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!

Those of us in Western industrialized cultures...

... have things like the internet and the World Wide Web. :-)

I’m mooching off of Amanda for the first part of this one. Time for my weekly blog about how all my classes are conspiring together. Really. We looked at the Robert Frank pictures in this class, we looked at them in my photography class, now they’re popping up again in S&C. Also, Amanda pointed out to me the other day that the funding for S&C was provided by USC (clearly they should have provided more funding so the book could have been printed in color). Wow, it really is a conspiracy, no?

S&C described the way media is generally aimed at a specific group of people, and I fully agree with them. For instance, television networks that cater primarily to children have ads that appeal to children, networks aimed at women have ads aimed at women, etc. etc. Even a medium like the internet can be split up to appeal to different people. Take for example msn.com. The front page of the site provides a general resource for news, using offering at least on article that appeals to each demographic. These articles lead to separate areas of the site. Take for instance the “Dating and Personals” section, clearly aimed almost entirely at single women, or the sports section. Guess who that’s aimed at. So, to me, it’s pretty obvious that almost all media reaching a mass audience to day is somehow encoded with messaging making it appealing to a certain demographic. What amuses me are the moments when everybody tunes in on one thing and demographics become obsolete. S&C mention a moment like this in the televising of JFK’s debates with Nixon and footage of his death.

I can't say I was alive for these moments so I don't know what it was like for the people watching together. I was, however, alive for another moment that S&C mention: Princess Diana's death and funeral. I wasn't even ten years old at the time nor did I have any idea who Diana was, but my entire family had the TV on and was watching the incident, even though I was never allowed to watch TV as a child. It sticks in my mind as one of those moments when it seemed like the entire world was focused on one thing.

Obviously, another one of those moments was September 11th, but we've already seen that footage in class. It seems to me that in moments like these people overcome the demographics defined by television and focus on something more important than advertisements and entertainment. When I was little I always asked my parents what they had been doing the day something historically important happened, and I imagine that any kids I may have in the future would do the same for these events.

Long blog of DOOM! :-)

Up until I read this chapter of S&C I had forgotten completely that people used to think the bone structure of your face had anything to do with the way you think. Amusing!

That aside, the chapter’s discourse on the Rodney King video and “real” videos was particularly interesting. In my photography class today we watched maybe half of a film called “Portrait of Jason.” The style the documentary is filmed in is called “cinema verite” meaning “cinema of truth.” In the documentary the camera records Jason telling his story. The sound recording is continuous through out the film, however each time the director and his assistant needed to change the roll of film they kept recording sound but allowed the video to be blank. You can actually see the black leaders on the film they shot the movie with. This was an attempt to portray the documentary as a portrayal of the truth, like the cinematic techniques S&C discuss. The focus is slightly off sometimes in the film and the camera creates the idea that it is being filmed by an amature. Like S&C say, we have a tendency to believe something that was filmed by an amateur is more likely to tell the truth than something that has been prepared for television. This was the case with the Rodney King video. (I love YouTube by the way. How else would I have found clips of a video from 1991?) This is also the case with the UCLA taser incident that we brought up last week, or maybe two weeks ago. The circumstances surrounding the two videos are nearly the same. Neither show the beginning of the incident nor are particularly clear, so it’s difficult to tell just from the video whether or not the police acted responsibly.

Even after brining up the role of the manipulation of footage in acquitting some of the cops involved in the Rodney King beating, I find interesting that S&C also bring up a case where “raw’ footage seems to provide a more complete picture. I feel like the manipulation of the image of the fetus was more serious than just reviewing the Rodney King footage because it actually used images from something completely different, not just techniques to control speed and motion. I still feel like any manipulation of film is somehow “cheating” and it’s no wonder that the result of the trial of the LAPD officers was one of the things to spark the 1992 riots. However, I feel like the same manipulation of footage today wouldn’t have even close to the same effect because people are so used to seeing videos messed with.

I’m jealous of that woman on the cover, of Time. She’s pretty. The cynical me says that they wouldn’t have put a random computer generated face on the cover if it was ugly, but…. S&C discussion of mapping the body using genetics is also really interesting in comparison to descriptions of the body using race. It seems like it’s a step in the right direction, because it leads us away from value judgments of the visual aspects of a person’s body, but then again I also don’t want to end up with a society like in “Gattaca.” Not only is the ability to create or manipulate pictures like the cover of Time interesting, it’s also useful, as S&C point out. You can not only see what your children could look like (like in tonight’s episode of the Gilmore Girls) you can also use it to create pictures based on the physiology of a skeleton or old pictures of a missing person. That’s a good use of image manipulation. Making already skinny models look even skinnier to distort the popular idea of beauty is a bad use of image manipulation. Bad advertising people, bad!
Moving on. My experience with games is very limited, although I have many many gamers for friends. They have tried many a time to convince me that good video games have plot and story and all that, so I’ll except that, because they’re my friends and I love them, but don’t ask me how it works. The only game I can think of with any sort of story that I ever played is Oregon Trail. I don’t feel I need to explain that. Hopefully you all get it. I have however, seen several shows that were originally based on games, and these all had proper narrative and plot, backing up the words of my friends.

