizenship, and learning, as well as provides us a glimpse into the innovative academic community which has informed his work. This interview originally ran in two parts over on my blog.
What are the implications of the produsage model for understanding how knowledge gets produced and circulated? You clearly are interested in this book in Wikipedia. What core insights can we take from Wikipedia that might be applied to other collaborative enterprises?
In the first place, perhaps, I think it would be great if Wikipedians themselves could draw some further insights from the way Wikipedia has developed so far, and better understand the drivers of its success. Its very success is a threat to its future survival, if it means that there is a growing disconnect between middle and upper levels of Wikipedia's administration and everyday users and contributors. The project has been remarkably resilient to internal and external threats, of course, but that doesn't mean that it will continue to weather any storm that comes its way. In particular, I would argue that Wikipedia should work to enshrine the prerequisites for produsage as absolutely fundamental, inalienable principles of the project, and protect them even against well-meaning suggestions for change. (That doesn't mean locking down its present modus operandi for all eternity, of course - but whatever changes are made must be made very carefully and with due consultation.)
The crucial question for Wikipedia and other produsage projects concerned with building and growing repositories of community knowledge is that of how to engage with those who are regarded as experts in their field, of course. Both sides of this debate have valid arguments in their favour, of course - people like Wikipedia dissident and Citizendium founder Larry Sanger point to the fact that clearly, different people do have different levels of knowledge about any given topic, while others believe that any a priori elevation of the contributor level of such experts (or ultimately, exclusion of non-experts) is unnecessary: if these people have superior knowledge and the sources to back it up, that knowledge should come through collective evaluation processes unscathed.
From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (II of IV)
This is the second part of an interview I conducted recently with QUT's Axel Bruns on my blog.
Your analysis emphasizes the value of "unfinished artifacts" and an ongoing production process. Can you point to some examples of where these principles have been consciously applied to the development of cultural goods?
My earlier work (my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, and various related publications) has focussed mainly on what we've now come to call 'citizen journalism' - and (perhaps somewhat unusually, given that so much of the philosophy of produsage ultimately traces back its lineage to open source) it's in this context that I first started to think about the need for a new concept of produsage as an alternative to 'production'.
From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (I of IV)
I have long regarded the Creative Industries folks at Queensland University of Technology to be an important sister program to what we are doing in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Like us, they are pursuing media and cultural studies in the context of a leading technological institution. Like us, they are adopting a cross-disciplinary approach which includes the possibility of productive exchange between the Humanities and the business sector. Like us, they are trying to make sense of the changing media landscape with a particular focus on issues of participatory culture, civic media, media literacy, and collective intelligence. The work which emerges there is distinctive -- reflecting the different cultural and economic context of Australia -- but it complements in many ways what we are producing through our program. I will be traveling to Queensland in June to continue to conversation.
Since this blog has launched, I have shared with you the reflections of three people currently or formerly affiliated with the QUT program -- Alan McKee; Jean Burgess ; and Joshua Green, who currently leads our Convergence Culture Consortium team. Today, I want to introduce you to a fourth member of the QUT group -- Axel Bruns. I presented this interview recently on my blog, but I wanted to share it here in a series of posts as well.
Thanks to my ties to the QUT community, I got a chance to read an early draft of Bruns's magisterial new book, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), and I've wanted for some time to be able to introduce this project to my readers. Bruns tackles so many of the topics which I write about on the blog on a regular basis -- his early work dealt extensively on issues of blogging and citizen journalism and he has important observations, here and in the book, about the future of civic media. He has a strong interest in issues of education and citizenship, discussing what we need to do to prepare people to more fully participate within the evolving cultural economy. As his title suggests, he is offering rich and nuanced case studies of many of the core "Web 2.0" sites which are transforming how knowledge gets produced and how culture gets generated at the present moment. He has absorbed, engaged with, built upon, and surpassed, in many cases, much of the existing scholarly writing in this space to produce his own original account for the directions our culture is taking.
