iGeneration 08

This is an example of a posted podcast, just to show the layout and how the mp3 file will look once it’s uploaded to the blog.

Exegesis
Your exegesis – the critical essay giving the aims, context and rationale for your podcast, using the terms of reference and theory from the course, would go here (first, before the podcast itself).

The Podcast
Tama Test Podcast [1:00]
(The blue triangle is the play button, click it to hear the podcast. It’s a good idea to indicate the total length of the podcast in square brackets so your listener knows how long it runs for!)

Bibliography
Orb Gettarr, ‘The Ghosts of Ancient Light (FL Mix)’ (Music), n.d. c.2007, http://www.tetragrammatonproductionsltd.net/The-Ghosts-of-Ancient
-Light-FL-Mix.mp3, CC BY SA 2.5
With your bibliography, supply whatever information is available and relevant. Include the author (real name if possible, or the band or username is that’s all you can find, the title of the post/song/clip/etc., write the URL out in full, the year if you can find it (if not, use “n.d.” – no date – and if you can estimate the year, something like “c. 2007″ where the “c” means ‘circa’ (which really means ‘as best as I can tell’) and since it’s relevant to what we’re doing, the license under which you’re re-using any music or samples.

Release Forms
You don’t have to scan any release forms you have – just hand them in with your hard copy version of the exegesis.

Category
When writing your podcast post, make sure you select ‘podcast’ as the category, too!

Stories are fundamental to human experience – we can think of the earliest recorded examples of storytelling with pictures in caves, and of oral histories and legends passed down through generations. Much later we saw the rise of the novel and more generally the history of both fiction and non-fiction. Closer to our time, cinematic developments have seen storytelling reshaped again. How much have these cultural forms consisted of narrative?

Fast forward to the 1990s and later, and the advent of new media has seen significant changes in how we make use of information. Digital technology’s golden child, the internet, has provided the ideal platform for the database, which organises information in a vastly different way to narrative. What, if any, are their links? Are database and narrative purely oppositional?

Our experience of ’story’ might change in this new atmosphere, one where actual lives are immersed in virtual worlds, and users/producers remix and create their own media. Is narrative being reshaped? How might this affect our experience and understanding of the world?

READINGS:

Hardy, Barbara (1977) ‘The Nature of Narrative’ in The Collected Essays of Barbara Hardy, pp. 1-13. [This is in hardcopy in the library, or PDF attached. (3.5Mb)]

Manovich, Lev (2001) The Language of New Media. ‘Cultural Interfaces (pp. 69-93); ‘Illusion, Narrative, and Interactivity’ (pp. 205-211); ‘Database and Narrative’ (pp. 225-228); ‘Navigable Space’ (pp. 244-252); ‘Digital Cinema and the History of the Moving Image’ (pp. 293-296); ‘The New Temporality: Loop as a Narrative Engine’ (pp. 314-322). [In Reserve section of library, unfortunately. You can access a few pages on Google Books.]

www.craigbellamy.net [a blog about web 2.0 developments], especially http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/10/26/new-media-and-cultural-
form-narrative-versus-database/

Cameron, Andy. ‘Dissimulations: illusions of interactivity’ in Millenium Film Journal 28 (Spring 1995). http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ28/Dissimulation.html

Brown, Neil et al (2003). ‘Interactive narrative as a multi-temporal agency’, in Future Cinema: the cinematic imagery after film. http://icinema.unsw.edu.au/pdf/interactive_narrative.pdf For background information, go to http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_tvis_II_1.html

If you want to, you can try Facade, an interactive narrative! [download via BitTorrent.] http://tomidblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/presentation-of-digital-narrative.html For a user’s feedback, go to http://interactivestory.net/

SOME QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT:

1. To what extent does narrative filter/shape your experience of life?

2. How does the database foster interactivity?

3. In the absence of linear plots and other narrative qualities, what makes an ‘interactive’ narrative a ‘narrative’?

4. If database is becoming ubiquitous, does this mean a break from the past? Or simply remixing of traditional forms?

5. What is the role of temporality in traditional narrative, and how might interactivity be affecting that?

Social networking sites are fast becoming an everyday feature of our lives – we use them to organise charity events, show our support in political elections, play games, and engage in a little ‘social stalking’. Social network sites like facebook raise questions of privacy and future consequence – will we regret posting photos of social activities and the comments we post on our friend’s walls when applying for jobs?

Some questions to think about during the readings:

1. Before you begin the readings, I would like you to think about how often you use facebook (or, if you do at all), why/how you use it and your views on social networking sites in general.
2. Are social networking sites an extension of ‘real life’ networks and can they exist without ‘real life’ interaction?
3. Should employees and students be allowed access to these networking sites such as facebook during work and school hours? Are they merely a waste of time that results in productivity loss or can they benefit learning/working?
4. Are those who don’t use social networking sites missing out? Do the pros out-weigh the cons for joining facebook?
5. Several of the articles, as well as ‘The Truth about Facebook!’ clip, explore who has invested in facebook (and their connections to other organisations) and the issues surrounding privacy on facebook – does this effect your opinion of facebook? Will it change your behaviours on facebook?

