The Internet's a Commie!

'Communism would totally work,' people say.
'...If only...'

I agree. It's obviously brilliant, but there are tons of IFs.

Maybe, however, the Internet has come to fix it all.

This week's reading talks about the need for a new model of power.

Now that individuals can create and add to what used to be controlled solely by large corporations (think Linux vs. Microsoft/Macintosh), it's a lot harder for the big bad guys to come and squash the little people (definitely check out the link via the picture to the right). Additionally, there's the shocking revelation that people are actually willing to do things for free!

-shocked face-

WHY? Why would anyone not want to be paid?

Well, maybe it's because we're all commies at heart....and because Micro$oft is for Capitalists.

But of course that's not the case for everything. There are plenty of people out there who are still trying their darndest to make money off of the Internet. A few of them will even be enormously successful at it. But that's okay. The Internet isn't just a commie, or even just a community. It's got so many communities that there's room enough for all. Even clashing oppositions! Oh boy!

The media of the Internet can be run by lots of little guys because they don't have to appeal to everybody (or dictate what everybody gets). Instead, they appeal to whomever finds them appealing, and that's good enough, because there are lots and lots of people on the planet who have Internet access. There are even more who don't, who someday might. Ooh the potential...

Tripping over Culture

I don't know if there's really anything more articulate that I can add to the piracy story, but if nobody else minds, I'm going to use this required blogging moment to rant a little about something I've not really said much about yet.

I used P2P software when it was hot stuff, and then rumors started going around that it was illegal and I started being sneakier about it. Then the rumors turned into giant lawsuits and I got scared. I eventually completely stopped.

Now, however, we can all enjoy the luxury of paying big businesses lots of money for them to control what used to be free.

$.99 a pop! And remember, of course, that $.99 is just a tricky way of messing with people's minds to make them think it isn't actually a dollar, which it is. We all know the penny is useless.

So, for one dolla' we can buy us some music. Digital music. But wait, what did we learn about digital things? Oh...yeah....the whole concept of reproduction doesn't really apply to them. Hm. Nice that they still charge us though.

Personally, I am way too cheap and way too opposed to anybody who I think is monopolizing on this overreaction/crackdown to ever pay money for a song online, but as long as I'm a college student, I can use Ruckus to hunt down artists I've heard about to find out if I actually like their music enough to buy their CD.Via th is method, I recently discovered that I absolutely love Hoobastank's new CD, Every Man For Himself (here's a snippet from their song, Born To Lead), so I bought it. Then I discovered that the new Lostprophets CD sucks (no audio for them, because I didn't buy their CD).

It's brilliant!

I not only just supported one of my favorite artists as a reward for their good work, but I saved money by not falling for the previously good reputation that Lostprophets had built up with me. All thanks to free, online, digital music.

How does that (free music) not benefit the system? Now, instead of artists making a profit off of songs that nobody likes (woe to them), people can decide beforehand which songs are actually worth listening to, and even worth paying some money for. Additionally, people can be exposed to even MORE music they might like. Artists get recognition, and if they're good, they can profit from CD sales, concert tickets, or merchandise.

But surely that's not enough... after all, those songs that people listened to that influenced their purchasing decision should have cost money, too. I mean, the artist deserves at least that much, right?

Poor...starving...rock star. Evil digital media - so damn efficient.

It seems to me that the more we squash "free culture," the more we'll find ourselves tripping to find any culture at all.

Personally, I think we ought to form a team of real pirates. We all know that the internet is the people's domain. How many anti-free culture lawyers do you know who are also hackers? Let's keep it free and use our numbers and skills to our advantage. These arrests and lawsuits are scary, but they won't win out in the online world.

Not that I know anything about how that works...

Back to Reality

Last Friday I went to the Films Across Borders event put on by Visions and Voices.

The featured filmmaker, Alex Rivera, had made some rather interesting short films (a lot of them dealing with immigration) and he showed some of them to us, as well as giving us a little preview of his upcoming feature film, The Sleep Dealer, which deals with the fact that while we're tightening our physical borders, we're also making use of technologies such as the Internet that allow for completely open/non-existent borders. What was interesting, though, was that he touched upon one of the ideas of this chapter: a virtual "home" for diasporic people, provided by broadcasting and media forms.