In this interview, you will get a sense of the scope of his vision. In this interview, Bruns lays out his core concept of "produsage," explains why we need to adopt new terms to understand this new model of cultural production, and then explores this term's implications for citizenship and learning.
In addition to the piece I ran on the C3 blog from Kevin Driscoll earlier today, I wanted to share another piece from my blog by C3 Graduate Student Researcher Xiaochang Li.
Here, Li interweaves her reflections on the Spy genre, especially Get Smart and Alias, and her own personal and family history. This distinctly cold war genre is deployed in an effort to understand her own identity as a Chinese-American. (Of course, though this will make sense to few outside our circle, but the most fannish gesture in this essay may be, in Xiaochang's case, the opening reference to Marcel Proust!)
Spy Stories
by Xiaochang Li
Marcel Proust, working from the sinking grave of his bed, tells us that we are creatures assembled from faulty memory, the eager sum of our desperate retellings, frantic optimists. Autobiography is not the province of excavation but construction, and even the most honest of us are careful architects of repetition and forgetfulness, deliberate amnesiacs working to amass reasonable explanations for what we have become. Recollection, I learned, is just another form of secrecy.
In the 60s spy satire, Get Smart, Maxwell Smart is a haphazard agent engaged in a long-term stand-off with an organization called KAOS, an epic battle against the perpetrators of general disarray. He fumbled his way through disarming death rays and and foiling assassination plots, assured in his aptitude even as he walked into the obvious traps and locked himself inside phone booths. This he taught me too: we are not always what we appear, even to ourselves.
This is the fourth in a series of "intimate critiques" produced by masters students in my Media Theory and Methods proseminar that I've been running over on my blog. Since Kevin will be speaking as part of a Consortium-organized colloquium event on Thursday regarding his work on video sharing sites, I thought it would be a great idea to share his post with C3 blog readers as well.
Here, Kevin walks us through the process by which he learned to hear and appreciate a mix tape which initially challenged him both formally and ideologically. In the process, as a young white male, he confronts some explicit lyrics which force him to re-examine some of his assumptions about race, class and sexuality. This essay may take some readers out of their comfort zone -- and that's part of its point, since he is trying to explain how we renegotiate our senses of ourselves when we encounter forms of expression which do not fit our norms or pre-established tastes.
Bitch Ass Darius "Follow The Sound" Mixtape
by Kevin Driscoll
The CD itself is rather unassuming. Sleeveless, its face bears a name and phone number handwritten in Sharpie. Flip the disc over and you might suspect it is blank. The area pock-marked with data stretches from the center hole to just before the outermost edge. Drop it into a CD player and you'll discover that there are eighty tracks, few of which extend beyond sixty seconds.
I met Joe Beuckman in the summer of 2003 when we performed together in a small artspace located inside one of dozens of post-industrial hulks scattered around Allentown, PA. He gave a demonstration about reverse engineering Nintendo cartridges, showed off a vinyl record used to store executable computer instructions, and then scratched that record over Three 6 Mafia's "Sippin' on Some Syrup" while shouting, "I'm scratching data right now!" I introduced myself after the show and he gave me CD-Rs containing the latest mixtapes from two of his DJ alter-egos: Kenny Kingston and Bitch Ass Darius. Kenny Kingston is a lover of early-90s dance music: house, hip-hop, r'n'b, and new jack swing. Bitch Ass Darius plays a mixture of Miami bass, acid house, and pitched-up Detroit techno known occasionally as "ghettotech" or "booty bass." While I found familiarity, comfort, and nostalgia in Kingston's pop-heavy mix, everything about Darius' mix, from the super-fast tempo to the puerile lyrics, felt alien and alienating.
