Dear Diary vs Dear Blogger...

I have enjoyed the blogging process throughout the semester. I didn't think I would, and was quite resistant to the idea at first, but in the end, I found it quite satisfying.

From an educational perspective, being forced to think about and respond to the readings was quite valuable, and I enjoyed having a platform through which to express my opinions. It's also interesting to read other people's views on the same readings: I think it's quite astounding how different all our perspectives are.

Technologically, I found blogging frustrating. For the technologically-retarded, such as myself, the template options in blogger are quite limited. I fiddled around endlessly trying to read (steal?) the source code off blogs that I liked and adapt it to my own purposes, but I only succeeded in creating fundamental code flaws. I also did not master the art of inserting photographs in the way that I wanted to and had seen in other blogs. This particular part of blogging wasn't as satisfying as paper-journalling: if I have a photo, ticket stub, doodle, or even just a particular colour that I like, it is easy to contstruct this on paper. As you can see from looking at my blog, I was less successful virtually.

I really like the idea that when you write a blog you are publishing it to the world at large. Of course, I don't think anyone has read it (although someone did leave me a rather pornographic comment, I think it was comment-spam), but someone COULD read it! This of course changes the tone of your language and the content of the posts you make, especially as you know that your lecturer will be reading it!

One thing I found difficult in my writing was what sort of tone to adopt. Blogs can be very informal, and indeed, our task was to create pieces of personal reflection. However, when analysing articles, theories and ideas, it can be difficult to slip in and out of the academic tongue needed to describe the principle and the collegiate casualness needed to express your opinion to your peers. I ended up just using whatever language came naturally to me in relation to the topic (I hope it doesn't seem like I have multiple personalities!), after all, your blog can be whatever you wish it to be.

I worried for a while that content-wise, my blog was very different from many others in my class. I took quite a literal approach to responding to the weekly readings, and tried to reference my ideas and other pertinent articles whenever possible. One of the most useful features of writing online is the ability to link (extensively, excessively and voluminously!). When I do write in my paper-journal, I often get frustrated at having to explain the background to something or define a concept (even though I'm the only one who'll ever read it, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense), but it is great to be able to really easily provide your readers with examples, definitions and information about your topic.

I'm not sure if I will continue blogging. As a learning tool it was wonderful, yet now that KCB201 is nearly over, the incentive to persist will be gone. The process was far more time consuming than I imagined, and I am currently suffering from blogger's fatigue! I have newfound respect for the authors of the blogs that I regularly read, who continue to update almost daily, month after month.

I think the best thing about blogs is how easy it is for the lay person (such as myself) to create a functioning, independent space from which to express themselves to the world. I initially doubted the validity of studying blogs, unable to see their value to a society already saturated with media. Now, I am a convert.

High School PE all over again...

Amy Bruckman's essay 'Finding One's Own in Cyberspace' presented some dilemmas to me. Bruckman begins with a metaphor: choosing a virtual community is akin to choosing a restaurant. When choosing a restaurant you look to visual clues (how busy is it? what are the diner's wearing? what is the decor like?), word-of-mouth cues from friends and your own personal feelings and impressions about the 'vibe' of the place. Bruckman suggests that so too we should approach finding an appropriate online community: 'lurk' for a while to ascertain the nature/flavour of the site and its exchanges, try sites recommended by people with similar tastes and take cues from the structure, layout, and 'decor' as to the vibe of the community. I agree with her fundamental argument, that a user shouldn't feel that because a particular community is uncomfortable/not right for them, then there is no suitable community out there; but some of her thoughts on admission, selection and exclusivity within communities seemed elitist, undemocratic and needlessly dismissive.


While it may rankle an American pluralistic sensibility, the use of wealth as a social filter has the advantage of simplicity and objectivity: no one's personal judgement plays a role in deciding who is to be admitted.

Bruckman goes on to say that charging people a nominal fee per post discourages spamming and flaming and leads to a 'significantly raised level of discourse'. Well, my sensibilities are certainly rankled. I don't think that wealth is an objective, non-personal filter: someone somewhere at the creation of the community has to decide that wealth is to be the determining factor to be valued above all else. That is both a personal and subjective decision. Further, we are all taught about how empowering the internet is: it enables the boundaries normally present (geographic/social/religious/economic etc) to be traversed and overcome. Yet here is the promotion of one of the most difficult-to-overcome boundaries: socio-economic status. I recognise the need to develop means for reducing unwanted spam, flaming or inappropriate posts, but is the solution really to further emphasize the digital divide? I know that as a poverty-stricken student I wouldn't be able to afford to actively participate in a community that charged. But then Bruckman doesn't seem to like students... (See below).

Most MUDs are populated by undergraduates who should be doing their homework. I thought it would be interesting instead to bring together a group of people with a shared intellectual interest: the study of media.

Umm, well, RUDE! Especially considering the vast majority of people reading her essay are probably students!I visited the MediaMoo homepage because it sounded like an interesting platform for communication and discussion. Alas, I do not meet the requirements. However, if I were a post-grad, then I would. In the QUT context (and I'm sure many other universities) this seems wholly ridiculous, seeing as a number of subjects are exactly the same for under-grad and post-grad students (eg KCB336 New Media Technologies is also KCP336 New Media Technologies for gradual students: same lectures, same tutorials, same assessment). Also, since when did being an undergraduate mean that you didn't have valid and interesting ideas? Bruckman gives an example of a potential, valued member of her community as a librarian with eight years experience from a small town in Georgia. Yet a student, who is of necessity immersed in the latest principles/theories/developments, and who is also of necessity constantly researching the subject, should be excluded? Bruckman reasons this need for selection is to maintain a professional, collegiate atomosphere of peer-to-peer discussion rather than have MediaMOO become a didactic educational forum. Despite only being a lowly under-graduate, I have many ideas and theories that are borne out of the research and teachings undertaken in my course. And to openly suggest they are any less valid than the post-grad sitting next to me in KCB336 or a Georgian librarians is elitist and dismissive.

