iGeneration 08

Before getting too into this, if anyone is a little unclear on what exactly peer-to-peer (p2p) is and how it works, I’d recommend having a little look and the wikipedia pages on “file sharing” and “peer to peer” just as a little touch up kind of thing. The pages give a little bit of background knowledge about the characteristics of this kind of network, which is helpful and constitutes a fair amount of what I’m looking to talk about. If you’re quite knowledgeable then feel free to skip this stage.

A peer to peer network is inherently suited to the exchange of information or files between its users. It encourages its members to share content with the rest of the group, and, unlike a regular client/server system, is made better through more participation from its members. And so, members of such networks use this functionality to share content with each other on a large scale, and within this, share content illegally. That is, distribute illegal copies of songs, television programmes, and/or film to each other with no regard for the copyright laws that may pertain. While reading these works below, keep in the back of your mind the above paragraph. Also, consider these questions:

1. Do p2p networks encourage peer creation of content in any major sort of way?

2. How can p2p networks be considered a more participatory medium for exchange of information than say, broadcast, or even client/server systems.

3. What are your thoughts on the argument that p2p and piracy can serve as free advertising for artists?

4. How can this means of distribution help existing communities to communicate?

5. Have you ever used a p2p network and if so, have you felt like you were participating in it, in a meaningful or positive way?

6. Is the internet based type of piracy much different from earlier types – copying cassettes for instance.

7. Are internet based networks much different from “real world” types – ‘zine publishing for instance.

Reading

Johan Pouwelse The BitTorrent P2P file-sharing system

Baptiste Pretre Attacks on Peer to Peer Networks (*For this one, the important bits are the Introduction, Chapters 2 and 3 and the Final Conclusion. There are some interesting bits and pieces distributed throughout, but a large part of it is technical things that aren’t really of interest. Even some parts of the important bits aren’t of much use to us, so don’t worry if something isn’t quite getting through.)

Scott Jensen The P2P revolution (The second section of this has a fair amount of technical stuff that doesn’t really matter, so is skippable.)

Eric A. Taub Off New York Streets, Film Piracy Is Online

Dan, writing in the New Media Research Studio Internet Piracy and the Delicious Aroma of Waffles

To reiterate, there is a lot of technical stuff in some of the sources which isn’t necessary for our purposes.

Finally, I’d like to draw a hypothetical situation for you all to consider with all the above in mind:

There is a(n illegal) p2p network of which you are a member. What characteristics does it have? For instance, is it capable of keeping your location and identity secure? Is it large and anonymous, or small and private? Are you concerned with people leeching off the network and not contributing? Do you want good download speeds? Are you concerned by companies deliberately inserting bad data to the network?

Youtube. An innocent act of frustration which led to the activation of the URL youtube.com in February 2005. Since then, the amount of users has exploded in such a phenomenal rate. YouTube’s extremely easy-to-use features have caused netizens (citizens of the internet) flocking to it when there are about 200 other destinations such as Blip.tv.

As YouTube is orientated towards user-generated content, one person’s account can add up to more than nine years’ worth of stuff. This caused YouTube’s losses to be pegged at $20 million a year. Where is YouTube going to gain its revenue from?

With YouTube, people have found means and ways to upload their creative works such as remixes of music and videos. This has led to serious copyright issues with big companies such as Viacom. However, some companies have decided to drop the copyright issues and gain revenues through ads, How successful do you think these ads are?

Lastly, would YouTube cease to exist if a ‘Next Big Thing’ dominates the internet? Or is YouTube truly the future?

Readings

Professor Henry Jenkins, “What Happened Before YouTube (Part 1)”, Cultural Science site (25-28^th June, 2008), http://cultural-science.org/creatingvaluehenry1.html (accessed 22/09/08) [14 mins]

Professor Henry Jenkins, “What Happened Before YouTube (Part 3)”, Culture Science site (25-28^th June, 2008), http://cultural-science.org/creatingvaluehenry3.html (accessed 22/09/08) [13 mins]

Henry Jenkins & John Hartley, “Is YouTube truly the future?”, The Sydney Morning Herald site, http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/is-youtube-truly-the-future/
2008/06/24/1214073239134.html (accessed 19/09/08)

Breen, J.C, “YouTube or YouLose: Can YouTube survive a copyright Infringement Lawsuit?” Texas Intellectual Property Law, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2007, pp. 152-181

Brian Stelter 2008, “Now Playing on YouTube: Clips With Ads on the Side” [Business/Financial Desk]. New York Times, August 16, Late Edition (east Coast). http://www.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/ (accessed September 22, 2008).

Stephen Hutcheon, “YouTube’s Lonelygirl15 outed as a phoney “ , The Sydney Morning Herald site (September 11, 2006), http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/lonelygirl15-branded-a-phoney/
2006/09/11/1157826853893.html (accessed 18/09/08)

Questions

1) Would you consider as a form of database or more towards a social networking site?

2) How does YouTube help to facilitate fan culture? Does it bring participatory culture to a higher level?

3) With copyright laws in place, how are creators at a disadvantage when remixing movies/music? What can be done or has been done (or has anything been even done) to ensure fair use?

4) Do you think YouTube has been abused? For example, using it as a commodity for commercial purposes?

5) Does YouTube blur the boundaries of the various communities? For example, political, educational, fan culture etc. If so, how?

6) Does YouTube have a future?

