The purpose of my “Mashumentary” project was to present copyright issues in media form. I used media from the Internet to create a “media mashup”, a new work legal under fair use. There is some information that I gained in my study that I didn’t put on the video due to awkwardness, so I will provide it here.
Survey
I found that within the people I surveyed, most people were in a group that might be defined by the term copy moderate. There is a good majority of people who just don’t know, don’t care, and who don’t really understand copyright law. Others still may buy CD’s, but don’t think file sharing is ethically wrong. Some feel as though the super capitalist ways of the companies controlling media have sucked the teat of greed far to long and need to embrace the coming revolution.
Interview with singer, songwriter, and recording artist Jim Bizer.
Responses by Jim are notated by ***.
Ian: How long have you been playing music?
***Jim: I started playing French Horn, and guitar shortly after, at age 8; so I’ve been playing music for 44 years.
Professionally?
***I played my first paid performance at age 14 and have continued since then – this is my 38th year as a professional musician.
Recording?
***First started experimenting with a sound-on-sound recorder in high school. Acquired a 4-track tape machine when I was 22 and made many “demo-quality” recordings, some of which I gave to friends, some of which I used for promotional purposes. From the mid 80s to the early 90s, I did quite a bit of work in pro studios, including production of my own songs (in hopes of a record contract), sessions as a sideman on guitar, bass and keyboards on other artists’ projects, as well as producing music for television and radio. It wasn’t until 2001 that I finally released an independent commercial recording of my own songs. Since then, I have released another solo CD, one as part of a band, contributed to numerous compilation recordings and recently released a duo CD with Jan Krist.
Do you belong to a record label?
***I never did land that elusive “record deal” and in retrospect, I’m just as happy I didn’t. The Yellow Room Gang, a songwriters’ collective that I’m part of, has an informal “label name” to help support each other’s independent recordings.
What was the first medium in which you recorded your songs?
***Recorded on reel-to-reel tape and distributed on cassette tapes.
What impact has the changing trend toward electronic media and the Internet. i.e. file sharing, had on your work?
***Definitely a double-edged sword – the Internet has made global distribution possible for independent artists and having songs (and video) available for streaming on the web has tremendously simplified the submission process for getting gigs. The flip side is that recorded music is now so easy to duplicate and share that a lot of music that once would have been purchased is being given away, which makes it much more difficult to make a living at writing and producing music. I haven’t been heavily impacted by this (yet): working in the “folk” genre, there’s still a strong emphasis on physical recordings. My music is available on iTunes, Rhapsody and numerous other download sources, but the large bulk of my sales are CDs (maybe because one person downloaded my tunes and is now giving them away…)
What are your general feelings toward file sharing?
***Ambivalent – this brings up the entire issue of combining art and commerce. Part of me is uncomfortable charging for and putting a price on my art. Another part of me wants (and feels I deserve) remuneration.
File sharing is great way to get lots of people hearing music they wouldn’t hear otherwise: good thing. File sharing means many people will never pay for the music they listen to, making it much harder, perhaps impossible, for the 98% of recording artists who are barely getting by: bad thing.
How does one protect their intellectual property? Should definitions be revised?
***It’s clear that the new technology has made the old system of compensation obsolete. Perhaps some improved method of copy protection could restore viability, but certainly at the cost of convenience and everybody would hate it. Should we abandon the concept of intellectual property altogether? But then how would we support artists and inventors? Sorry to say, I don’t have answers.
There are artists around who have their work available to the public to share, download, add, and revise. These individuals call themselves the copyleft. How do you think these sorts of sites and communities will change music? Do you think this is a bad thing?
***It could be a good thing creatively. It may mean that eventually people will not be able to sustain a career making music. Which may not be entirely bad – it might help solve the art vs commerce dilemma. Seriously.