Of course, a creator or moderator of an online community is able to pick and choose the members to their heart's content. I'm just annoyed that I had to read her article as part of our course, yet am considered ineligible and inferior to then join the discussion.

It's kind of like choosing teams in high school PE all over again...

Virtual Schmirtual: Reflection on Class Online Chats

I really enjoyed the class on-line chats, but particularly the week 11 one, where we were all actually in the same classroom together as well as online together. I found it really hilarious when someone would type something funny and then certain people all around the room would start laughing out loud! (The 'copyright' chatroom was the cool place to be!) It negated the need for the LOL and ROFL acronyms, but we still used them!

It was an interesting way to discuss issues. In the week 12 chat, someone posed the question "do you feel more comfortable chatting online than you do in a normal tute situation"? For me, the answer was definitely yes. Despite having many opinions and being a reasonably confident speaker, there is still something I find so daunting about tutorial chats (even though I'm in third year, you's think I'd get over it). Online, I was able to express myself clearly, and with the anonymity (until outed by 'banksja'!), felt comfortable asking questions. I did think that having a slightly smaller group (as in week 11) made it easier than the larger group in week 12, purely because sometimes you're comments got lost up the chat-page when everyone was typing at once. I also thought it was interesting that our class seemed to develop 'in jokes' (I didn't know Courtney was from Texas?!) quite quickly online, a camaraderie we hadn't (and still haven't?) established nearly so much in the 'real' world.

Chatting together online whilst being together physically prompts me to think about the ol' online/offline dichotomy. I do think that the supposed separation of the two is overrated, and for me, the most fun is had when they merge.

I really enjoyed the chats, and they should remain an important part of the course in the future. But no more outing, banksja!

I am global, therefore I am...

In 'The Global Self and the New Reality', Barbara Creed discusses the new notions of 'self' that have developed in response to increasing globalisation enabled by the internet. This new self is fluid, mobile and more empowered on both global and local levels due to information communication technologies. One of the most interesting points made was how the internet is described as having the power to expand the self into a global entity in an activism context, "a global self that has the potential to address the controversial area of global social justice". The social justice net-scape is being shaped from two different levels: the multinational corporations influencing it from above; and the grass-roots, social movements creating a new global awareness from below.

One proffered example is OneWorld Online, the world's leading human rights website. This site is a 'gateway' site, informing interested citizens about current human rights issues and campaigns run by members of the OneWorld network, such as Amnesty International, UNICEF, and Oxfam. This 'gateway' style of presenting social justice issues seems to particularly value e-democracy and promote the ideals of the internet espoused by the first-wave theorists.

The global self is more open to the possibility of change, and through sites such as this, is able to participate in public interest debates in a global sphere. I like this notion of a self so empowered by information communication technologies that the actual fabric of its identity is altered. In the numerous conceptions of society we are proffered (the Information Society, the Knowledge Economy, the Global Village etc), one constant seems to be the notion of information, or knowledge, as power. The shift from the 'tangibles' of the past to the intangible 'information as commodity' of the present can be better utilized to effect social change only through knowledge dissemination and the consequent action of informed citizens.

Another interesting human rights-focused group is the Communication, Information and Informatics Sector of UNESCO, (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). Self described as promoting the "free flow of ideas by word and image, a wider and better balanced dissemination of all forms of information contributing to the advancement of societies", this organization also seems to be a perfect example of empowering the global self in the new gloabl sphere. Particular areas of focus are access to information, development of media, capacity building and freedom of expression.

I love it when a media-studies reading actually makes me believe I can change the world.

Geographical Domain Names

I love a good law case, especially a media-law case, because I get to see it with background from both sides. Matthew Rimmer's article 'Virtual Cultures: Internet Domain Names and Geographical Terms' goes over the issues involved in the debate surrounding southafrica.com. This domain name was registered by an American company called Virtual Cultures, and the Republic of South Africa has now mounted an effort to claim the southafrica.com domain name as their own. Their main arguments include:

The names of sovereign nations are deserving of special protection as domain names. For example, the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property has long afforded special protections limited to national symbols of sovereign nations, such as national flags, emblems, official signs and hallmarks. In today's world of internet communications, a country's own name is a symbol of the sovereign nation and should be its unique global identifier...

It is important to recognise that, largely due to the digital divide, this 'gold rush' by entities in developed nations occurred at a time when many developing nations were unaware of the activities of these entities and how these activities would affect them... If the current registrants, primarily Western individuals and corporation, are permitted to continue to exploit these valuable national assets to which they have no rights, the effect will be to widen the digital divide to the further detriment of developing nations.
(Republic of South Africa, 2001)

The problem is not solved by trademark law, as you cannot trademark a geographical term. In the similar case of Barcelona.com Inc v Execelentisimo Ayntamiento de Barcelona (2002), it was held that the city of Barcelona had a right or legitimate interest in the expression 'Barcelona', and the registeration of the disputed domain name was done so in bad faith. The close-to-home case of Brisbane City Council v Joyce Russ Advertising Limited (2001) had a different outcome. The domain name brisbane.com was disputed under WIPO guidelines, the decision being favourable to the defendant after it was held that the Brisbane City Council wasn't entitled to the brisbane.com domain name as it had not established any common-law rights or trademark rights to that name.

The southafrica.com dispute is currently at an impasse. A WIPO statement indicated:

A recommendation to adopt such measures consequently would be a departure from one of the fundamental principles underlying the Report of the first WIPO Process, namely, the avoidance of the creation of new intellectual property rights or of enhanced protection of rights in cyberspace compared to the protection that exists in the real world.
(WIPO, 2001)

This excuse seems weak. The creation of new intellectual property rights is not necessarily a bad thing: one would expect that as media are continually created, re-imagined and then superceded, so too the law should retain flexibility to continue to effectively govern the changing media-landscape. The law is by necessity a creature of habit: the entire common law system is based on obeying precedent. Yet the common law also allows for flexibility through interpretation, which is how law is able to 'move with the times'. Creating new intellectual property rights would be an enormous undertaking, and the process would need to be internationally democratic and involve extensive deliberation, but cases such as the southafrica.com case have illustrated the need for enhanced rights, particularly for those who were slow off the (digital) blocks. It doesn't seem fair to me that already-disadvantaged countries should be further penalised for their less-than-first-world status.