First off, can I just say to everyone: well done, your podcasts are all really engaging; I’ve enjoyed listening to every single one!   Following that line, don’t forget you need to listen and share your thoughts.  To be fair, it would be fantastic if everyone got two comments on their podcasts (it wouldn’t really be fair for one person to get five comments, another person none).  That said, beyond the two critical comments you’re required to make, you’re most welcome to leave comments on the other podcasts, too, if you like!

Secondly, in our next seminar which is on Project planning, discussion and refinement you’ll be pleased to hear there are no set readings.  Instead, you need to bring along your thoughts about the major project you’d like to do for this unit.  Depending on what everyone wants to do, we’ll discuss potential ideas and then refine them into a form which can be equitable (ie things which can actually be marked alongside each other at the end of the day).  Your only major stipulation is that your major project must explore participatory culture and digital communication in a meaningful and focused way.  Also, think about what form you’d like your project to take: a straight-forward essay; a short video piece; a longer podcast; some sort of blogged investigation; and so on.  Think about something that would be of interest and engaging to you. 

Keep in mind, though, that there will be a fair amount of negotiation and refinement needed for each idea, so bring along your thinking caps, and your flexibility!

Let me reiterate, though: your podcasts are all really interesting, and you should all be proud of your efforts!

[Photo: ‘Fireworks at the Taste of Chicago’ by Zesmerelda, CC BY.]

Fandom has existed for a long time, certainly visible since the 1950s. Publications and activities of fans in those times included fanzines (with very limited circulation) and conventions etc, it is limited by geographical locations. Early fandom appeared to be a male thing, female fans were not visible or they had ‘masculine connections’ with the fandom. During the 1990s, the visibility of female fans had rocketed. They became more obviously significant as they visibly engaged in fan fiction (fanfic) writing.

After the millennium, a lot of fandom migrated to the internet and the ‘sense of community’/identity is now more obviously about dispersed fan communities instead of geographical locations. Fanfic and fan art are now in websites which can be widely searched through search engines. The copyright problem is then evoked. Also, to serve the interest of adult fans, some fan fic includes sexually explicit languages that are inappropriate for young fans.

‘Cyber-fandom’ seems to have a lot of impact as again it amplifies the effects of fandom. In this digital age, where will fandom go and how will it affect us? And how do the origins of fandom online reflect the larger growth of online communication and ‘virtual’ communities?

Readings:

[X] Henry Jenkins – ‘”Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture“’, 2003

[X] Gooch, Betty – ‘The Communication of Fan Culture: The Impact of New Media on Science Fiction and Fantasy Fandom’

[X] Chilling Effects – ‘Harry Potter in the Restricted Section’

[X] Elana Shefrin – ‘Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping New Congruencies Between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture’

[X] Westcott, Grace – ‘Friction over Fan Fiction: Is this Burgeoning Art Form Legal?’

[X] Lee, Kylie – ‘Confronting Enterprise slash fan fiction’

[X] Hero Complex – ‘ “Harry Potter” fan rebellion of 2008’

[X] Bruns, Kendall – ‘Film: Pleasures of Fandom – Annual Comic-Con is a Multimedia Pop Culture Extravaganza’

Questions to think about:

 What makes a fan? Just a supporter of a text, or an active participant in fandom activities? Are fans essential to media products, especially novels and movies?

 Does cyber-fandom help with the visibility of female fans?

 Who is responsible for stopping young fans (supposedly under 18) from reading fan fiction which contains explicitly sexual languages? The parents, fan fiction site owners or fan fiction writers?

 Do you think fan fictions are legal in terms of fair use, or it is just being tolerated by copyright owners (tolerated use)?

 Does fan fic do any good to the original author? (It is a promotion of a particular piece of work, but what if, as Westcott mentioned, a non-fan which is unfamiliar with Harry Potter comes across a fan fic with a sado-masochistic Hagrid?)

 How does Henry Jenkins suggest fan culture relates to broader notions of participatory culture?

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]

Your core readings for this seminar are:
[X] Henry Jenkins, "Interactive Audiences?: The ‘Collective Intelligence’ of Media Fans" in Dan Harries (ed.), The New Media Book, (London: British Film Institute, 2002), pp. 157-170.
[X] Tim O’Reilly. ‘What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’, O’Reilly Network, 30 September 2005.
[X] J.D. Lasica, "Darknet mini-book: Introduction", "’Darknet’ foreword" (by Howard Rhinegold), and "The teenage filmmakers" in Darknet: Hollywood’s War against the Digital Generation. John Wiley & Sons, 2005.

The article by Henry Jenkins looks at interactivity and audience agency, giving a sense of where culture has been in terms of participation and ownership, and then looks to how culture is shifting facilitated, in part, by digital communication. Tim O’Reilly’s article famously introduces the idea of ‘Web 2.0’ which has widely been adopted to describe the shift toward online cultures built for and by users. Finally, the excerpts from J.D. Lasica’s Darknet look at what immediate changes and battles are happening in the Western cultural context due to immediate challenges made by digital communication and interaction tools.

While this seminar is meant as a general overview, keep these questions in mind when doing you reading:
[1] Is participatory culture a brand new idea, or does is have historical precedents? 
[2] How are the terms ‘ownership’, ‘community’ and ‘culture’ actually used in these readings (and are these stable terms, or do they mean something different for each author)?
[3] How is the shorthand ‘web 2.0’ deployed by O’Reilly and how accurate do you think it is?
[4] How open and accessible is cultural production in the twenty-first century? What are the trends, and where do you think things are headed?

(Remember, after our face to face conversation in the seminar, your thoughts and reflections on the topic should be posted as a comment on this post.)