“How often, for example, has science fiction been criticized for being preoccupied with world-making at the expense of character psychology or plot development?” Yeah, admit it. Science fiction does that a lot.

“If, for example, the attraction centers around pirates, Carson writes, ‘every texture you use, every sound you play, every turn in the road should reinforce the concept of pirates,’ while any contradictory element may shatter the sense of immersion into this narrative universe. The same might be said for a game like 'Sea Dogs' which, no less than 'The Pirates of the Caribbean,' depends on its ability to map our pre-existing pirate fantasies.” This is also amusing to me, since I loved that ride as a kid. I don’t think it really told a story (it’s been a while since I went to Disney Land) but it certainly created the world it wanted you to imagine yourself in.

Oh my goodness, seriously. Why are all of my classes related to this one somehow? I took a class on crime fiction and the multiplicity of stories on modern detective fiction last semester and here I find it mentioned in an article on gaming. The ability of a game to have multiple stories seems essential to its flexibility as something interactive. Flashbacks also seem feasible if not even an easier way to insert story into a game. In one film adaptation of a game the protagonist has lost his memory and slowly regains it throughout the film (and game). Each memory is structured as a flashback, like a mini film inserted into the game. The player controls the character in real time, but as more memories are unlocked more of the story becomes apparent. As is mentioned in the article a game like this, which serves as a sort of detective narrative, seems to work best to motivate the audience to continue to unravel the story (at least, in my very limited knowledge of games).

Final random notes:
1. Wow, there was a lot of interesting stuff this week.
2. In my photography class this week we watched a slide show of the entirety of Robert Frank's “The Americans”
3. I have a love/hate relationship with FCP.
4. No comments make me sad. :-(

I get it, I get it...

... photography lies. Images lie. Sturken and Cartwright are being a little redundant here, although it is interesting to think of Impressionism as a way to represent reality, since it always seemed pretty abstract to me. Still, I thought it was interesting that Sturken and Cartwright brought up the idea of "historical" images, since I blogged before about the images of the Indians that seemed historical but weren't. It is still true that an image like the one I mentioned before, or an image with the signs of age (blurred edges, sepia tone, etc.) like S&C describe, is still generally viewed as "historical" and "true" by the casual viewer.

Most people have probably seen this image before and know that it's not actually a historical image of a computer from the past, but it proves that image technologies today certainly can appear to be historical representations of the truth. The caption at the bottom, the grain in the image, and the fact that it's black and white all make the image seem older than it is and credible - the caption in particular makes the photo seem like it is telling the truth. I found it highly amusing that S&C, describing the change in imaging technology and reproduction of images, didn't seem to foresee exactly how fast some of this technology was going to develop. (I think I might permanently start italicizing Internet and world wide web now just for the fun of it. And this was published in 2001? Wow, time flies.)

Gender-bending?

This chapter in S&C reminded me somewhat of the year Sofia Coppola was the third woman director ever nominated for an Oscar. I remember the news at the time, proclaiming that film and television was “finally moving in the right direction,” etc., etc., etc. Sure, it’s nice to see a woman succeeding in a place where the male gaze is much more prominent, but I don’t think the male perspective is as dominant as Sturken and Cartwright seem to think. While they did mention some oppositional and negotiated interpretations of film designed for a male gaze, I think it these reading are much more prominent, which is why the male gaze is still predominant. In the second chapter S&C discussed how the viewer makes their own meaning and in this chapter they discussed the locale of the cinema as the defining place of a “gaze.” It seems to me that these two situations combined is what allows people to indulge in oppositional readings and thus avert the original gaze imposed on a film. I do think, and I quote that: “in order to function in our lives, we actively repress various desires, fears, memories, and fantasies. Hence, beneath our conscious, daily social interaction there exists a dynamic, active realm of forces of desire that is inaccessible to our rational and logical selves.” The dark room of a movie theatre combined with these invisible forces of desire make possible oppositional interpretations that most people wouldn’t admit to or even see in the light of daily social interaction. I agree with S&C’s mention of lesbian readings of the male gaze, but I think other factors like political, religious, and racial background also determine whether a woman would even identify with the “victimized” female being gazed upon in the first place. While I think that the male gaze persists in popular cinema because of the support of oppositional or negotiated readings, I think it is also important to pay attention to the role modern technology plays in determining gaze. Today everyone is both the gazer and the subject of film on a daily basis. Just yesterday I had to sign a release for one of my classes to be videotaped, but today I didn’t notice whether or not anyone was actually there videotaping us. Being a subject and being an observer has become such a readily accepted part of society that it seems like each gaze is equally represented in common film (such as what you see on YouTube) even if they are not represented equally in the cinema.

That Image Assignment

Despite the fact that the class's reactions to my pictures made me want to change some of the things I wrote in my explaination, I'll post what I typed up before class anyway.