It also seems interesting that in this whole discourse, domain names are discussed as if they were real, tangible property or chattels - capable of distinct and definite ownership. The Republic of South Africa likens the denial of the disputed domain name as being like the denial of a natural resource, of inherent value and inherently owned by them.

So ultimately, I suppose it seems that traditional modes of governance do not always work in the online world, nor are they always appropriate. Old Man Law often likes to preserve the past as he toddles on towards antiquity, but just because something has always been done a certain way doesn't mean thats the best way. And once again I have no answers...

[Sidebar: This particular WIPO website is dedicated to internet domain name disputes and has lots of interesting information]

Fan Practices and Convergence

Nancy Baym, in Interpreting and Comparing Perspectives in the Audience Community, discusses fan practices and activities, in particular those of members of the rec.arts.tv.soaps (r.a.t.s.) newsgroup. She asserts the four maion features of active soap fandom include the personalization of the text, character interpretation, speculation and informative practices. Baym writes from a viewpoint sympathetic to both fans and soaps, both of which are often treated somewhat pejoratively.

For myself, I found myself most strongly identifying with the textual personalization process, whereby viewers make the shows personally meaningful. This can be through identification with a character (I AM Buffy), imposition of the self into the drama (I'm Buffy's best friend), or relating the textual events to personal experiences (Oh My God, when Buffy staked that vampire, it was just like that time when I...). (And of course, I am not being pejorative here, I have already admitted to being an avid Buffy fan, consider all jokes to be deprecating of self, not others).

An interesting part of new media enabled fandom is the way that media platforms can converge to provide a whole new way to experience the text, soemtimes completely separate from the primary text itself. Indeed, Baym mentions that some readers of r.a.t.s rarely, if ever, watch the actual soap, and instead rely on the newsgroup as their sole form of textual consumption.

An interesting example of media convergence in fandom is outlined by Brooker (2001) in “Living on ‘Dawson’s Creek’: Teen viewers, cultural convergence, and television overflow,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no.4, pp. 456-472. This essay discusses the ‘overflow’ of primary media texts, in particular the title show, across multiple media platforms – most notably, internet sites. This media convergence can be between the primary text and ‘official’ secondary texts (such as the network-developed Dawson’s Creek homepage) or with ‘unofficial’ fan-created texts, as well as the recent emergence of sites that fuse the two. The textually specific multi-media platforms are described as ‘cultural convergence’, and it is argued that these exclusively dedicated secondary texts encourage fan interactivity and participation, and provide an immersive experience that is an extension of the original narrative. While the ‘official’ website is produced to provide structured, directional interactivity purposely created to tie in with the original text, the ‘unofficial’ texts are often frowned upon by the owner-producers as violating both intellectual property principles and the sanctity of the original text.

In a small study, Brooker also examined audience predisposition to practice cultural convergence, and concludes that gender, national context and socioeconomic background are all influential factors. His results also suggest that the secondary texts, whether official or unofficial, remain ancillary supplements to the primary text itself. This is in contrast to Baym's findings, the discord maybe resulting from the very different audiences that consume each show.

Another viewpoint about fandom and convergence is discussed by Matthew Hills (2002) in “Conclusion: new media, new fandoms, new theoretical approaches?,” in Fan Cultures, London: Routledge, pp. 172 – 185. Hills argues that the Internet, specifically online newsgroups, through virtue of constant accessibility to media content and other media users, has completely altered fan practices. He therefore suggests that online fandoms cannot be viewed as merely versions or translations of offline fandoms, but as successful entities within the new cultural and media convergence. Hills suggests that just as new media have greatly enabled fandom through the partial deconstruction of the social divisions once so limiting to participants, so too it has placed new pressures on these communities. This leads to his proposal of ‘just-in-time’ fandom, the result of spatio-temporal rhythms influencing fandoms' operation, an example being the significant time lapse between screening of television shows in America and in other countries, the different chronologies effectively alienating the two fan communities.

Pondering Protocol... and Fandom

All this protocol talk reminded me of an article I read last semester, M. Consalvo (2003) “Cyber-Slaying Media Fans: Code, Digital Poaching, and Corporate Control of the Internet,” The Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol.27, no.1, pp. 67-86. This article examines how online fans are limited by Internet coding, specifically HTML, the basic Internet code used to create functioning websites. Consalvo proposes the idea of fans as cyborgs (“fan-borgs”), because their use of and reliance on the Internet and computer mediated communication has become so integral to their survival and growth that the technology has become ubiquitous within fan culture. This reliance, however, has its downfall. Consalvo argues that while the Internet was created as a medium of anonymous and unrestricted communication, this is not the reality. In practice, the Internet is regulated by deep levels of coding (“the plumbing”), created and controlled by expert programmers and corporations that determines how the HTML is used and manifested. This architectural authorship belies the oft-touted freedom of the Internet, and Consalvo contends that it functions to limit fan-borgs in their responses to and manipulations of media content. The specific fandoms examined are the Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer online communities. Both communities have experienced hostile corporate attempts to limit their online activity, but as overtly active members of participatory culture, they responded in an organized and cohesive fashion.

Pondering Proximity

The concept of proximity, and the social boundaries that it both enforces and disperses, fascinates me. The reading by Barry Wellman, Physical Place and Cyberspace: The Rise of Networked Individualism, focused on a few such issues, including the newfound socialization independent of place and group and the appropriation of public space for personal use. This week, to enable my pondering, I've decided to paste in quotes from the article itself, followed by my own thoughts and how this relates to my own experiences...

• Computer-supported communication will be everywhere, but, because it is independent of place, it will be nowhere. The importance of place as a communication site will diminish even more, and the person - not the place, household or workgroup - will become even more of an autonomous communication mode.
  