Children as Storytellers: The Making of TikaTok (Part Two)
I recently shared with you an interview with CMS alum Neal Grigsby and MIT Media Lab alum Orit Zuckerman, two of the key players in a new startup company, TikaTok, which is working to encourage children to create their own books and share them with other young readers. In this followup post, also cross-posted from my blog, we get a bit more personal as the two share their sense of how their MIT education contributed to their current projects.
Your site also seems to promote opportunities for collaboration between young authors and illustrators. Is this a way of introducing young people to the world of collective intelligence?
Neal: It certainly is, and although it was always on our road map to add this feature, necessity made us move it up the schedule. Our users demanded it. Drawing, and getting an illustration up on the site, can be a creative and technical challenge for many. The team went back and forth for a very long time about the possibility of providing a digital drawing tool before finally coming to the conclusion that it was a bad idea for several reasons. But if you could use the illustrations that other kids had already provided and pledged to the community, if only until a time that your own drawings would be ready, it would really help.
Children as Storytellers: The Making of TikaTok (Part One)
Considering the interests the Consortium has in issues such as participatory culture and innovative distribution platforms, I thought they might be interested in the first part of an interview I just ran over on my blog. I will share the second part here on the C3 blog shortly as well.
When our son was three years old, we began the practice of having him compose stories for us before bed. We traded off nights. Some nights we'd read him a story. Some nights he would make up a story which we typed out on the computer for him, word for word, without changes. Sometimes he would take a few friendly prods to get moving but we were very careful to preserve the structure and details of his imagination. We would print out the stories and have him draw pictures to illustrate them. We would then photocopy the whole and send them to his grandparents on birthdays and other major holidays as a time capsule of his creative life.
A Criti-Fan Who's Yearning for the World as It Was
I ran this on my site this morning, and considering the tie-in to Sam's work here through the Consortium blog, I wanted to cross-post it here as well.
One of the more unorthodox policy decisions we've made at the Comparative Media
Studies Program is to allow students to include non-academics as outside readers on their thesis committees where they can demonstrate that the person has relevent experience and expertise. This has opened to door to bringing alternative kinds of knowledge into the thesis process. When Sam Ford, who now runs the blog here for the Convergence Culture Consortium, wrote a thesis about soap operas and convergence, I ended up sitting on a committee which included both a veteran soap opera writer Kay Alden (The Young and the Restless, now writing for The Bold and the Beautiful) and a long time soap fan who had written for Soap Opera Weekly, Lynn Liccardo. Needless to say, it was a fascinating discussion -- one which allowed Sam to test his ideas against real world feedback from within both the industry and the fan community. As one of the non-soaps people in the room (along with William Uricchio), I learned a great deal from listening to both of
our visiting experts.
This term, Sam Ford has been teaching a course through our program on soap opera and the blog for the course has attracted a range of outside participants, including, once again, Lynn Liccardo. I asked Lynn if I could share with you some thoughts she has about what has happened to the soap opera genre in recent years and why she is becoming increasingly frustrated with a genre which has been part of her life for decades.
A CRIT-FAN WHO'S YEARNING FOR THE WORLD AS IT WAS
by Lynn Liccardo
Over the past few weeks I've been checking in on the blog Sam Ford set up for his class on The American Soap Opera: here. The student comments touch on many of the issues that underlie the current, sorry state of the American Soap Opera. Of course, being only a few weeks into the course, and from what I can tell, relatively new soap viewers, they lack the contextual understanding to connect the dots.
They're watching As the World Turns, a show I've watched since it premiered in 1956, the year I started kindergarten. But they're watching and studying ATWT as it exists today; I'm watching the same show and yearning for the show it used to be.
As Sam Ford noted in a post earlier this week, The Chronicle of Higher Education, this week, features excerpts from my remarks at their Technology Forum earlier this year. In the talk, I described some of the ways that our program has deployed new media technologies to expand its outreach to the public and I have suggested some of the benefits to academic programs in embracing the potentials which these technologies offer for us to extend our roles as public intellectuals. Since much of this deals with this blog, it seemed only appropriate to share it with my readers on my blog and here on the C3 blog as well.
