A funny website (with an entire section about how evil SL is!)

First off, somebody needs to make it possible to copy paste from pdfs.

A lot of Benkler's arguments reminded me of some of the things we discussed in relation to Sammy, Lydia, and Sarah's video. He points out that new modes of communication allow people to keep in touch with people with greater ease and enable people to meet other people from completely different cultures across the globe. While we know, by virtue of our participatory culture projects, that technology available via the internet can easily be used for less-than-commendable objectives, it was reassuring to hear from Sammy, Sarah, and Lydia that most people just want to keep in touch with others who are important to them. Benkler seconds this. He seems to have a very positive outlook for the future of communication through the internet, proposing that free access to information will increase opportunity for those worse off to acheive equality with people who begin life well. I agree with a lot of points that Benkler makes and I'd like to share his optimism, but then I see sites like this:


It's sad because it's true. Right now the internet is a place where people can be assholes anonymously. Anyone can say/do/be anything whether good or bad. And while I think it's good that the internet has made it harder to kill opposing viewpoints, not all stupid viewpoints need to be glorified for the world to see.

Did you know?

[rant]
Did you know that, for some reason, video from Second Life must be taken in uncompressed 8-bit in order to preserve quality? Do you know how big uncompressed footage is? About a GB a minute. Sometimes more. Did you know that converting live footage into 8-bit changes the aspect ratio to 640x480? Which is not the same aspect ratio as footage from Second Life. That means, despite the fact that we originally converted ALL of our live footage into 8-bit in order to avoid rendering, we had to render all of the SL footage anyway. Do you know how long it takes to render almost 110 GB of footage? Forever. Do you know how long it takes to transfer that much from hard drive to hard drive? Forever. Especially if one hard drive only has a USB port. My estimate of our total footage, spread across 3 hard drives: 200+GB. Did you know that the editing in our SL project took us 11+ hours of straight editing? Yes, with no breaks in between, as well as a few more hours editing other pieces. Not including getting all of that footage into 8-bit or exporting at the end of the project. Just to put our project into perspective. :-) I think none of us ever want to see SL or Final Cut again.
[/rant]

Edit: 10am to 11:30pm is 13+ hours of editing, not 11. My brain is still so dead I can't even remember how many hours are in a day. Sad.

This week's sponsor: Me

That's why it's pink. It will go back to being black next time I post.

We are the pirates who don't do anything

The fate of the FM radio guy makes me sad. I practically lived off FM radio at one point and every time I go home I look forward to knowing the stations.

"The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture." Lessig makes an interesting point in this sentence, but I don't completely agree with him or his sentiments. I don't see the internet as "'trespassing' upon legitimate claims of 'property.'" I like the "free" flow of information that is possible through the internet, but maybe that's only because I only benefit from it. I have no "property" that the internet can trespass on. I am not the filmmaker whose movie is being downloaded, the singer whose music is being downloaded, or the artist whose prints are being printed out at home. Lessig writes that "in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity." I like this tradition. To some extent, I feel like if intellectual property can't be used by everybody in whatever way, then all the movies and songs and tv shows or comedy shows that use lines or even references from other things with "value" then they damn well better be paying for every single word. At what point is something "stolen" from something else? Most people probably wouldn't have an issue with just quoting something else. But at what point is a quote too long? At what point are you no longer allowed to share things with friends? Example: 1. I watch a movie on TV (and I don't have one of those boxes that contributes to ratings). 2. I tape a movie on TV because I am going to be gone while it's airing and I plan to watch it later. 3. My friend doesn't get that station so I make a copy of my tape for her, so she can watch the movie. 4. VHS sucks, so I record the movie onto my computer. 5. Another TV-less VHS-player-less friends also wants to see it, so I send them my electronic copy of the movie. 6. They send it to two of their friends. 7. Who send it to two of their friends each. 8. It circulates more. At what point is this piracy?? To some extent I feel like "free" flow of information on the internet doesn't really negatively effect that many people. After all, if I like the movie, I buy the DVD. But obviously, I go to USC, so I'm not exactly poor. Some industries, like music, need to adjust to the change. It seem like many bands have already discovered that big money isn't going to be made by selling CDs anymore - that's why bands go on tour.