In 1995, when CGI was nothing like what it is today, Alex Rivera made a short film about his Peruvian father. He recounted how at home his dad tried to completely separate himself from his Peruvian background, but every night he would sit in front of the t.v. and watch Spanish-language programming for hours at a time. He was miles and miles away from his home country, and even seemingly trying to forget about it, but each night he would, as Rivera put it, transport himself back to Peru through a virtual world... Because television can do that.

To try to make visual what Rivera imagined happened to his father each night, he made the film Papapapá (potato father), using now-ancient technology that was way cool at the time (and took three weeks to render, he told me later) to put his father in an actually virtual space (skip to the end of the 28-minute film to see that part).

It was a little hard for me to watch, because the graphics were so horrible, but it gets the point across. His dad his shot out of a Pringles can and lands in this virtual reality that's somehow Peru through his television. He finally finds a way out to get back into the real world, but we're left to wonder, what about all the people now?

We have much more addictive things than the television that can create virtual worlds even more realistic than the one created by Rivera for his father. What happens if we don't leave?

We talked a little bit in class about the question of why we prefer Second Life to the so-called 'First Life,' and of course the most obvious answer was that in Second Life, you can fly! But what about places like the ones described in Sturken and Cartwright, where poor communities purchase a television set rather than a refrigerator or a bicycle? The analogy can be carried over to us - we use the Internet to build relationships with people who live just down the hall from us, rather than bothering to get up and walk over there to actually physically hang out.

Part of what makes it so appealing is that we're able to come into contact with so many different people online that it makes it easy to have a huge number of shallow relationships, while at the same time choosing which people we get closer to. That sounds pretty good. In fact, it sounds a lot like life, but with even more of the slightly-shallower contacts. Plus, it's super convenient...and of course, there's the flying, but who knows, maybe we'll all find ourselves trapped in a world of bad CGI, begging to get out and get back to that mythical "MeetSpace" or "First Life" and live IRL for a while.

Resistance

One thing that bothers me every day is advertising. It bothers me because I don't like the idea of being manipulated, especially with the stealthy tactics that advertisers use, such as product placement in movies (not always so subtly), logos on clothing, and ads on the side of every webpage I visit.

Here's part of a video clip made by Steve Seid and Peter Conheim called Value-Added Cinema that shows product placement in various films:




Yet while I find it very annoying that I'm constantly bombarded with advertisements, I definitely appreciate the fact that they lower the price of many of the things they're on (although not all). Websites are hosted for free! I got a free hat from the seafood company I fish for that had their logo on the front, and well...honestly products do appear in our daily lives, so it's not always such a big surprise that they'll pop up in movies.

Being wary and throwing things at the screen every time I see product placement in a movie makes me feel better, but why always fight something that's so prevalent? Rather than wage war on ads, I've decided to enjoy them. I can laugh at the funny ones, analyze the sexist ones, and try to figure out the hidden placement of logos all around me. It's my decision to wear or not to wear brand-name clothing, and I choose which products I buy for what reasons, and advertisers have to make their money, too.

The sense of lack and the desire for unnecessary goods that ads create can only work if we as consumers allow it to. I'm incredibly stingy, and if I don't absolutely need something, I'm very resistant to buying it. I'd rather have high quality products than something that will break down in a couple of years, but has a brand name on it. I hang on to stuff until it is no longer useful to me and then only part with it with reluctance. This is my resistance.

The Periphery

Now I'm slightly confused. This week's chapter is the chapter I read last week, and last week's chapter is what I wrote about the week before, so now I seem to be somewhere in the twilight zone.

Oh well.

I want to tell you all that I'm in love with David Hockney's art. At least, most of it. Just look at this amazing self-portrait (-insert clip of Beyoncé singing "to the left"-).

What college student couldn't relate to that? I know I've had the following conversation with myself (yes, I talk to myself - a lot):
"Damn... I have a huge paper due tomorrow, but instead I think I'm gonna just write about how much I hate having to write this essay."
Other self: "Write your essay!"
Self: "Nah... now I think I'll draw a picture about how miserable I am writing about not wanting to have to write this essay. "
Other self: "WRITE YOUR ESSAY!"
Self: "I'm going to bed."
Other self: "@%#(&* WRITE YOur.....oh, well..okay. Bed sounds good."