In the week after September 11, 2001, the students, faculty members, and alumni of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program rallied forces to create a Web site called (http://re:constructions). It was designed to provoke public reflection on the media's role in shaping our responses to national tragedies. Over the course of an intense weekend, students produced films, identified quotations, wrote essays, and contacted friends and family around the world. When the site went live, we had generated more than 100 separate entries, including reports on media responses to the attacks in more than 30 countries.
I have been pulled in so many directions lately that I've been having trouble finding time to blog about everything that has been happening. So consider this post as a chance to catch up on some materials which may be of interest to my regular readers.
A few weeks ago, I joined my CMS colleague Beth Coleman for a conversation about virtual worlds, hosted by the MIT Club of Boston and webcast to alumni around the country. You may recall that Coleman and I were two participants in a three way conversation with Clay Shirky about virtual worlds a while back. Coleman is in the process of writing Hello Avatar!, which is intended as a primer about virtual worlds. She regularly writes about such topics over at her Project Good Luck Blog.
The first three parts of this series are available here, here, and here. I have been running this series over at my blog as well. This series, which concludes with this piece, is co-authored by myself and Dr. Joshua Green, the Consortium's Research Manager.
Prohibitionists and The Moral Economy
"The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important." - Tim O'Reilly (2005)
"Our entire cultural economy is in dire straights....We will live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising." -- Andrew Keen (2007)
See the first two parts of this series here and here. I have been running this over on my blog. This series is co-authored between myself and Dr. Joshua Green, C3's Research Manager.
The Value of Engagement and Participation
"Corporations will allow the public to participate in the construction and representation of their creations or they will, eventually, compromise the commercial value of their properties. The new consumer will help to create value or they will refuse it... Corporations have a right to keep copyright but they have an interest in releasing it." --Grant McCracken (1997)
At the most basic level, the distribution and publicity mechanisms of networked computing renders visible the often "invisible" labor fans perform in supporting their favorite properties.
See the first part of this series here. I have been running this over on my blog. This series is co-authored between myself and Dr. Joshua Green, C3's Research Manager.
Convergence Culture
"The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet." -- Clay Shirkey (2000)
Push-button publishing, citizen journalism, and pro-amateur creative activities dominated early conceptions of the ways digitization would change media production. Newer, so-called "Web 2.0" companies integrate participatory components into their business plans. These activities run from feedback forums and beta-tests to inviting audiences to produce, tag, or remix content. Online services regularly collected under the banner of 'Web 2.0' such as photo sharing site flickr, social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, and video uploading sites such as YouTube and Veoh, have built entire business plans on the back of user-generated content. Software companies engage users as beta-testers and co-creators of content (Banks 2002). Marketing departments build puzzles, scavenger hunts, and interactive components into websites and mixed-media campaigns to generate buzz around branded entertainment properties. Technological, cultural, and marketplace changes make such tactics a necessity.
I wrote the following essay on the cultural politics around web 2.0 with Joshua Green, a post-doc in the CMS program, who is speerheading the Convergence Culture Consortium and who is my partner in crime in organizing the Futures of Entertainment conferences. Green came to us from the Creative Industries program at Queensland University of Technology. This paper blends work out of Queensland on creative industries with work out of MIT on convergence culture. Green is currently completing a book manuscript about YouTube with Jean Burgess, who was interviewed over at my blog earlier this year. I am running this series on my blog but also wanted to cross-post it here, considering its relationship to the work we do here in the Consortium.
GDC Roundup 2008: Diversity and Innovation in the Contemporary Games Industry
I ran this over on my blog, but in light of our various conference roundups here on the C3 blog of late, I thought it might be good to share some insight on the GDC as well.