The advances in electronic media have undoubtedly transformed the way we listen to music and how we view all media. The explosion in popularity of the mp3 format has created a monster: a living creature; a society of online personas sharing screens. A society created on a foundation springing from the idea of sharing. Napster, and the proceeding online revolution made it possible for individuals to obtain music and other media without going to the record store. This has affected the way artists produce and distribute their music. So this raises the question, how is this affecting our culture?
***Also interesting that most often, people consume music privately, listening to their personal music players that no one else hears. In the past, listening to music was a collective experience (even whether some wanted to listen or not!)
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
My Web Report
Ever since I was old enough to read I was playing video games. I can remember sitting in my family room, controller in hand, maneuvering a little pixelly character named Mario across an equally pixelly environment, evading and conquering hordes of pixelly villains to save the beautifully pixelled princess. Video games have come a long way since then and the industry’s evolutionary process has always intrigued me. So, for my “State of the Web” report I decided to evaluate the two links leading me to an article entitled "Game Master"and a video named" Gaming 2012" which is a podcast. The article appears in a subcategory of the site called profiles, which is exactly what the piece is. John Seabrook is the author of the profile and appears on the video. When perusing the site I found the New Yorker headline with the man in the top hot and monocle alluring, but found the plethora of advertisements quite annoying. There’s a lot going on the page and a hundred different links to click hyperlinked to countless words. This distracted me from the article a little but when I clicked on “view as a single page” I scrolled down and all the extra noise faded away.
The article, written in 2007, is basically about Will Wright’s life and his career as a computer game designer. It depicts the life of Will Wright and what lead him to create these games and the various ways in which he came up with the idea for them. The narrative is charming at times, but toward the middle it became a little tedious as I found myself less and less interested in Will Wright’s personal life and wanted to read more about Spore. Along with the narrative on Will Wright’s life, Seabrook takes you through a rough outline of the history of video games and correlates it to the story. Seabrook relates how he came up with the idea of some of his games. The most interesting of the stories is how he came to realize the idea of The Sims. Wright wanted to connect more with his daughter so he created a digital dollhouse, which evolved into the game known as The Sims. Seabrook makes note that much of Wright’s inspiration came from books. The idea for The Sims spawned from “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander and “A Theory of Human Motivation” by Abraham Maslow while his game SimEarth was based on the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock. Spore, however was derived from Drake’s equation and “Power of Ten”. All this leads up to the discussion on the video game spore, and Seabrook speculates if Spore will change gaming like The Sims did.
The video is helpful because it puts faces to names. In the video Will Wright conducts a basic overview of the game Spore. He conveys his motivation for making the game and what he hopes it will accomplish. He mentions the importance of hands-on learning and admitted that it was his education at a Montessori school that programmed him to be the way he is. At this point Wright quickly walks through the game, after which John Seabrook interviews Wright about the themes found in the article.
I’m not entirely sure how to go about completing the second part, but whenever I see questions with numbers attributed to them, this makes me compelled to answer them as they appear.
1. I picked this site because I have always been a huge fan of video games and have been a hopeless nerd gamer for most of my life. I actually didn’t know anything about spore before I read the article and video actually inspired me to purchase the game.
2. When I first entered the site my impression was that of annoyance. I started reading the article and a pop up appeared asking me to subscribe to The New Yorker magazine, obscuring my view of the text. Clicking around the link on the site is amusing, and there are a lot of articles and blogs available. I was a little annoyed with the way the beginning of the text was laid out, because in the middle of the text there is a randomly generated cartoon that has no relevance to the article. I clicked on the link for the cartoon kit, which made me register for the site. After which, however, I was able to screw around with the kit, which is somewhat fun.
3. I wasn’t very impressed with the layout of the site, and as I said the pop-up ad was very annoying. The other aspects of the site weren’t bad. The type is easy to read and the excess of links on either side fades away when you view the article as a single page.
4. The New Yorker is commonly regarded as a legitimate publication. The author John Seabrook is a well regarded journalist and has been writing for The New Yorker commenting on technology and pop-culture since 1993. Since The New Yorker is a business and attempting to make money, there are a lot of advertisements, which in my opinion distract from the scholarly content of the article.