There's many ways people can "pirate" information off of the internet, but I must admit that BitTorrent is my favorite. For those of you who don't know how it works (and because I hate leaving a blog w/o a picture):

Unlike the p2p software that Lessig mentions, BitTorrent is actually competent at what it does. Yes, it can be used for legitimate means. How is this really different from me copying that movie from VHS onto my computer? Either way I end up with a copy on my computer. Either way I am enabling other people to also have access to the same copy. If it weren't for this sort of "piracy" then some really great remixes out there wouldn't be around. Maybe, like Lessig seems to want, it's time for our tradition to change, but for now I still value creativity over intellectual property.

Test Post

I will add more to this later - when I have time.

"Money can't buy me love."

We're doing presentations on famous photographers in my photography class and I am doing, of course, Barbara Kruger. I haven't been able to get that Beatles song out of my head since I saw a photo of hers that said "money can't buy me." I can't seem to find that one online, but I did find this one.That's what advertisements would have us belive: money can buy us everything we ever wanted or ever will want. And this:
That last picture is scary - both images are negative reactions to the consumer society that S&C describe in this chapter. In general images serve to convince us that we need something in the image, whether it be something tangible like new shoes or something intangible like love or power. Kruger's images oppose this idea, like the BUGA UP group that S&C describe. Ads are everywhere, especially on the internet, where they can change everytime you refresh the page. Society is defined by advertisements. People are defined by what they buy - the brand of clothes they wear, the car they drive, etc. We're still living with this idea:(Kuger says it so much better than I can.) In one of my classes last year we spent some time talking about why people like to shop. According to my class, it's all about the choices and indecision. When you are in the moment of making a choice all possibilities are open to you. That is, while you're choosing what to buy, you feel like you own everything because you could theoretically buy everything. That's why browsing is so important to shopping, like S&C write. Images convince us that we can have everything and because we want to believe this we go out and look at whatever is being advertised. Some people are stronger than others - some buy things, some don't.
To buy or not to buy. That is the question. (Oddly enough, the class that brought up the power of indecision and choice thing was actually talking about Hamlet's inaction in the same play Kruger borrows this classic phrase from.)

Authenticity and the Music Video

Let's dive into some random subcultures for this blog. Normal music videos aside, that are produced for the likes of MTV and whatnot, there is another genre of music videos that I find to be much more interesting: the fan made music video.

S&C write that "music videos are considered to be primary examples of postmodern style, with their mix of varied, often disconnected, story elements, their combinations of different kinds of images, and their status as both ads and television texts." This is true for all music videos that are visible somewhere, whether that is on YouTube or on MTV. I find fan made videos particularly interesting because they have an inherent issue of authenticity. When I say "fan made video" I mean a music video using a song or songs set to clips from various TV shows, movies, etc. Clearly the people who make these videos had nothing to do with the production of the songs or footage they are using to make the video, they are just remixing the whole thing, to some extent. Yet their video still serves as an advertisement, because it features part of a show and generally serves to make the viewer (if they haven't seen whatever show the video uses footage from) more curious. Sometimes people even create their own trailers for series or movies that they like. There's plenty of places where these videos exist today. There are fan sites dedicated to videos for certain TV shows or types of shows and movies and videos can be easily accessed through YouTube or even BitTorrent. However, this brings up another issue of authenticity. If a video can easily be downloaded from somewhere, it means someone who downloaded it can easily upload it somewhere else under their own name. This doesn't seem fair to the person who took the time to find the songs and the footage they used and then put everything together. But really, in the first place, they are just using footage and music created completely by other people. "The world today consists of a huge variety of remakes" write S&C.

All I can say about some of these music videos is that these people are way better at video editing than I am and if you have seven and a half minutes to waste, you should watch the one below.



It wasn't uploaded by the person who made it, which the uploader acknowledged, and I think it meets the conditions of 1.) having a mix of varied, often disconnected, story elements and 2.) combinations of different kinds of images. Also, I think it is completely random. Enjoy!