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Nele Noppe

Learning From Culture Pirates - 0 views

chronicle.com/...64294

copyright internet law technology phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.
  • Along with the practice itself, "pirates" in publishing just keep resurfacing, and Johns argues that the label is no accident. He sees it as the pirates' attempt to evoke romantic notions of seafaring swashbucklers. Sure, the copying done by culture pirates may be technically illegal, but they have long claimed the moral high ground, arguing that they are not petty thieves, but principled heroes rightfully returning creative work to a public commons by making free or cheap copies available.
  • The weighty work, more than 550 pages, covers hundreds of years of history of copyright and intellectual property in the West, focusing on the stories of those angling to disrupt prevailing practices.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • If we listen to those pirates of old, we'll learn that there is nothing sacred or natural about our basic ideas of intellectual property, he argues, characterizing those notions as imperfect conventions formed in and by the Industrial Revolution. In fact, he suggests, it may be time to cast our models of patents and copyright overboard.
  • This nemesis is a shadowy collective rather than a person. Johns calls it "the intellectual-property defense industry," and says it emerged in the 1970s or so, in the form of trade associations and entities like the Interpol Intellectual Property Action Group. He sees these groups as remarkable in that they bring together ex-military and police officials, surveillance techniques, and data-scrambling to try to stamp out piracy and in some cases to limit reform, in unprecedented ways. "One could certainly track, and perhaps account for, the increasing consistency of intellectual property in the age of globalization by following this expansion of its practical enforcement across new regions and realms," Johns writes in Piracy.
  • No piracy, we might say, no Enlightenment.

  • Maybe copyright and patents should be scrapped, and whole new categories of intellectual property created. One category could be for mechanical inventions, one for genetics and other life sciences, one for analog creative works, one for digital books and movies. Or some other mix-and-match. "We might have a system of classification that would have more basic entities but might practically be a lot simpler, because it would correspond to existing ways of carrying on in the world," he says.

Nele Noppe

Creativity in amateur multimedia: Popular culture, critical theory, and HCI - 0 views

74.125.155.132/scholar

amateur_professional fans internet presentation_cwwc creativity open_source theory HCI openness machinima games technology authors communal medium technological_determinism visual_language phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Today, especially in academic circles, this pop
    culture phenomenon is little recognized and even less understood.
  • These analyses reveal relationships among emerging amateur multimedia aesthetics,
    common software authoring tools, and the three theorizations of creativity discussed
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10
       