Every Friday afternoon, the team at our GAMBIT Lab hosts a game critique session. Lab staff and students pick a theme, bring out a range of contemporary examples for people to play and pick apart, as the lab seeks to develop their own strategies for game design. GAMBIT's remit commits it to trying to expand and diversify our understanding of games as a medium of expression. A few weeks ago, Eitan Glinert presented the group with his perspectives on the games which had been nominated or won awards at the recent Game Developers Conference, and they individually and collectively generated a lot of buzz and excitement in our group.
There is especial interest here in games which manipulate time and space in creative ways. Some years ago, I was part of a group which organized a series of Creative Leaders workshops for Electronic Art. One of the exercises we did was have game designers read passages from Alan Lightman's novel, Einstein's Dreams. Lightman, a physicist, was interested in describing worlds with radically different structures of time and space and then playing out how they would impact the lives of their residents. Our conversations with game designers focused on how they might give players the experience of "visiting" such worlds, though I have also had fun in class discussions getting students to imagine what it would mean to design media for the inhabitants of such worlds.
On Saturday, Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good for You) and I delivered the opening remarks at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. I originally posted this over on my blog, but I know many C3 readers are interested in conferences like SXSW, so I wanted to share this here as well.
Conference organizers told me that we were heard by around 2000 people, including those in the large auditorium and in various overflow rooms. So, I've got to figure that a certain percentage of those people are going to be visiting this blog for the first time in the next week so I am pulling together a guide to where they can read more about some of the topics we discussed. For the rest of you, you might want to check out this very elaborate chart which was "live drawn" during our discussion and which does a reasonably good job of mapping out some of the core topics.
For those of you who want to learn more about the New Media Literacies, you might want to check out the white paper my team wrote for the MacArthur Foundation which identifies 11 core skills and cultural competencies which we think young people need to acquire to become full participants in this emerging media culture. The MacArthur network has generated a series of books on key topics surrounding digital media and learning which can be downloaded for free.
If you'd like to read more about the politics of fear and the ways it blinds us to what's really going on as young people engage with media, you should consider this blog post and this document which danah boyd and I co-authored in response to the push to regulate school and library access to social network software.
I originally posted this on my blog and wanted to share it with the Consortium readers as well, considering C3's particular interest in online video and participatory culture in its current research.
A few weeks ago, Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, and I held a public conversation about "From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy: Politics in the Age of YouTube" at Otis College. The conversation ranged across many aspects of the current campaign season -- from "Obama Girl" to Huckabee's relationship to Chuck Norris, from The Daily Show to this anti-Hillary video -- suggesting the ways that social networks and participatory culture have impacted this most unlikely of campaign seasons.
I posted this on my blog earlier this week and wanted to share it with the Consortium readers as well, since I know the C3 team has been doing some thinking about memes of late.
The other night, I had dinner with a group of colleagues from the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. Amongst them was Tom Levinson, sometimes producer for Nova, author of three published books on science and culture (Einstein in Berlin: Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science; and Ice Time: Climate Science and Life on Earth) with a fourth (about Isaac Newton) on the way, and a relative newcomer to the world of blogging.
His newly launched blog, The Inverse Square Blog, is full of interesting information and arguments centering around the presentation of science within the public sphere. Check out, for example, his response to the Obama "Yes We Can" video and to the topic of viral marketing, which crops up with some frequency here these days.
This morning, I awoke to find that Tom Levinson has tagged me on what is being described as the "1, 2, 3" Meme.
On Monday, I spoke in Tampa at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tech Forum. My central topic was on the ways that the new media landscape was enabling the emergence of new kinds of public intellectuals. I promised folks in the audience that I would provide them with links to some of the examples which I cited. I already posted this over on my blog, but I thought the resources would be of interest to C3 readers as well.
Learning From YouTube: An Interview with Alex Juhasz (Part Two)
Earlier, I ran the first installment of a two part interview with filmmaker, activist, and cultural critic Alex Juhasz that first ran over on my blog.
In the first part, we focused primarily on a course she taught this fall on YouTube, describing some of the pedagogical issues she encountered, and some of the ways her course got distorted through mass media coverage.