5. Though not explicitly mentioned in the article, the evolution of literacy is now also tied with multimodal texts, such as video games. The common conception of video games is that they increase illiteracy, and is turning the younger generation into fat lazy slobs. Will Wright seems to present a different model that glorifies gaming as a learning tool.
6. The article and the video seem to merely focus on how the game may change gaming while I wanted there to be a little bit more about how it may change literacy. In order to make a correlation to class themes I needed to extrapolate it from passing comments.
7. I would recommend this site to other students and my friend purely for the content. The advertisements are frustrating, but what can one expect from a business’ website?
The article, written in 2007, is basically about Will Wright’s life and his career as a computer game designer. It depicts the life of Will Wright and what lead him to create these games and the various ways in which he came up with the idea for them. The narrative is charming at times, but toward the middle it became a little tedious as I found myself less and less interested in Will Wright’s personal life and wanted to read more about Spore. Along with the narrative on Will Wright’s life, Seabrook takes you through a rough outline of the history of video games and correlates it to the story. Seabrook relates how he came up with the idea of some of his games. The most interesting of the stories is how he came to realize the idea of The Sims. Wright wanted to connect more with his daughter so he created a digital dollhouse, which evolved into the game known as The Sims. Seabrook makes note that much of Wright’s inspiration came from books. The idea for The Sims spawned from “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander and “A Theory of Human Motivation” by Abraham Maslow while his game SimEarth was based on the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock. Spore, however was derived from Drake’s equation and “Power of Ten”. All this leads up to the discussion on the video game spore, and Seabrook speculates if Spore will change gaming like The Sims did.
The video is helpful because it puts faces to names. In the video Will Wright conducts a basic overview of the game Spore. He conveys his motivation for making the game and what he hopes it will accomplish. He mentions the importance of hands-on learning and admitted that it was his education at a Montessori school that programmed him to be the way he is. At this point Wright quickly walks through the game, after which John Seabrook interviews Wright about the themes found in the article.
I’m not entirely sure how to go about completing the second part, but whenever I see questions with numbers attributed to them, this makes me compelled to answer them as they appear.
1. I picked this site because I have always been a huge fan of video games and have been a hopeless nerd gamer for most of my life. I actually didn’t know anything about spore before I read the article and video actually inspired me to purchase the game.
2. When I first entered the site my impression was that of annoyance. I started reading the article and a pop up appeared asking me to subscribe to The New Yorker magazine, obscuring my view of the text. Clicking around the link on the site is amusing, and there are a lot of articles and blogs available. I was a little annoyed with the way the beginning of the text was laid out, because in the middle of the text there is a randomly generated cartoon that has no relevance to the article. I clicked on the link for the cartoon kit, which made me register for the site. After which, however, I was able to screw around with the kit, which is somewhat fun.
3. I wasn’t very impressed with the layout of the site, and as I said the pop-up ad was very annoying. The other aspects of the site weren’t bad. The type is easy to read and the excess of links on either side fades away when you view the article as a single page.
4. The New Yorker is commonly regarded as a legitimate publication. The author John Seabrook is a well regarded journalist and has been writing for The New Yorker commenting on technology and pop-culture since 1993. Since The New Yorker is a business and attempting to make money, there are a lot of advertisements, which in my opinion distract from the scholarly content of the article.
5. Though not explicitly mentioned in the article, the evolution of literacy is now also tied with multimodal texts, such as video games. The common conception of video games is that they increase illiteracy, and is turning the younger generation into fat lazy slobs. Will Wright seems to present a different model that glorifies gaming as a learning tool.
6. The article and the video seem to merely focus on how the game may change gaming while I wanted there to be a little bit more about how it may change literacy. In order to make a correlation to class themes I needed to extrapolate it from passing comments.
7. I would recommend this site to other students and my friend purely for the content. The advertisements are frustrating, but what can one expect from a business’ website?
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