      VERBAND FANWERK - OPEN SOURCE
  • This paper explores the enabling factors, especially the role of multimedia authoring
    tools, in the recent explosion of amateur multimedia.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Yet control over popular culture by mass
    media is clearly eroding
  • HCI practitioners have explored how software interfaces can enhance and support users in
    general and creativity in particular. Its analytical tools for examining the relationships between
    tools and a concrete group of users vis-à-vis a well-defined explication of tasks both solve and
    create problems. The ability to specify these relationships explicitly greatly facilitates the
    design of systems; yet that same explicit specificity also defines creativity a priori in cybernetic
    terms more friendly to computers than to the culturally diverse and rich practice of creativity
  • Critical theory—an umbrella term that encompasses literary theory, continental
    philosophy, and communication theory, among others—offers sophisticated theoretical
    resources for the study of cultural artifacts and their use in the communities that create them.
    Many of these theories ground themselves in the materiality of the cultural artifacts they
    study; yet the material layer for which these theories were once developed were largely
    textual. The movement of cultural artifacts from the physical to digital poses a deep challenge
    (and some risk) for critics studying digital media with these theories
  • this paper investigates three relevant traditions of theory that address these overlaps: HCI,
    poststructuralism, and theories of technological determinism, especially in media.
  • Creativity—its nature, conditions of possibility, inputs and outputs, and processes—plays a
    major role in virtually all academic, professional, and artistic domains. As a result, it is
    heavily, and heterogeneously, theorized.
  • Genealogically, HCI developed alongside cognitive science and computer science, and was
    most often put in service of professional productivity software.
  • HCI often characterizes creativity in rationalistic, intentional, and scientific ways. For
    example, Schneiderman (2002, 2003) proposes a creativity framework for, in his words,
    “generating excellence” with four parts: collect, relate, create, and donate. With it, he hopes
    to capture the social, iterative, associational, and distributional characteristics of creativity,
    especially as described by cognitive science. Evident in this perspective is an effort to model
    creativity, which is seen as a social activity, with certain structural features that take place in
    environments conducive to creativity.
  • All of this is in service of what Schneiderman calls
    “evolutionary creativity,” which he illustrates as follows:“doctors making cancer diagnoses,
    lawyers preparing briefs, or photo editors producing magazine stories”(2002, p. 238). Here,
    Page 17
    Creativity in Amateur Multimedia
    15
    and pervasive throughout the essay, Schneiderman’s notion of creativity appears to be
    paraphrasable as professional innovation: His interest is not artistic self-expression and, as we
    shall see, he is not alone in understanding creativity in terms of professional discourses
  • Again, creativity is understood as it relates to professional discourses,
    in this case the discourse of art history and its pedagogical presentation to museum-goers.
    Even analyses of group creativity in HCI contexts that seek to go beyond rationalist-
    individualist notions of creativity nonetheless operate in a rationalist mode.
  • The notion of creativity that emerges from these mainstream HCI essays places its
    agency primarily in the intentional activity of the individual (though the individual is
    presumably a member of relevant groups). It sees the ecology of creativity as a community of
    expert practice comprising research, dialogue, and artifact exchange, facilitated by social and
    computer environments that forgivingly compel an iterative and basically scientific
    (correctness, discrete information, classification, hypothesis) approach toward truth.
  • The role of the author-function is, among other things, to control the polyvalence
    intrinsic to texts, such that the author, rather than performing the creative role of bringing the
    text into the world, performs the role of constraining the meaning of the text within a society.
  • (Foucault, 1969/2000, p. 206). Therefore, writing is a
    destabilizing force that threatens to transform the discourse in which it operates and to swallow
    up its own author. It is important to remember that Foucault is not limiting his analysis to
    literary texts; he explicitly includes scientific and academic writing,
  • In this conceptualization of writing, creativity occurs at the level of discursive rule-
    transgressing. The role of the historical human in this process is greatly diminished, not
    because humans are not involved in textual production, but because the individual is at the
    wrong level of granularity for analysis. A given historical individual authoring discourse does
    so within complex interactions involving several selves and the clash of languages
  • Related, but not identical, to Foucault’s notion of authorship are theories of
    “intertextuality” put forward by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Intertextuality is the notion
    Page 19
    Creativity in Amateur Multimedia
    17
    that a text is a “tissue” of (mis) quotations from other texts, considered to be more than mere
    collages, but transformative, of the sign systems from which they are derived (McAfee, 2004)
  • Creativity’s agency lies in the juxtaposition of sign systems (in which authorial
    identities are implicated), which occurs in the context of play, and results in artifacts that are
    significant not for what they say, but for the ways they materially contribute to the generative
    capacity of the discursive rule-set from which they operate.
  • Perhaps the foremost theorist of technological determinism is Jacques Ellul (1964/2003,
    1980/2003), who argues that individuals, science, and government are all “conditioned” by
    technology.
  • Like Schneiderman
    (2002, 2003) and Foucault (1969/2000), Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), too, is making claims
    about the origins and generation of knowledge in scientific discourses, but he situates the
    agency in the fierce pressures of technology as it overwhelms and often replaces the
    comparatively meek procedures of science and governance
  • As a result, according to
    Benjamin, our cognitive experience of the art also changes; whereas painting allows spectators
    to control their own stream of consciousness and reflect on what they see, cinema’s moving
    images disrupt association and contemplation, dominating viewers’ thoughts.
  • Benjamin’s (1936/1968) arguments are developed further by self-described technological
    determinist Marshall McLuhan, whose claim that “the medium is the message”(1964/2003)
    characterizes media as “extensions of ourselves” that “alter sense ratios or patterns of
    perception steadily and without any resistance”(p. 31).
  • For Manovich, the emergence of new visual languages is enabled not by an iterative, rational
    approach to innovation, as cognitive science might suggest; neither does it emerge from an
    evolutionary history of discursive transgression, as a poststructuralist approach might
    suggest 10. Rather, it is made possible by certain forms of productive convenience built into
    authoring tools that unleash visual languages and cultural logics that exceed any human
    intention, whether at the level of the individual or the group of experts.
  • To answer this question, it is useful to consider what the three traditions share in
    common. All consider creativity in the context of professionalism and knowledge production.
    Creativity is not simply about painting a pretty new picture or expressing a personal emotion;
    it contributes to discourses about the world and our place in it. All three traditions also
    understand creativity as situated within systems—networks of software-supported experts,
    discursive sign systems, or systems of production and consumption. All of these implicitly
    reject romantic notions of the individual creative genius and pure self-expression; implied in
    this is a rejection or at least dilution of individual intention as the prime mover of creativity
  • Questions one might ask include the following: What are the social and technical
    conditions or structures necessary for the generation of these artifacts? What is the discourse of
    amateur multimedia? What is the minimal unit of meaning? In what ways does its production
    establish relationships between authors, viewers, technologies, meaning, and ideology?
  • A key first step is to understand how creativity is implemented in multimedia authoring
    software. Each program has ways it encourages authors to work. For example, Photoshop
    greatly rewards users who take advantage of layers, opening up avenues of possibility for
    compositing, nondestructive experimentation, and long-term editability. This in turn makes
    certain meanings (especially meanings created by the juxtapositions of spatial compositing)
    more easily realized than others. To what extent do contemporary authoring platforms
    encourage in the same ways (constituting and compelling a notion of digital creativity), or do
    different applications suggest different notions of digital creativity?
  • Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10
     