  It's strange how being 'connected' can also afford us greater freedom. One no longer has to sit by the phone waiting for a call, as they can carry their mobile with them at all times; one no longer needs to wait in the computer-queue at the QUT library, as they will kindly lend you a laptop so you can email from Beadles (or the guild bar) to your heart's content; and one no longer needs to attend lectures (well, law lectures at least) because they are streamed online and you can access them from anywhere at anytime. Place has become less important to our communications, indeed most often when you call people, you have no idea where they are.
  
  
• Another transition has already started. It is the communication-driven shift away from place-based inter-household ties to individualised person-to-person interactions and specialised role-to-role interactions.
  
  Some would argue that this newfound absence of geographical proximity in our personal relations is a bad thing: "people chat to perfect strangers and yet are ignorant of those who live next door", "you can't have a 'real', fulfilling relationship online", "people just don't care anymore". Wellman contends that online relationships can be just as fulfilling as offline relationships, but fulfilling of different needs. Online relationships are often purpose-driven, or in Wellman's conception 'role-to-role, meaning that people will actively seek out, or be sought themselves, to participate in communication exchanges for particular reasons (for example, academics using usenet to discuss the latest chapters in their books. This fulfils a specific purpose, and most users would fulfill their other needs (such as discussing their closet Captain Kirk-lust) through other different, purposed, interactions).
  
  
• Although the telegraph was generally only used for short, high-priority messages, it was the harbinger of communication becoming divorced from transportation.
  
  No longer are geography and temporal discord decisive, limiting factors in communications. Overcoming the time/place difference has been recognized extensively as a major advantage of computer-mediated communications. An example is in fandom. Originally, fans of different nationalities were quite separate. If an episode of a TV show screened in America, American fans were able to communicate about the show through the pre-internet fan media of zines, newsletters, etc, but by the time such media filtered through to other countries by snail mail, most of the discussion was no longer relevant (everyone already knew who shot JR). Now the temporal discord is irrelevant, as the data is stored online, ready to be accessed at any point in time when it is of relevance to the consumer. The internet has also facilitated many international fan-bases, now able to communicate effectively and relevantly through time and space.
  
  
• Science-fiction author William Gibson (the inventor of the term 'cyberspace') believes that in the near future 'people will pay money for something that will make them believe for a while that they are not connected'.
  
  This is already happening. Whether or not people desire to be totally 'dis-connected', there is definite evidence of people wishing to choose when and with whom they connect, as Wellman puts it, 'to maintain anonymity and freedom of choice, many do not want to be always - or often - connected'. Hence the popularity of ICT features such as caller ID, voicemail, and the 'block' or 'away' functions on MSN. For me, sms messaging also falls under this category: sometimes, I really don't want to get in a conversation with someone, and a text message can be a non-committal, non-engaging means of communicating. This quote also makes me think in a 'how-times-change' way about how in the 'old' days, movie screenings were preceded by 'no smoking' advertisements, and now, in addition, they are preceded by 'please turn off your mobile phone' announcements.
  
  
• As mobile phones proliferate, the norms of this inherently person-to-person system foster the intrusion of intensely involving private behaviour into public spaces.
  
  This is what Wellman calls the personalisation of public space, or the appropriation of public space for personal needs. The examples in the article include a girl having a loud (and very personal) conversation on her mobile phone whilst using public transport, and people who listen to personal music players (eg Ipods) whilst in public. The author observes that 'people who withdraw inward in public space are unsettling, their behaviour signalling that their bodies, but not personas, are passing through'. Is it symptomatic of our ever-growing ability to connect that we feel the need to purposely disconnect from our immediate surroundings? Sometimes I feel like I unwittingly consume so much media and receive so many mediated messages (constant checking of emails for uni-related messages, constantly confronted with news headlines on my web browser, constantly barraged by muzak in public places etc) that I definitely feel an urge to switch off. My way of doing so in public places is usually by wearing big, dark sunglasses: I don't have to make eye contact and 'connect' with anyone and it's a physical barrier between me and the world. (And if I'm approached by eager/officious/scary salespeople in shopping centres, I pretend to talk on my mobile. Just don't forget to turn it on 'silent first', I've made that mistake before.)
  
  
• Observing this intense, one-sided conversation was more like observing masturbation than like observing a couple in love.
  
  I don't actually have anything to say about this quote, other than that it is the funniest thing I've read all day. Although it was closely followed by 'the guts of her phone hidden in the Gucci'. It's not often my homework makes me chortle.

Angel Flight and Angel Talk

When we first formed into our groups for our 'establishing a virtual community' task, one boy in my group was adamant in what our community should be: Angel Flight. At first, not knowing much about the organisation, I was sceptical that a community so grounded in the physical world (providing flights and assistance) could ever really effectively cross-over to the virtual world. But the more that I researched the assignment, the more I saw that the idea was really valid and inspired: I actually fell in love with the assignment.

Angel Flight Australia is a charity that co-ordinates non emergency flights for financially and medically needy people. All flights are free and may involve patients or compassionate carers travelling to or from medical facilities anywhere in Australia. Chronically ill children and their families and carers face unique problems. These problems are often exacerbated by isolation and remoteness, leaving those families who live in rural areas to struggle onwards alone.

The solution our group proposed was ‘Angel Talk' – an online facility for support, communication and learning.

There are many studies that highlight the benefits of community and social support for the chronically ill. A 2002 study conducted in Baltimore concluded that chronically ill patients, especially children, are at increased risk of developing mental health problems, but this risk can be greatly reduced by participating in community-based support programs. Another American study determined that multiple benefits were experienced by chronically ill patients and their families when they had access to appropriate support services, the listed benefits including increased ability to cope with illness-specific needs, reduced disability-related problems and successful familial adaptation.

These studies no doubt illustrate the benefits of social support and community participation, but that can be difficult when your nearest neighbour is 30 kilometres away or your town is serviced by only one overworked GP.

