Blog Assignment Week 9

In his book, Free Culture Lessig defines piracy that is just plain wrong as taking another person’s copyrighted material, copying it, and selling it. He mentions that there is no truly accurate way to condone this type of piracy, though there are a few arguments that could be made for it. The first that he mentions is the fact that the United States did not honor foreign copyrights, but this doesn’t really work since technically our law only dealt with American copyrights. Next he says that this piracy might be condoned since it does little harm to the industry, but this isn’t true in all cases. Finally Lessig shows how this piracy can often have a positive effect on the industry. He gives an example using Microsoft Windows. If a bunch of Chinese acquire Windows through piracy and use it then later on when those people actually buy software then they are more likely to buy Windows than any other software. In the end it is clear that these attempted justifications for piracy just do not work. In the end Lessig points out that this is still piracy, and it is wrong.
Lessig thinks that peer to peer sharing is a completely different case, though. First, he points out that peer to peer sharing is a means to escape the recording industry which has a monopoly on recorded material. He also explains that it is another exploitation of a new technology, and that one major difference is that the material being shared is not actually being sold. I do not necessarily agree with this because although the material is not sold directly sharers are usually required to pay some fee to use the file sharing software.
Finally, Lessig warns that we must decide how much peer to peer file sharing hurts the artist before we decide how to regulate it.

Flash Mobbing?

Our discussions for the past few weeks have concerned memes. If you have forgotten a meme is a theoretical unit of cultural information according to Wikipedia. Generally memes are like viruses in the way that they spread. That is, they spread from person to person seemingly unknowingly. Memes have been around since the dawn of man, and they continue to come about and propagate themselves today.
A specific type of meme that we have been focusing on recently is the flash mob. A flash mob is defined as a group of people who gather in a usually predetermined location, perform some usually brief action, and then disperse according to Word Spy. The first flash mob was organized by a man named Bill Wasik, who claims to work in the culture industry, in a Macy’s department store in downtown Manhattan. He claims that he got the idea for the flash mob from theatre. He was interested in why people got to see performing arts and he wanted to see what would happen if the performances were taken out of the equation. A truly deep question. Wow, Bill, is that the best thing that you have to do with your time?
I must admit I do not fully understand flash mobs, their participants, their reasons, or their implications. I am decidedly biased. I do not understand why they exist or continue to exist beyond my understandings of social interaction. Thus I do not know everything about them , and some people may think that my opinion is narrow.
Here are a few possible reasons for the popularity of flash mobbing. First, maybe it is a result of our society’s descent into autonomy. Is it possible that people are so bored with their everyday lives that they resort to flash mobbing to liven up their day. Maybe people are just so used to entertainment and aesthetic pleasure today that we seek out new ways to find amusement for ourselves. Maybe people do this because they are trying to feel included socially, when their work and everyday life may leave them with a feeling of isolation or exclusion.
One thing is for sure there does not seem to be any clear benefit to the participants of flash mobbing. This seems to lead us to believe that the last possible cause of flash mobbing is the best choice. After all, it is the only scenario that offers some sort of benefit or gain to the participants.
I do not know. In fact, I do not understand the phenomenon much. I am only offering some possible causes.

Here is my Wii-ized Steven Seagal.

Visual Essays

This week we have focused on visual composition, specifically the visual essay. According to Wikipedia, a visual essay is a set or series of photographs that are intended to tell a story or evoke a series of emotions in the viewer. A photo essay will often address a certain issue or attempt to capture the character of a place, event, or process. A photo essay can be comprised solely of photos, it can be a series of photos accompanied by text captions or notes, or it can be a long text based essay accompanied by photos to help convey the point of the essay. Photo essays do not necessarily have to be arranged so that they must be viewed in a particular order. They can be arranged so that their meaning is clear in any order, or they can be arranged so that they must be viewed in an order to present the intended point most effectively.
It is important to recognize that all photo essays are collections of photos, but not all collections of photos are photo essays. For example, a slide show showing pictures of a war torn country would be an example of a photo essay meant to evoke emotions in the viewers and might not need to be viewed in a particular order to get its point across. A photo essay meant to describe a process like how to play baseball would be an example of a photo essay telling a story, and would probably need to be viewed in some order to make sense to its viewers.
In class we were supposed to come up with our own photo essay. We were split into groups of four and given the opportunity to choose our own topics. My group decided to make a photo essay of a process with mild humor. We picked ultimate Frisbee, a sport similar to football, as our topic. We decided that we wanted to show that the sport is easy to learn, and then show some photos of a game in progress. Since there were only four group members, one of which had to take the pictures, it was somewhat difficult to depict an actual game, but we did it as best we could. Before we actually took the pictures we brainstormed on what images that we needed to include in our essay. Then we went out and took the pictures. Finally we uploaded the photos onto Flickr, arranged them, and added captions.
Overall, think that visual essays are superior to essays comprised solely of text since they contain images. I have already discussed they differences, advantages, and disadvantages of images and text in previous posts.