    "1"
Nele Noppe

The Future of the Book - 0 views

74.125.155.132/scholar

umberto_eco internet technology reading open_work fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 10 Jan 10 - No Cached
  • The present and
    the forthcoming young generation is and will be a computer-
    oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that
    it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images.
  • Moreover, the new generation is trained to read at an incredible
    speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable of
    reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teenager
  • I am a rare-book collector, and I feel
    delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that took one
    page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina
    Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several pages long.
    They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal
    addressee, usually an emperor or a pope, and lasted for pages and
    pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the
    virtues of the text to follow. If baroque writers read our
    contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified. Introductions
    are one-page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book,
    thank some national or international endowment for a generous
    grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the
    love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children,
    and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We
    understand perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals
    revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights spent
    underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten
    in a hurry....
    But I imagine that in the near future we will have three lines
    saying "W/c, Smith, Rockefeller," which we will decode as "I thank
    my wife and my children; this book was patiently revised by
    Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller
    Foundation." That would be as eloquent as a baroque introduction.
    It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The quest for a new and surviving
    literacy ought not to be the quest for a preinformatic quantity. The
    enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere
  • the radical mistake of
    irresponsible deconstructionists or of critics like Stanley Fish was to
    believe that you can do everything you want with a text. This is
    blatantly false. Busa's hypertext on the Aquinas corpus is a
    marvelous instrument, but you cannot use it to find out a
    satisfactory definition of electricity.
  • Then there is the third possibility, the one outlined by Michael
    Joyce. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and
    infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a
    sort of jazzlike unending story. At this point the classical notion of
    authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to
    implement free creativity. As the author of The Open Work I can
    only hail such a possibility. However there is a difference between
    implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of
    produced texts. We shall have a new culture in which there will be a
    difference between producing infinitely many texts and interpreting
    precisely a finite number of texts. That is what happens in our
    present culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded
    performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new instance of a New
    Orleans jam session
  • The
    problem is in saying that we have replaced an old thing with
    another one; we have both, thank God. TV zapping is an activity
    that has nothing to do with reading a movie
  • Debray has reminded us that the invention of the photograph
    has set painters free from the duty of imitation.
  • Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has freed
    literature from certain narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform.
    But if there is something like postmodern literature, it exists
    because it has been largely influenced by comic strips or cinema.
    This means that in the history of culture it has never happened that
    something has simply killed something else. Something has
    profoundly changed something else
Nele Noppe

Allons Gai: Be-Boy magazine in French « A Face Made for Radio: Helen McCarthy... - 0 views

helenmccarthy.wordpress.com/...-gai-be-boy-magazine-in-french

academic manga magazines shojo_manga boys_love france manga_industry sexual_content technology cellphones fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 11 Aug 09 - Cached
  • The Anime Encyclopedia points out that porn usually leads mainstream genres in the adoption of new delivery technologies. Japan usually leads Europe and America in just the same way.
Nele Noppe

A nightmare of capitalist Japan: Spirited Away - 0 views

www.ejumpcut.org/...text.html

academic anime miyazaki_hayao shinto religion economy cosplay characters technology fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 22 Jun 09 - Cached

  • "Our old enemy 'poverty' somehow disappeared, and we can no longer find an enemy to fight against" (Miyazaki, 1988).

    In other words, after Japan's industrial success since the Meiji restoration in 1890s and recovery from WWII cast out poverty from the nation, people still remain possessed by an illusion of gaining a wealthy everyday life and continue living with a gap between their ideal and real life. As a result, an endless and unsatisfying cycle of production and consumption has begun destroying harmony among family and community (Harootunian, 2000).

  • Zizek (1989) points out that people of late capitalism are well aware that money is not magical. To obtain it, it has to be replaced through labor, and after you use it, it will just disappear, as will as any other material. Allison (1996) adds to this point:

    "They know money is no more than an image and yet engage in its economy where use-value has been increasingly replaced and displaced by images (one of the primary definitions of post-modernism) all the same” (p. xvi).

  • Related to its presentation of the loss of spiritual values, the film elaborates an extensive critique of another contemporary global issue: identity confusion. A symptom of identity loss is seen in the way that cultures today encourage people to constantly refashion their self-image, so that individuals construct their identity based on ideals presented in popular media.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 04 Aug 09
       
      testing
  • ...4 more annotations...

  • Because of the gap between the real and the fantasy, people in late capitalist society become ever more unsatisfied with themselves. Perhaps, that is one of the reasons why people are more and more attracted to anime, where transformation of identity are easily visually accomplished.

    To illustrate, we may name a few examples from a popular daily life phenomenon among anime fans, called “cosplay.”

  • When you are cosplaying, your identity depends on what others know about the character, not on who you are. Cosplay, therefore, allows the players to change their identity.
  • Miyazaki stresses the importance of having a proper name to warn us against the possibility of losing our identity in the post-modern world. When Chihiro first gets hired by Yubaba, Yubaba alters Chihiro’s name to Sen. Later Haku explains to Chihiro that Yubaba controls people by stealing their names. The plot operates on the premise that if Chihiro forgot her original name, she would forget about her past and never be able to go back to where she was from.
  • Besides Chihiro and Haku, a key character representing identity confusion is No-Face, who has only a shadow-like body and a mask. The mask does not hide his face for he has no face; rather, the mask constructs his outside identity. Since the mask symbolizes a product that people can buy with money, here it indicates an unoriginal identity that people can construct by giving into materialism.
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