Our community was designed to take up where angel flights leaves off: Angel flight will have you connected in the real world; but Angel flight will connect you in the virtual world. The idea behind Angel Talk was that it would specifically cater for chronically ill patients, their families and their carers who live in remote areas. Through a number of tailored website features including secure, private, personal chat rooms, open forums focused on relevant issues and a collection of easy-to-understand yet authoritative health articles, Angel Talk would seek to build on the shared affinity required to establish an online community (as discussed by Howard Rheingold in 'Community Development in the Cybersociety of the Future) and provide enough services and special features to keep them coming back (Amy Jo Kim, ) . Rural patients will be able to talk to the city patients they met in hospital; a carer who lives in Woollahra can compare notes with a carer who lives in Wagga Wagga; a mother from rural Charleville can read the latest article on paediatric pain management from the Mater Hospital.

Angel Talk could also be utilized by hospitals. The online community can provide a previously un-utilized form of ongoing “treatment” in the form of social support. No longer do patients have to return home to the isolation of rural Australia alone. Now, they would have a facility to maintain contact, to reach out. This is of obvious benefit to the hospitals themselves: patient-care does not have to end upon discharge. There would be no actual, patient-specific advice from health professionals given on the website (can anyone spell 'law suit'?), rather, Angel-Talk would be a valuable addition to existing, traditional treatment programs.

The Angel Talk idea was about designing a community that would effectively and caringly service and support its members, with participants hopefully becoming fully-fledged, active community members who are not disadvantaged by geography, but are as connected, informed and supported as their urban counterparts.

There were many great ideas in our class (Q-Scene, E-commodation, etc), and it was quite fascinating to see the totally different directions that we all took, given such a broad task. I loved the Angel Talk idea (despite possible arguments as to its actual potential and sustainability). For me, as a media studies student, it is important when I have 'moments' that re-affirm why I did media studies in the first place: to somehow change the world. It was nice to feel that we'd come up with a project that (at the least) was socially aware, and, taken to fruition, for some people, could change the world... Or at least rural Australia.

See no evil

Jo Ann di Filippo's 'Pornography on the Web' discusses the birth and growth of the adult entertainment industry online. The topic of pornography is obviously fraught with tension and emotion, and I find myself identifying with so many different views on the subject.


It is very hard to look at a picture of a woman's body and not see it with the perception that her body is being exploited. - Andrea Dworkin, 1981

This school of thought emphasizes the danger and negative effects of pornography made for men. The notion of the 'male gaze' becoming truly ingrained into the fabric of our society is seen as oppressive and damaging. (Q. Pornography that depicts violence or degradation is somewhat 'easy' to classify as being exploitative, but what about when both parties are both fully aware, informed, consenting and equal?)

Pornography is part of a healthy free flow of information about sex. This is information our society badly needs. It is a freedom women need. A woman's body, a woman's right. - Wendy WcElroy, 1995

This approach emphasizes the need for freedom of speech, expression and sexual identity. More information and depictions about sex dispel the taboo and allow women to explore their sexual selves and sexual liberation. (Q. Pornography that depicts two aware, informed, consenting and equal partners may be somewhat 'easy' to classify as liberated or empowering, but what about pornography that depicts violence and degradation?)

(A. There is no answer. Both sides of the argument have very valid points, and I strongly agree with both, if thats possible!)

For me, as a law/media student, one of the most interesting (and horrifying) issues related to online pornography is the issue of invasion of privacy and exploitation through images or films produced without the subject's consent and/or knowledge. The recent spate of 'upskirt' photographs taken with mobile phone cameras, cameras hidden in toilet stalls, and the use of CCTV cameras to focus in on women's breasts are all examples of this new 'trend' (and all have happened in Brisbane in the last four years: at a football game; a Brisbane law firm and the Queen Street Mall respectively).
The truly horrifying part (other than the violation/invasion of privacy / embarassment / humiliation) is that these images and films can so easily be uploaded to a computer and quick-as-a-flash distributed to the world at large. So far, legislators have found it incredibly difficult to create effective laws, and even if they succeed, enforcing them will pose many problems. And really, once the offence is committed and your image is on the net, there can be no retraction - the damage is well and truly done.
This is admittedly a side issue of the internet-pornography discussion, however it does illustrate that the enormous potential of the internet can be used for 'bad' just as much as for 'good'. I hope that legislators do not turn a blind eye to this type of offence just because it may seem 'too hard' to enforce/police/monitor, and it will be interesting to see if the law can catch up with society. And the criminals.

Positioning Fans

Amanda Howell's article The X-Files, X-Philes and X-Philia: Internet fandom as a site of convergence highlights the power struggles inherent to the relationship between fans and producers. Fans are often positioned as the 'powerless elite': possessing superior knowledge and interpretation of their chosen text, yet impotent and unable to actually exert any sort of influence. The story of the X-Philes (avid fans of the TV series The X-Files) includes a long and convoluted relationship with their particular big bad: Twentieth Century Fox. Fox itself was slow to utilize the internet as a convergent platform for the show, and in the absence of an official site, thousands of unofficial fan sites cropped up. These sites often involved 'textual poaching', as coined by Henry Jenkins as the fan practice of appropriating textual elements for their own cultural purposes. The results of this poaching (movies, sound bytes, fan fiction, slash etc) was not welcomed by Fox, despite the fact, as one fan pointed out, that it really worked for their benefit:

Since the inception of The X-Files and its original meager ratings, fans of the show began demonstrating their support through creative expressions here on the WWW... A vast majority of these WWW sites were created by personal Web authors such as myself. We don't want money, we don't want notoriety - we simply wish to express ourselves and our belief in the show... In essence, 20th Century Fox TV couldn't have paid for a better advertising scheme than the free one the X-Philers were bringing to the Web.

As you can imagine, fans were sent polite requests to 'cease and desist', followed by not-so-nice letters and law suits.

However, X-Philes do consider themselves to have a much more respectful 'relationship' with the show's creator, Chris Carter. It is part of X-Philes folk lore that during the shows early seasons, the creator and writers of the show used to chat with fans on the internet after the airing of episodes. Indeed, the writers even wrote one fan into the series as an homage, and a small group of recurring characters (The Lone Gunmen) were generally accepted to be characters that directly represented the avid fans (like a Mary-Sue).