And then if I'm really out of it, I'll draw a picture of me huddled in a panic on the floor beneath my looming computer and keyboard, clutching a notebook with unwonted writings and drawings on it, with schizophrenic thoughts (such as the above conversation) scrawled out across the page, leading ultimately to...... bed. Of course.

What on earth does this have to do with anything, eh?

Well, I am of the opinion that spending too much time in front of the computer will drive us all to insanity. We have to write essays on the computer, we watch lectures on the computer, we work on powerpoint presentations for class on the computer, and then for fun we check our e-mail and network socially - all from the computer. Computers are amazing! We can do almost anything with them. But um... now what?

It would seem that we're forgetting the periphery of multimedia. To hark back to this week's chapter's post from last week (that makes sense, I swear), perhaps what is driving us all into a narcotic stupor isn't the fact that we all think we're doing something by knowing something, it's that we think we're literate in multimedia when we only know how to work a computer.

So, with a few more kinks in my back and slightly squinting eyes from my bad posture and bright monitor, I vote (and I'm sure it counts for a lot) that next time we meet for class, we all bring a guitar and learn how to communicate through dance. Who's with me?

Narcotics or Knowledge?

Well, I feel duped, as well as a little bit prescient (such a good word - I saw it for the first time today, and then just discovered it again in this week's chapter). I read the wrong chapter for this week, but seem to have already blogged about the chapter that we were actually supposed to read. As such, and since I had already written the following by the time I discovered this error, I'm just going to publish it anyway. Do with it as you please.

Here's the duped and prescient me, as a visual (and unrelated) segue between my introductory comments and my actual blog.

My mom always taught me that you can find whatever you're looking for wherever you go.

While she meant drunk college parties vs. intellectual study parties, this principle holds true of the quest for the good in a world we're told is full only of the bad.

Let's speak of mass media (since that happens to be the title of the chapter I read). If you want to point out the misuses and abuses of mass media, you'll find them, easy. But there are plenty of good things about it, too. Sturken and Cartwright present the argument that it creates a narcotic effect by "convincing people that being informed about a social issue by seeing it covered in the media is the same as doing something about it" (165). This negative kind of thinking seems to be calling us all silly sheep. Silly drugged sheep, at that.

I hold a different view. The way I see it, being a sheep implies that one is gravely uninformed. However, being properly informed on relevant issues actually is an important step in doing something about them, and indirectly, is the same as doing something. Try and shatter my idealism if you want, but I'm a firm believer in the power of my well-informed vote.

By being informed, we hold within us the potential power to effect change should a complicated issue ever come to a vote. (Now when would a vote ever be complicated?)


Another bit of wisdom my mother imparted to me is typical advice from a physician: prevention is always better than a cure.

By being informed beforehand, we preclude the need to enact change by preventing a problem from ever occurring in the first place.

Certainly, part of being "informed" is also being critical of the information we are presented with. And it would be ignorant to say that simply being informed is enough. Maybe nothing is enough. But if you're going to go around looking for the negative, go and do it over there, because there are plenty of us who are successfully looking for the positive in this nearly overwhelmingly powerful, connective tool we call The Media.

Cave Picturam! (Beware the image!)

In Biology, we often see carefully drawn images that are meant to be scientific: the view from a microscope, the details of a bird's wing, et cetera.

But wait. What?

Image as science falls prey to our previously discussed myth of "photographic truth" - even more dangerously so when we're talking about drawings, not photographs. Anyone who's done a Biology lab knows how hard it is to draw what you see in a microscope. The lines blur together and overlap and we don't always clearly see what we know we're supposed to, so we tweak our drawings a bit to get the lab done. It would take hours to draw it exactly how we see it. Even those who are actually visual enough to draw exactly what they see may be prone to a little idealization.

Such was the case with Ernst Haeckel, who in the 1800s published drawings of embryonic development to make a case for Biogenetic Law (which says that vertebrate embryos go through similar developmental stages due to shared ancestry).

Unfortunately, some of his drawings were tweaked. In fact, they were drawn based on his earlier observations and idealized to support his theory. Sounds kind of like a student who looks through a microscope, decides what the figure should look like, and then goes off in a corner and draws what it ought to be, mostly based off the image in the microscope, but fixed up a bit where needed (or forgotten).