Today, she is focusing more fully on some of her concerns about profoundly "undemocratic" aspects of YouTube, concerns which her teaching experience brought into sharper focus. While Juhasz and I start from very different perspectives, I see her critique as a valuable starting point for a conversation about the ways that YouTube does or does not achieve our highest goals for a more diverse and participatory culture.
Learning From YouTube: An Interview with Alex Juhasz (Part One)
Given the Consortium's interest in YouTube, I wanted to post a recent interview I ran over on my blog a few days ago.
What does it mean to learn from Youtube and what would it mean to treat YouTube itself as a platform for instruction and critique?
Alex Juhasz taught a course about YouTube last term at Pizer College, a small liberal arts school in California. As she explains below, Juhasz and her students adopted novel strategies for not simply engaging with YouTube content but also for using the YouTube platform to communicate their findings to a world beyond the classroom. In doing so, they took risks -- inviting outside scrutiny of their classroom activities, bringing down skepticism and scorn from many in the mainstream media which itself plays such a central role in the cycle of self promotion and publicity which surrounds the platform and its content. They became part of the phenomenon they were studying -- for better or for worse.
Earlier this month, I served as a respondent on a panel at USC's 24/7 DIY Video Event on a panel during which Juhasz shared her experiences. I felt that both her pedagogical approach and her critical perspective on YouTube would be of interest to readers of both my blog and the C3 blog.
I recently shared this piece with the readers of my blog. Considering the work the Consortium has been doing of late on YouTube (See blog entries about it here, here, and here), I wanted to cross-post it here as well.
Last week's 24/7 DIY Video Summit at the University of Southern California represented a gathering of the tribes, bringing together and sparking conversations between many of the different communities which have been involved in producing and distributing "amateur" media content in recent years.
Mimi Ito and Steve Anderson, the conference organizers, have worked for several years to develop a curatorial process which would respect the different norms and practices of these diverse DIY cultures while providing a context for them to compare notes about how the introduction of new digital production and distribution tools have impacted their communities.
Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jassi, Part II
Earlier this week, I cross-posted the first part of an interview with media scholar Pat Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media and Law Professor Peter Jaszi, both from American University. Now that the second half of the interview is available on my blog as well, I also wanted to share it with the Consortium's blog readers.
Your team has had good luck developing a set of guidelines to provide more clarity to documentary producers about when their deployment of borrowed materials is protected under current legal understandings. Can you describe some of the impact that this report has had? What lessons might we take from those experiences as we look at the challenges confronting amateur media makers?
PA: Documentary filmmakers found their hands tied creatively, without access to fair use. So in November 2005 they developed a consensus statement, Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, through their national organizations and with our coordination, which describes four typical situations that come up for them, and what the principles of fair use are, along with the limitations on those principles. For instance, the Statement shows that in critiquing a particular piece of media, you can use that media to illustrate your point. The limitation is that you can't use more of it than makes your point. Common sense and good manners require that you let people know what it is (provide credit).
Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jassi, Part I
I posted this entry on my blog yesterday from the west coast, having flown out to California to participate in 24/7 A DYI Video Summit being hosted by the University of Southern California. The event brings together videomakers from a range of different communities -- everything from fan video producers to activists who use Youtube to get their messages out to the world. I am thrilled to be participating on a plenary panel on the future of DYI Video, featuring Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, and Lawrence Lessig, hosted by Howard Rheingold.
As I was getting ready to head out to the conference, I conducted an interview with media scholar Pat Aufderheide (of the Center for Social Media) and Law Professor Peter Jaszi, both from American University, and I thought I would share it with the Consortium's readers as well.
I've long been interested in the work Pat and Peter have been doing promoting fair use in relation to a range of different communities of practice -- including documentary filmmakers, media literacy instructors, and producers of online video content. We featured some of the work they were doing through the Media in Transition conference at MIT last year.