So how do fans reposition themselves from being a 'powerless elite'? Jenkins' concept of textual appropriation positions fans as a valid constituent of media audiences. Jenkins’ principle assertion is the ongoing evolution of media consumption from merely a spectator culture to a participatory culture, with the introduction of new media technology greatly advancing this process. Fans, once the passive, powerless ‘peasants’ of media culture, can now be ‘proprietors’, using new media tools to participate in activities and create their own texts. These empowered consumer/producers can transform and extend the original textual experience into rich and detailed cultural productions and social interactions.

Jenkins describes fan cultures as complex and diverse subcultural communities that are constructed as institutions of theory, analysis and re-creation. Specific fan activities such as ‘zines’ (fan magazines), fan fiction, ‘slash’ (secondary textual constructions of homoerotic affairs between an original text’s protagonists), fan music video and fan message boards, are intensified and enhanced through computer mediated communication. Whilst prejudices and misconceived stereotypes often leveled at fans, who operate from an area of “cultural marginality” and “social weakness”, Jenkins positions fandom as a firmly justifiable and defensible perspective surrounding mass media.

An interesting examination of a specific X-Philes community is from the article “An electronic community of female fans of The X-Files,” by S. R. Wakefield, from the Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol.29, 2001, no.3, pp. 130-138. This article examines a specific online community created by fans of ‘Scully’, the main female X-Files character, named the Order of the Blessed Saint Scully the Enigmatic. Particular attention is paid to the (often simultaneous) camaraderie and tension present in the group, the emergence of hierarchies, and the development of specific language and jargon, and how the fans poach and manipulate the original text. One of the most interesting features of this particular community is their repositioning of Scully. She is explicitly cast in different roles depending on the nature of the discussion (as saint, as sexpot, as the everywoman), and the fans create relational positions for themselves accordingly (as nun, as gazer, as sister).

So, after all that, how can fans reposition themselves? Textual poaching is proffered as a legitimat practice of cultural value, yet obviously the actual producers aren't always happy about it. One potential solution is proposed by Steve Silberman in his article 'The War Against Fandom":

The most sane compromise I've seen is Chris Fusco and Peter Duke's notion of "Fan Asset" sites: archives of authorized downloadable files for use by fans to build their own sites, within approved guidelines. Fusco, one of the creators of the official X-Files site, tells me he hopes to launch the first such site for X-philes on the Fourth of July.

(Umm, that article was written in 2000, and I couldn't find any such site. But still, it's a good idea.)

We are ALL boat people

We are all boat people is an online activism site devoted to dispelling myths that abound about the issue of 'boat people' arriving in Australia. The main tenet of the website is that we are ALL boat people: at some point, every non-indigineous person in Australia had relatives who arrived here by boat (or, in more recent times, maybe by plane). Our ancestors came over on the First Fleet, ie boats...

This website is an example of new media technologies enabling a social movement, as described by Barbara Creed in 'The Global Self and the New Reality'. Anuradha Vittachi, co-founder of OneWorld Online, describes a 'cybercitizen' who is a concerned individual who has become an activist in the virtual public sphere. We are all boat people enables 'cybercitizens' through the dissemination of information, the dispersing of myths and the promotion of constructive solutions.

Re-using and Re-imagining Media

A friend in my tutorial group lost her blog. She created one, published posts, then 'lost' it. Somewhere out there is a once-loved blog, floating abandoned through time and space.

Recently I was in Sydney, and I visited the antique/vintage/sometimes rubbishy markets at Rozelle. These markets are in the grounds of an old, beautiful school. Every weekend the schoolyard is filled with hap-hazard, random market sellers flogging hap-hazard, random things. One of the regular stalls specializes in pre-owned books, pre-owned photographs and pre-owned postcards. The picture above is one such post-card that I purchased (for the slightly ridiculous price of three dollars). I'm not entirely sure why I bought it (it has a pretty picture on it; I'm a little obsessed with ballerinas; it's evocative of history and romance and the 'oldendays'), but I was thinking about how random it is that I now own a postcard sent from 'Harley' to a 'Mrs Edwin Jorgenensen', who lived in Quebec in 1920.

It reminds me of how you are told in your first lecture of 'media and society' how media is always being re-imagined and used in unexpected ways, eg the newspaper that is so important today will be wrapping your fish and chips tomorrow (if you go to a dodgy store, which Jason Sternberg must, because he gave us that example!) or lining your bird cage to catch the poo. Someone out there wrote a post-card, for whatever reasons, and now I have it because it's... pretty and old. Lots of people must be collecting old post-cards, because the man I bought it from seemed to do a roaring trade (and the friend who lost her blog it is, who commented on this post and ruined her own anonymity (!) says she also collects used post-cards), so obviously there's a bunch of us re-using and re-imagining these things, re-purposing creative works for our own purposes.

It makes me wonder how today's 'new' media is going to be re-interpreted in the future. We can't exactly wrap the dog's birthday present in an old email like we might with yesterday's Courier Mail, so what will happen?

Maybe, eighty-six years from now, someone will find my friend's blog. And read it. And wonder and ponder.

Topic Mashup - Fandom Communities + Copyright

Two of my favourite media studies topics, fandom and intellectual property, do not often co-exist peacefully. The textual poaching so essential to fan empowerment is at odds with the rights asserted by producers over the works. This is illustrated in an article by E. Shefrin (2004) “Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping New Congruencies between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol.21, no.3, pp. 261-281.