Now, this isn't to say that Haeckel was a bad guy. In fact, he was quite the accomplished embryologist, and his drawings of nature are quite beautiful. Simply put, though, his embryo drawings remind us of the wisdom of the "perspective"-phobic Greeks. They understood that one should not trust art that claims to be anything other than art, or (as Sturken and Cartwright put it), "that one should not paint a painting that might "trick" a viewer into thinking it was real" (116).

Silly Haeckel. Must have missed that memo.

And of course, silly us for so readily trusting images (a big no no!) just because they're "scientific." Psh.

Voyeuristic Pleasure?

Does allowing yourself to be displayed in a film or a photograph mean that you are also thus exposing yourself to voyeurism? This chapter described the camera as a tool of power, because it allows the viewer to see without being seen.

There's a song by Duncan Sheik called "Magazines."
Here's a snippet of the audio and here are the lyrics to go with it:

I wondered if I would be punished for
my voyeuristic pleasure

Now I know
and you're in magazines

When I first heard it a few years ago, I thought, "Oh, that's an interesting song. I wonder what voyeuristic means." Then I looked it up (you can find the definition in Chapter 3 of our book, as well). I didn't like the song very much any more.

But on a less extreme level, aren't images all slightly voyeuristic?

Let's talk Facebook.

Until my Freshman year of college, I refused to get a myspace or facebook account. I felt that they dumbed down communication, wasted countless hours of my hopelessly addicted friends, and exposed everyone to unwanted stalking. But I cracked under pressure from my roommate and signed up for a Facebook account only a day or so after moving in to my new residence hall. I became par t of this online book of faces (and phone numbers, and drunken pictures, and random information).

With Facebook, as with so many online 'communities,' one can theoretically determine exactly how much information and which pictures are displayed. And then we're free to roam about the rest of the site, looking at everyone else. Without being seen.

We almost develop a false sense of security about it. Unless someone posts a response under a picture, we have no way of knowing who has looked at it. Maybe nobody cares - maybe nobody looks at it. Maybe it's okay to put more interesting information up. If it doesn't seem like anybody's stalking us, then we start to feel safer about revealing ourselves. It's almost the opposite of the panopticon that the book discussed, where the inmates of a prison all behave, because they know they could be being watched by a guard at any moment. On Facebook, we know we're open to being "Facebooked" by others, but it only adds to the dare. And also, the more we post, the more others will post, right?

For one of my jobs, I'm a video technician for the Experiential Learning Center. Part of what that means is I sit behind one-way mirrors and monitor multiple cameras pointed at rooms full of Business students. They can't see me, but I can see them. It's not a secret that they're being taped (and they aren't always). It's not meant to be invasive. It's to help them learn how to give better presentations, and to work together better as a team by watching clips of the exercises they do. In fact, the ELC is a brilliant addition to the Marshall School of Business.

Sometimes, though, the people in the rooms forget that that mirror they're admiring themselves in has a hallway on the other side. They forget that those cameras up near the ceiling are connected to a room full of monitors. Every now and then, we'll be sitting in our control room, doing our tech work, and suddenly we'll see a group show up in one of the rooms and start practicing karaoke. Naturally, they want to see how they look, so they face the mirrors - and the cameras, and we're back there cracking up.

Facebook and my ELC job are obviously not on the same level as the kinds of magazines Duncan Sheik was singing about, but it seems that media has brought to us a more accessible kind of toned-down voyeurism. There's something about being able to see and not be seen that makes us feel powerful...and perhaps a little evil.

Image Assignments

Part II Studium/Punctum

When I saw the image of a guy relaxing under a tree on a blanket (RF39), I looked for something that would maybe tell his story. I looked around the picture, and I noticed what looked to me like a flower down by his feet. It could just be the leaves positioned in a strange way that just look like a flower in the black and white image, but to me, it's a flower. It's a punctum flower.

The man lying on the grass is just a man under a tree until you see the discarded flower.