Punctum - Originally when I saw this image it seemed very posed, as if each of the guys was showing off to the camera. The denotative interpretation of the image led me to believe that it was supposed to be very manly, however, it looked comical to me. Somehow I just couldn’t see a very manly image in the way the men posed for the camera around the bike, so I decided to make the center person, who seems to be trying to hardest to look cool, into something I don’t think he would have liked at all. I did this by adding the two little hearts light on his cheekbone as he turns towards the camera. I think this mocks the original intention of the photo and makes the men seem girl – gender bending as Sturken and Cartwright would say. Originally I didn’t want to crop the photo, because the heart shows up best when the picture is its original size, and you can see all of the men’s bikes. I was forced to crop it and resize it a little to meet size limitations for the project.

Leaflet - I would drop this flyer on the horse meat processing plants in Texas (one of the pictures is actually from a rescue facility near a plant). I wanted the little girl on the front to represent the cuteness that I see in the horses and ponies being slaughtered (hint, hint, symbol). The picture on the back is actual documentation of a real pony that was rescued and is being cared for, but I also wanted to show its relationship with the little girls helping it (hint, hint, icon and index). I chose simple images and bright colors because I wanted everything to appear very cute and innocent, like the little ponies every girl wants as a child. I also wanted the text to be really simple.

Ads, Oppositional Readings, and... Slash!

First off - I do not get these ads. I really haven’t understood a single ad provided as an example in our book. Looking at the picture of the phone booth and reading about tolls makes me wonder when that ad was made (I’ve never used a phone booth – when I was little my parents had clunky car phones and then cell phones – I still don’t really understand how the car phone thing worked, but that’s what we had). Clearly I am a completely different viewer from the people these ads were meant for.

Secondly – Sturken and Cartwright’s mention of appropriation and oppositional reading reminded me of something I do quite frequently to amuse myself. I enjoy movies like most college students out there, but I don’t have a lot of time to watch them, so when I find time for a movie I want it to be good. Especially if it’s a chick flick. When I watch girly movies I want them girly, dammit! I want my cute guys and nice girls and I want my happy ending! And I get mad when I don’t get my happy ending. I never really understood the few people who try to make chick flicks more than they are – the only reason anyone would ever watch one is for the feel good happy ending. So, when there’s no happy ending, I make it up. Or, I just ignore the ending of the movie (and whatever the message may be that it’s trying to pound into my brain).

I think I just contradicted myself in my head. When reading about “slash” interpretations (“the technique of reading lesbian or gay subtexts in movies that feature gender bending” in Sturken and Cartwright’s words) I thought to myself that I generally dislike that sort of oppositional interpretation because it bends what I would casually consider the truth of a work of fiction. But I guess I’m bending the truth of all those socially conscious chick flicks that I hate too. I am a fickle viewer.

Photographic Truth?

As I read about the meaning of a still life painting of bread, wine, and fish it occurred to me that sometimes I only think a picture has meaning because it is a picture. After all, someone went to the trouble of making the image, so it can’t be entirely meaningless, can it? If I saw bread and wine and a fish on a table, I would think it was bread and wine and a fish on a table and nothing more.

So far this semester it seems as if three of my four classes have allied together to tell me one thing: Don’t believe what you see. Recently in my cinema class we watched a movie “based on a true story.” While I would feel all warm and fuzzy inside if the movie really was a truthful portrayal of an event that really occurred, I find it nearly impossible to believe that the feel-good ending of the movie is real. It presents itself in a historical manner (complete with text at the end explaining what happens to each of the characters after the movie – am I really supposed to believe that crap?) yet clearly has a purpose in showing a story considered to be inspiring.

The other day I was struggling to remember whether we had seen the photograph of the air show in this class or in the photography class I am also taking. While I eventually remembered which class I’d seen that photo in (I’ve been sick lately and my mind has been marginally dysfunctional) it reminded me of some of the photographs we saw in my last photography lecture. Several of them were portraits of Native Americans in traditional clothing. Just looking at these images I assumed that they were probably an accurate portrayal of how people viewed Native Americans in the early 1900s. After looking at the photos for a few minutes the professor explained that they were actually taken twenty or thirty years after most Native Americans had “assimilated themselves” into American culture, and that the photographer had traveled around with wigs and costumes until he found people to pose for him. Despite knowing that images rarely portray the truth (and reading about it again in Sturken and Cartwright’s little book) I still somehow expected images from so long ago to actually be true.

As I pondered the “myth of photographic truth” one other thing came to me that amused me greatly in my own little world. After my Photoshop tutorial (in which I was told to do something fun with the program in order to actually grow to like using it) I decided it would be fun to remove my stepbrother from a picture taken during a family vacation several years ago. He’s standing off to the side, not in a nice little group like the rest of the family, and his head is tilted strangely to one side, so previously I had tried cropping him out of the picture but this either left the rest of us awkwardly in one corner of the picture or removed so much of the background that you couldn’t have guessed where we were. After using the clone stamp tool and fixing up the picture enough to make me happy, I sent it to my little sister. What I didn’t do was print it out and put it in my album of family pictures. To me there is still something “true” about the picture with him in it and something “false” about the picture I changed. While I am probably the only one who is every going to know or care about the changed picture, I still find that I prefer the picture that I am more comfortable with as being true.