I wanted to provide an update from my post earlier this week with some more notes about my recent trip to Shanghai. For more posts on the trip, see my blog.
As I was getting ready for the trip, I stumbled onto a recently released study, produced by IAC and JWT, which compared the centrality of digital media in the life of teens in the United States and China. I used these statistics in my talk at the conference to suggest the importance of fostering new media literacies and ethics among Chinese youth. Here are some of the report's findings:
Almost five times as many Chinese as American respondents said they have a parallel life online (61 percent vs. 13 percent).
More than twice as many Chinese respondents agreed that "I have experimented with how I present myself online" (69 percent vs. 28 percent of Americans).
More than half the Chinese sample (51 percent) said they have adopted a completely different persona in some of their online interactions, compared with only 17 percent of Americans.
Fewer than a third of Americans (30 percent) said the Internet helps their social life, but more than three-quarters of Chinese respondents (77 percent) agreed that "The Internet helps me make friends."
Chinese respondents were also more likely than Americans to say they have expressed personal opinions or written about themselves online (72 percent vs. 56 percent). And they have expressed themselves more strongly online than they generally do in person (52 percent vs. 43 percent of Americans).
Chinese respondents were almost twice as likely as Americans to agree that it's good to be able to express honest opinions anonymously online (79 percent vs. 42 percent) and to agree that online they are free to do and say things they would not do or say offline (73 percent vs. 32 percent).
I have been publishing a variety of notes from the time I spent in Shanghai earlier this month for my blog earlier this month. I thought C3 readers might be particularly interested in this piece. You can find other notes from my visit to Shanghai here, here, and here.
I had dinner on my last night in Shanghai with Yu Liu, a reporter who covers digital culture for Lifeweek Magazine, which is roughly the equivalent of Time. She shared with me a story she had written about the growing fan culture around Prison Break in China. As she notes, Prison Break's focus on strong filial bonds resonate powerfully with Chinese cultural tradition.
(This left me wondering about the popularity of Supernatural in China -- which has the strong brotherly affection coupled with ghost stories and would seem ready made for this market, but I didn't see any signs of it.)
Prison Break had already been mentioned to me several times during the visit as a series which was sparking strong fan response here. Yu Liu's report describes the elaborate collaborative network which has emerged to allow Chinese fans to translate and recirculate Prison Break episodes within twelve hours of their airing in the United States. As we spoke, she drew strong parallels to the fan subbing practices around anime in the western world, which I have discussed here in the blog in the past.
She said that during the first season, the Chinese fans had discovered the series on dvds sold on street corners as part of the black market in entertainment properties here. By the second season, the fans primarily relied on the internet to access content, impatient with the longer turnaround time of dvd production. Like American anime fans, they took the media in their own hands.
I originally posted this entry on my blog last month. While my blog remains inactive during our transition to a new server, I wanted to cross-post this over at C3 now that the Consortium blog is back up and running.
When I heard several months ago that some of my MIT colleagues and students were helping to stage a performance of Live Action Anime, I knew I had to be there. I anticipated the experience with a kind of "only at MIT" amusement -- not sure what to expect but knowing that the results would be dazzling.
The performance, Madness at Mokuba, opened with a spectacular battle between two giant robots (see the image above) staged against the backdrop of projected anime images and accompanied by an awe-inspiring soundtrack of metallic clanks and engine sounds which instantly reminded me of my first experience watching RoboTech and Star Blazers several decades ago. I didn't know what live action would look like but as the performance continued, I was more and more impressed with the craft and research which went into this performance.
I have written here in the past about my growing discomfort with the phrase, "digital natives" -- which like all metaphors helps us to see some aspects of the world clearly while masking others.
Like many of you, I first encountered these metaphors in the work of Marc Prensky and saw them as a powerful new way of thinking about generational differences that were creating an impass in debates about media literacy education. Prensky laid out these metaphors in a 2001 essay for On the Horizon which has been widely read and cited.