Then I saw the tattoo on his arm, and upon closer inspection (zoom in, zoom out), discovered it was of a woman. Now, he could just be a typical guy, obsessed with women in bikinis, but there’s that flower. If there is a connection between the woman on his arm and the flower thrown away at his feet, then I wanted to draw attention to it, so I used similar colors to highlight both, and darkened the lines of the tattoo to make it more visible. The tattoo, however, was too near the guy’s face, which draws a lot of attention to it. To bring more attention back to the flower, I created more flowers.

Part III Sign Systems

This project is currently destroyed by my computer. However, before its destruction, it was a leaflet targeted to undergraduate students studying engineering or math who may potentially become statisticians. The goal is to encourage them to pursue graduate studies in the field of statistics.

The front is color-coded red. It says, “50% pick up this side.” There is an index: a circle in the middle for reflective foil, to act as a mirror. When the person picks up the leaflet, they see themselves, and think, “I’m that 50% who happened to pick up this red side.” There’s a pie chart for a symbol. Half is red, and half is blue, and it says “50% This side” for the red and “50% The other side” for the blue half. Below the mirror it says, “Don’t be just a statistic – be a statistician!” All of the text is also symbolic (inherently arbitrary). The icon is a picture of a person picking up a leaflet (under which it says “Statistic”) next to a picture of a person with graduation garb (under which it says “Statistician”).

On the other side of the leaflet it says the same thing, but the colors are switched, so that everything that was red is blue, and everything that was blue is red.

Moments Brought to Meaning

Being totally new to the blogging-sphere (blog-globe?), I can't say that I entirely know what I'm doing. I've so far resisted getting a blog, in the same way that I've resisted using a Mac. However, now that I'm part of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, I find myself not only blogging, but doing so from a fancy new Mac with a conveniently gigantic monitor. This could be fun.

Susan Sontag, New York Times:

To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life, and therefore to go on with one's life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera's nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as images.

We discussed this quote a bit in class. To digress from her point about torture, one part about this quote really stuck out to me. "To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life.... to live is also to pose." There is always that potential - that someone will photograph you. Who knows, maybe someone will record that moment in your life without you knowing it. The little index of you could end up anywhere.

Recently I was looking at a card my friend in the Czech Republic sent me with a Chinaski (pop Czech band) music video DVD. On the front is a picture of the two of us eating ice cream somewhere in Germany, but what's interesting is not that studium, but what I have singled out as the punctum for this blog: the red-shirted man.

We all have pictures like this - where there's a random person looking confused at the camera. It's somebody who wasn't supposed to be in the picture, but there he is, right behind my shoulder. I have no idea who he is, or what he was doing, but now he's in my blog, too.

It naturally makes me wonder where I've inadvertently ended up. Will someone find a picture of me somewhere, and use it as an example of some point that they want to make? And what of my writing? Susan Sontag surely expected her article to end up in lots of people's hands, as it was published in the New York Times, but did she expect someone to extract those lines and write a silly little blog about them? Every day we run the risk of being plucked from our own little world and snuckered into someone else's. Maybe we live expecting that. With new media making things so easy to access, anything we do or say may end up being used/discussed/displayed in another country, with another language. It's like the accidental time capsule of instant knowledge. By complete accident, this red-shirted man ended up in a photograph that ended up in a birthday card, that ended up (via a crappy picture of the card) on this blog, where it is now instantly accessible to everyone with internet and a search engine. Who knows who will stumble upon him now, or what meaning they will bring to the picture.

Obviously, my blog is not CNN or any other well-known medium, but this is just a simple example in my simple, IML-class environment. Had this picture never been taken, there would probably not be a whole lot of significance to the fact that that guy walked behind two girls eating ice cream one summer. Had I not decided to use it as an example in my blog, it would probably have even less significance. But now, to me, and maybe to a few others, it means something. This visual moment has been brought to meaning. The tree fell in the forest and was heard - recorded even, and put up in our IML audio library (hypothetically).

My point is that it's not only about the meaning that we bring to images; it's also about the images that we bring to meaning, and the meanings that we capture with images. A moment captured is a moment with potential. Maybe someday, even the moments that we've missed capturing will somehow be accessible, too (time travel?).

Whether it's ethical or not to use an image of someone random without their permission, I don't know, but I think I would feel honored if somewhere in Turkey there's an artist sketching my likeness in the background of some painting based on a picture found in an old photoalbum in an attic. It could happen.