#codieanneblr

Data - A Marketing Tool

In the lecture and tutorial we looked at some great issues surrounding this. There are many cybercrimes happening all over the internet, but no solid way of governing them. The different countries and states have different laws, and so if something on the internet is illegal in one place, it can be based in another place where it is legal and still have the same audience. Some of the issues around internet governance intrigued me, such as piracy and intellectual property.

When it comes to creative ideas, nothing is absolutely original; there is always influence. Kleon wrote in Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (2012, 7) that “All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.” Therefore as a creative culture, we need to take ideas from other people and change them to create new ones. This issue was also addressed in the video Everything is a Remix. In this video Kirby (2012) suggests that social evolution depends on us copying, transforming and combining ideas. This is how ideas were always generated. But now we have the road blocks of copyright laws.

When copyright was first introduced it was done so with the intent to provide a “balance between public good and private benefit” (Flew 2014, 188). Ideas became worth a market value and therefore needed protecting. This became a sort of road block in how ideas were developed; people could no longer use other people’s ideas too closely to form their own. Instead we have to be careful in the way that we get inspiration from other’s ideas. For example, we can’t use a photo unless we have the photographer’s permission, but we can take a picture that is very similar to the original and use that instead.

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This brings me to the issue of piracy. Many TV shows, movies, music and other creative content are illegally downloaded excessively around the world. This is because it is easy, often a faster way to get the content, free, and largely ungovernable. However, if anyone were to use a video we put on Youtube for example, we would call them out and protect our creative work. These ideas are summarised by Kirby; “When we copy, we justify; When others copy, we vilify” (2012).

There are many more issues which you could draw upon in order to solve how we could govern the internet, but just by looking at these two issues you can see that there is no simple answer. The only thing that I can say is that the internet is constantly evolving and finding new loopholes in the law, and so the governance of it should too be constantly evolving with it.

  References

Ferguson, Kirby. 2012. “Everything is a Remix.” Vimeo video. Accessed April 20th, 2014. http://vimeo.com/36881035

Flew, Terry. 2014. New Media. 4th ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Kleon, Austin. 2012. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. New York: Workman Publishing Company.

The Third Medium

This can be seen all over the internet, with things such as comments, feedback, blogs, and social media etc. As a user on Facebook there are posts that you read, posts that you share and posts that you create. There are all types of ways to communicate, create and share ideas on the web, but there are also people reading, listening and watching what you say. The basis of Facebook is to be social on the internet. You post a status so that people will read it and comment on it. You also read posts by others and comment on them. In this way the web 2.0 isn’t taking away the audiences, but has evolved the web into a give and take of communication between every user in the world. In the week 3 lecture Sauter (2014) quoted Tim Berners-Lee who said “We ought to be able not only to find any kind of document on the Web, but also to create any kind of document, easily.” This ties in perfectly with my point; everyone should and can now be equally able to be both creators and consumers on the web.

With the web 2.0 and the power shift, the amount of content has grown immensely and the idea of spreadability was started. Green and Jenkins say that “Increasingly, all of us - media "producers" and consumers alike - are also media appraisers and distributors.” The audiences now have the power to share content on the web, not just create or consume. An example of this is twitter trends, where you can see what the most used hash tags are at the moment. It allows popular content to reach a larger audience, which could then go viral. This links in to my previous post where I said in the third paragraph, that people can become Tumblr, YouTube etc. famous just by creating content and having a lot of people share it.

All in all web 2.0 has brought about a positive change in how the internet works by giving the power of opportunities to everyone to be both producers and consumers, and to have their creative content spread to large audiences.

References

Green, Joshua and Henry Jenkins. 2011. “Spreadable Media. How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked Economy.” In The Handbook of Media Audiences edited by Virginia Nightingale, 109-127. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell

Sauter, Theresa. 2014. "Internet, Self, and Beyond: Week 3 lecture slides." Accessed March 23, 2014.http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_4_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fcontent%2FlistContent.jsp%3Fcourse_id%3D_108110_1%26content_id%3D_5232445_1

Rosen, Jay. 2006. “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” PressThink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine, June 27.(short blog post). Avaliable at: http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html

There are lots of different personalities on Tumblr, and these are specifically shaped by each user with what they post or re-blog. There are also many different communities on Tumblr which are formed by lots of people consistently posting about the same topics, whether it be a favorite TV show, a celebrity, or a creative outlet such as photography. This often brings a feeling of connectedness to people that you may not know, but have a lot of common interests with. People often start to get a little obsessed with this online community, because there is a constant onslaught of information and they don’t want to miss anything. This need to not miss anything can make you become partially blind to the issues of privacy that comes with having an online profile that anyone could see.

On a lighter side of this is the argument that online profiles can better our lives in terms of positive self-exposure. This can be seen with people creating online portfolios. New media and online profiles can act as advertisement for people with a specific talent. This is how people can become Tumblr famous, or YouTube famous etc. One example of this is Justin Bieber. He was just a kid that could sing and he used YouTube to create a profile of his talent to advertise himself. This started off his career in the music industry, just by the right person seeing his online portfolio.

These sites that allow anyone to create an online profile of themselves can be described as personal PR platform. As Papacharissi and Gibson (2011) say in Fifteen Minutes of Privacy “People digitally record and archive their performances of self, enacted via social media.” This could have good and bad effects, depending on how aware you are of your privacy and what you’re posting. If you are aware of this, social media is a great tool to use to get your name and your work out there, and to generate an interested audience.

References

Deuze, Mark (2011). “Media Life.” Media, Culture & Society 33 (1) 137 Accessed March 16, 2014. http://mcs.sagepub.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/content/33/1/137.full.pdf+html