In this seminar we will explore modes of participation within virtual worlds, from the economic to the creative to the social, modes that have always been entwined but become increasingly so with advances in the interactivity and sophistication of gaming technology. There are a number of interesting arguments in the intellectual battleground that has formed around virtual worlds, from ownership of work (does it belong to the player/producer or the game publisher) to just what will the consequences be of a different kind of socialization and cooperation, one that occurs more or less anonymously in massively multi-player online games (MMOs). This seminar will try to tie in some of the things we’ve already been learning about concepts of participation, communication and ownership with what is growing to be the next big thing on the global entertainment scene, computer games and more specifically, MMOs.

Some questions to consider:

[1] In which ways do MMOs mirror ‘off-line’ society? What use is the distinction between virtual and actual in this sense (Dibbell talks about this)?

[2] Could online gamers be said to form a new kind of community, or are the the inheritors of an older tradition (Dungeons and Dragons, perhaps)?

[3] Is there something missing from virtual social communities? Or is the traditional notion of ‘outside’ life a dated one?

[4] Should virtual feudalism be protected i.e. should games publishers own exclusive rights to the fruits of a player’s labour? This extends to such remix items as machinima and mods.

[5] Are games as top-down a form of communication as TV was once thought to be?Or are they a more democratic, horizontal form?

[6] Are MMOs the new social ‘third space’?

Readings:
MMOs

[X] Constance Steinkuehler – Cognition and Literacy in Massively Multiplayer
Online Gaming (not as dry as it sounds)
http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SteinkuehlerNEWLIT2005.pdf

[X] Steinkuehler – Situated Identities as Styles of Play
http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/thesis.html

[X] Steinkuehler – A New ‘Third Place’ in AmericanYouth Culture
http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/Steinkuehler_ch6a.pdf

Economy and MMOs

[X] Julian Dibbell – Play Money
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQfKDff4d2M

[X] Ge Jin, aka Jingle – Chinese Gold Farmers in MMORPGs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEegohRPsqg&feature=PlayList&p=760CDCB4FF112F55&index=11

[X] Community and Collective Intelligence in Games
Jane McGonigal – Why I Love Bees
http://avantgame.com/McGonigal_WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf

This week please read these items:
[X] Lawrence Lessig, “Preface”, Introduction”, “Piracy”, “Conclusion” and “Afterward” from Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press, 2004, pp. xiii-xvi, 1-79, & 257-306. (The link will open the entire book as a PDF, but you’re only required to read the page span indicated.  Of course, you’re welcome to read it all if you have time!  The full book is in the library is you prefer to read hardcopy.)
[X] Sam Howard-Spink, "Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash-up of Music and Politics." First Monday 9.10, 2004.

And please listen to this presentation:
[X] Lawrence Lessig, ‘Final Free Culture Lecture’, Stanford University, 31 January 2008. (53 minutes, video file)

Last week Henry Jenkins and J.D. Lasica gave us some grounding in the way that cultural interaction and production have changed in recent years, especially in the context of digital media. Building upon these ideas, this week we’re turning to the work of Lawrence Lessig who has been called, among many other things, the Elvis of cyberspace law! Lessig is a passionate crusader for a legal system which reinforces and encourages creativity, rather than locking creativity down (which is what the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] and RIAA [Recording Industry of America Association] and their anti-piracy rhetoric platform are doing in Lessig’s view). In the excerpts from Free Culture that you’re reading, pay particular attention to the way culture has changed in terms of ownership and in terms of what that entails for creativity and cultural production. I’d encourage you to also explore the websites of the Creative Commons organisation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Lawrence Lessig’s own website. Lessig’s book is a great read, so if you have time you may want to dip into some of the other chapters, too.  You’re also reading an article by Sam Howard-Spink which explores the cultural reaction to ‘The Grey Album’, and the reaction when copyright holders tried to remove the album from circulation. (If you’re interested, you can download the Grey Album using bittorent via links here, or watch the Grey Video – a music video featuring one of the remixes from the Grey Album.)

When reading, keep these questions in mind:
[1] How does the rhetoric of ‘piracy’ work in the debate(s) surrounding digital cultural production and creativity?
[2] How has copyright as an idea evolved over time?  (Think about the politics behind the way copyright works.)
[3] How have large corporations and copyright holders reacted to new media forms and new media technologies in the past two decades?
[4] What does ‘Grey Tuesday’ tell you about the way individuals react to the current copyright system? How representative do you think this attitude towards copyright is amongst young people today?
[5] What does an organisation like the Creative Commons hope to achieve in terms of copyright and creativity?

[Image Credit: ‘culture is not a crime’ by Dawn Endico CC BY]