This article seeks to explore emerging areas of media and cultural convergence using the specific examples of the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars film series. The two textual examples are used to illustrate the opposing modes of interaction between media producers and online fans – Lord of the Rings and its auteur, Peter Jackson, as collaborative, respectful and revolutionary; Star Wars and its auteur, George Lucas, as undemocratic, disrespectful and manipulative.
During the making of Lord of the Rings, Jackson engaged in online discussions with fans, requested their opinions through online questionnaires, was forthcoming with production details and welcomed their active participation in message boards and online communities. Shefrin asserts that he deliberately promoted the participatory culture surrounding his production as he recognized the sizeable knowledge and power this fan base wielded and sought to embrace and cultivate it. On the other hand, Lucas and his production company, Lucasfilm, have often been accused of overt hostility to the online Star Wars fan communities. Lucasfilm has sought to control manipulation of the text through numerous law suits and attempts to control the intellectual property of all subsequent textual creations. Shefrin determines this mode as one of hegemonic control; Lucasfilm’s efforts and its recent release of a subscription based online “special zone” only serving to alienate fans and create a hierarchy within the fan base.
Shefrin argues that through examination of these two opposing styles of fan-producer interaction, the consequent effects on the cultural reception and consumption of the texts can be discerned, establishing two distinct models of the relationship between the media creators and Internet fan culture.

Fandom: A very personal case study

I was a fan. I still would be if I could, but my show, the spur that pricked the sides of my intent, ended. In the correct terminology (that I studiously remember from 'Television Cultures') I was an 'avid' fan. I never missed an episode, I owned all the videos, then the DVDs, I belonged to an online fan community, and I contributed to it regularly. Which show was it that was received so much time and attention? Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The consumption of the primary text was the most enjoyable part of fan-practise, but as new episodes only came out once a week (and not at all during summer), my energies were also directed into participating in an online community, 'Buffy Down Under'. This community mainly functioned through forums devoted to the show and other texts by the Buffy creator, Joss Whedon (eg Angel, Firefly, Serenity etc). I participated in community discussions most days, and as my confidence built up (the community had been established for years before I joined, and hence was a little intimidating at first), I began to make regular postings.

Communicating with other fans greatly enhanced my understanding of the text and my enjoyment of it. Through this media convergence we were able to extend our textual experiences by discussing and analysing episodes and extrapolating personal textual interpretations.

One thing that was interesting to me was the non-Buffy threads on the site. Lots of members (myself included) discussed completely unrelated-to-Buffy books, movies, events and music, and through our inherently understood common ground of Buffy-love, were able to have vastly different opinions and tastes but express them with mutual respect.

After the Buffy TV show ended, the online community became an even more important focus to our fan practices. Posting continued just as frequently, as now the sole form of continuing the text was through our communications.

I moved to Sydney a few years ago and we did not have internet at my house for the first month. When we finally did get it, and I went to visit my beloved forum one day, I found it gone. Instead, in the place where my online community once was, was a message from the chief administrator saying that due to financial, personal and temporal constraints, the site had closed down and the BDU community was no longer. When Buffy finished on TV, I was really upset, the text forever gone. When my online community ended, I was just as upset: the text, the interpretations and my friends were forever gone.

Now I love Scrubs.

Fan Power

The week 7 reading, 'Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture' by Henry Jenkins, proposes new conceptions of media usage by fans. This chapter is about the evolution of audiences within media culture with the advent of the Internet. Initially, audiences merely consumed media texts and the ongoing privatization of the media and its producers resulted in audiences feeling disillusioned at their perceived lack of power and cultural influence. However, Jenkins contends that their role has been radically transformed. The proliferation of new media tools has provided the means for these avid fans to develop new ways to interact with media content and has repositioned audience and fan cultures as interactive and participatory.

Jenkins outlines the main objective of these newly empowered fans as being to extend their experience of the original text. He specifically uses the example of Star Wars fans manipulating Star Wars and other texts, particularly in the making of ‘amateur’ films. The Internet is described as integral to the continuation of this cultural reproduction, affording these active participants new ‘spaces’ to display, discuss, create and critique their own work, the work of fellow fans, and the original text.

This reminded me of a current high-profile example of cultural reproduction, Brokeback to the Future. This is a short spoof/trailer/mashup created by some film students from Emerson College, Boston . They mashed together footage from the Back to the Future films to construct a gay-cowboy-romance, a la Brokeback Mountain. Underscoring the entire production is the distinctive twang of the Brokeback theme song. This piece of cultural reproduction is of such a high standard and so cleverly executed that it has received massive amounts of publicity and 'hits'. In fact, I actually first read about it in a newspaper (hard copy too, not online).

The article also proposes the idea of producer / fan ‘feedback loops’, whereby media producers actively include enigmas, codes and loose ends that overtly encourage fan discussion and activity; or where fans manipulate and recreate the original text, display it on the Net, and the most potentially commercial ideas are then taken up by the owner-producers and absorbed back into the mainstream media. A current example of this is in the Da Vinci Code movie, where director Ron Howard and writer Dan Brown created codes and puzzles and then embedded them in certain frames so that fans will be able to discover and solve (and, I'm sure Sony hopes, buy the DVD) and continue to 'play' with the text outside the traditional mode of monologic consumption.

[Sidebar: I found this site. It is awesome and made me laugh so much. It is called wookieepedia and is a wiki devoted to Star Wars facts, and it is a perfect example of the media convergence discussed in the article. Plus, Creative Industries people seem to love wikis, so bonus brownie points.]

wonder-PONDer: re-telling the activist story

Today's PONDer (courtesy of my Uncle's garden) is about one of the problems with activism, and uses an article by Graham Meikle called Open Publishing, Open Technologies from the book Future Active: media activism and the internet as inspiration.

The article uses the specific example of the Sydney IMC (Independent Media Centre) during the 200 Olympics, and explains not only the different modes of communication used my 'alternative' media producers such as IMC but also the different content that they are able to produce because of their inherent independence. The part I found particularly fascinating was in the reporting on protests. Meikle points out that coverage of protests are almost covered by 'mainstream' media in the same way; through the construction of a conflict narrative: "conflicts and oppositions will be highlighted or manufactured, and discussion of issues will be replaced by a depiction of disruption to the status quo". This results in reporting that will show the angry/enraged/impliedly crazy protesters shown chanting/waving placards/breaking the law, often without even mentioning or explaining the actual reason behind their protest. Meikle says that consumers of media need to realize that these conflict-based narratives are constructions of events, not neutral, unbiased accounts. I also think that this form of reporting has another effect: potential activists, people who would like to get involved with an issue, don't want to do so in the traditional protest way because only mad/crazy people do so. This came to me because of another subject I am doing, KCB302 Political Communication, when our tutor asked us why we, as young Australians, were so apathetic about things? Why was noone concerned about voluntary student unionism/the industrial relations reforms/the world in general? And I thought to myself, I am very concerned about all those things, I consider myself to be reasonably aware/concerned about such issues, yet I have never protested. I have never made nor waved a placard, even though I feel very deeply about some issues. So why not? Part of it is I don't see myself as a crazed chanter. I'm sure there are other reasons I don't participate (uni, work, assignment due in 5 minutes), but the effects of the conflict narrative construction of activists definitely plays a part. Meikle says that one of the most important challenges for internet activists is to "develop ways of telling stories which are issues focused". I think this is more important than ever. Otherwise apathy will prevail.

Virtual Community Report

Pajiba is a virtual community devoted to movie reviews that are slightly out of the ordinary, perhaps best explained by the site's slogan; "scathing reviews for bitchy people". Pajiba is made up of a team of five chief reviewers from professional critiquing backgrounds (most also critique for 'mainstream' publications as well) who analyse, dissect and evaluate movies with absolute honesty. There is no pandering, no hesitation and no concessions made, as the pajiba team valiantly set out to arm their community with the truth about the latest blockbuster or indie film.

The community is in the form of a blog, whereby the reviews are posted in reverse chronological order. The 'comments' function is (thankfully) enabled, and it is there that the heated discussion and zealous debate begins, with vehement agreement/disagreement with the review being the usual basis for a post. Members can only communicate in the 'comments' section, and submissions are moderated to ensure discussion is on topic and appropriate.

A recent review was posted about a documentary concerning September 11, right-wing politics and conservative Christians, called 'Loose Change'. In his preamble, the critic noted (with bewilderment and bemusement) that it was the reviews concerning religion and politics that generated by far the most hits and the most vociferous debates, (sometimes resulting in unpleasant post exchanges), even though they were still 'just movies'. I think that this is where Pajiba really succeeds: through analysis of movies as vehicles of contemporary culture, it sets up an environment for more broad, rhetorical analysis of greater issues, in an environment and context that is very accessible. Indeed, Pajiba originally started out in 2004 as a hybrid politics/movie review site. On dropping the politics element, Pajiba greatly increased its site traffic. Yet it is the political (and the religious, moral, ethical, racial...) discussions, applied to and extracted from movies, that have kept me coming back for more than a year.

Procrastinate and God will smite you down

OK, so this is totally my own fault for leaving my community report til the last minute, but honestly, what are the odds?! My lovely chosen community, Pajiba, has gone down. That, you might (rudely!) say, is reasonably forseeable and should be expected. Well, it has not just gone down for normal server-related issues, but for the rather more unexpected reason of, and I quote, "the department of homeland security shut our ass down"!!!!
Should you wish to read about the entire hilarious, assignment-damning debacle, you can do so here.
So throughout my community report, where I needed to link to things, I had to go through and find the google 'cached' record of the page and link to it.
Stupid stupid George W and his cronies. Grrr. Don't they have any respect for my KCB201 needs?

Post Secret

Post Secret is one of my favourite blogs. The author began his secret-revolution when he one day decided to start an art project. He handed out blank postcards at a train station, inviting the recipients to write a secret on the card, and then send it to him. The idea took off, and now Frank receives hundreds of thousands of secrets monthly. Some are funny, some are devastatingly sad. One thing that I like so much about the website is the author's obvious committment to supporting the community that supports him: the secrets posted change from week to week, yet always at the bottom is a small article and contact number for a help-line (that Frank himself has volunteered at for years) that provides phone-counselling and support for the suicidal, depressed and hopeless.
Above is my secret. Don't tell anyone.

[Please note: for some reason, this particular post has presented technical issues, and for some reason, the date line at the header of the post is sometimes obscured. If you highlight it, then it appears. This is of relevance as I am being assessed on the frequency of my posts!]

wonder-PONDer: copyright issues

I think there are a number of misconceptions about copyright. I am a law/media studies student, so I've studied it from a slightly different angle to what we're taught in the creative industries faculty. These are some myths I've noticed so far:

1. Copyright prevents ideas from being in the public domain.
Not true. Copyright does not protect ideas, you cannot get copyright in an idea. Copyright protects the specific expression of an idea, ie a 'work'. The 'Da Vinci Code' case is a good example of this: Dan Brown used the themes, ideas, even some characters, from the book 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail', yet did not infringe copyright.

2. Copyright is the same as plagiarism.
Also not true. Plagiarism is an ethical concept, not a legal one. You can actually be found 'guilty' of plagiarism by the university without having breached copyright. Therefore, it's a good idea to know the university's specific rules regarding plagiarism, as they are not all as commonsensical and logical as you would expect.

3. Copyright is bad.
Copyright works to balance the competing policy demands of protecting the author of a work and promoting continued human progress. All progress is based on building on the works of the people who went before us (imagine if every scientist had to first discover the wave-particle duality of light for themselves, we'd definitely have no map for the human genome), yet if we don't give people offer people protection for the work that they do do, then there's no incentive to go out there and discover/create new things, as someone else can just steal it right off you. I think copyright in its current incarnation does a good job of balancing these two factors.

4. Copyright should last forever.
Well, this isn't so much a myth as just a proposition that I disagree with. Some people think that works should never enter the public domain, ever. If this had been the case in the past (obviously the law couldn't apply retrospectively or all (academic) hell would break loose) then we would not be able to perform Shakespeare's plays, cite Aristotle's speeches or write out Gallileo's theories. Copyright should have a finite life, or wonderful wonderful works of art and culture will remain inaccessible.

5. Creative commons is the coolest thing ever.
OK, so also not a 'myth' as such, more a gripe: I really hate how in some creative industries subjects we are forced to publish/submit out work under a creative commons copyright license (KCB335 New Media Technologies!!!!!). Isn't the idea of creative commons to give creators more choices? So why force us to use them? Give us a choice. Rant over!