Drama Queens, Kings, Knights, Peasants and Well Everyone Else Too

Drama is a term used less for the performing arts and more for teenage conflict in the modern era.  Dr. Alice Marwick and Dr. danah boyd study drama in their paper The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics and more importantly the effects of social network on drama.  These interactions are not possible without an audience and are amplified by social networking sites.  In Marwick and boyd’s paper they interview a girl, Rashna, who puts it perfectly “There’s no removal from what happens at school.  Cause it can always continue on Facebook, and you have access to that at your home.  Which previously was considered somewhere where you don’t have to deal with everything that’s going on in school” (Marwick & boyd 12).  Drama now exists in more than a single medium, which puts more stress on individuals to always be performing.  This allows for more dramatic events along with more severe drama, which borders on bullying.  There is no escape; Marwick and boyd do a great job showing that in this paper.

Happy Place is a website that posts amusing pictures, videos, and stories for their users.  Thus, with uprising in drama on Facebook, they have a complete category for “Huge Drama Queens On Facebook”.  This is a contest for these individuals to see who the biggest drama queen truly is.  Happy Place mocks these people saying “Everyone has at least ten friends like this who constantly court concern with updates about how ‘you’ broke my heart and now ‘life just isn’t worth living,’ and they know they can get a dozen comments from their gullible, similarly theatrical friends…”.  Happy Place is not the only website of its type that collects dramatic status’ and shares them online.  It has become popular practice in pop-culture to share and mock these teens.

Sites like Happy Place only add another medium for drama to be enacted within.  Individuals come to this site to discuss their friends, family or themselves.  This adds another platform to perform in for drama.  Individuals share their own dramatic status updates and discuss it further.  Now individuals cannot even separate their Facebook-selves from their openly public-selves (which speaks to the reading we had for Tuesday, but that’s a topic for another blog).  Another factor involved with sites like Happy Place is it turns drama into cyber bullying.  While some people do put Facebook drama on purpose, a lot of them have no idea they are being ridiculed.  This means that drama is no longer "childish and harmless" but more malicious.  Drama is not the simplistic dealings of adolescents anymore but it is turning into addictive attention seeking activity by young adults that should be concerning to all.

Campfire Horror Stories: The Power of Google

            Independence is a word that every American holds dear to their heart. Siva Vaidhyanahan brings up the alarming fact that we are no longer independent, but dependent on Google.  Google has the search engine market cornered and is not going to stop there.  In The Googlization of Everything Vaidhyanahan speaks to the dangers of this dependence.  Google collects a vast bank of information, but who decides what information is “vital”.  Google has the potential to create a 1984-eske world that should alarm everyone, not just Siva Vaidhyanahan.

            Daniel Tsadok advocates Vaidhyanahan’s statement in his weblog. While Google Chrome is an amazing invention; its innovation is only matched by its danger.  He speaks how Google Chrome merges the search process with the URL and while this is impressive, it is also very dangerous “Sounds great, and fairly innocuous.  Except, as more people rely on Google to navigate the web, Google gains more control over where people end up”.  Google is able to make a website vanish with a click of a mouse.  Tsadok is not worried about the near future but Google’s dominance down the line. 

            Tsadok and Vaidhyanahan clearly agree that Google is dangerous.  Tsadok gives examples of how the dependence could give Google control over documents, calendar, email, phone service and even health records.  The Vaidhyanahan reading along with the Tsadok weblog paints a horrific picture for the future.  Google can gain dictatorship like power over the technology market, which is scary in the tech-based world we live in today.

The Five Faces of Piracy and the One Mask

Ramon Lobato identifies the six faces of piracy in his book Shadow Economies of Cinema.  The most easily identified face of piracy is theft.  Lobato describes this face as “an act of social and economic deviance- that is, as theft” (72).  He goes on to describe the measures that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has taken to prevent piracy.  First, the MPAA tried to link piracy with prostitution rings and terrorism, which was not successful.  They then took a more proactive approach towards the youth in regards to piracy.  The MPAA sponsored an essay contest where submitting an essay would get you a free studio tour.  Lobato’s final point is that organizations like the MPAA way overestimate piracy losses because they assume that every pirated item would have been bought and sold in a retail venue.  Lobato does a good job calling out the industry out on this saying “the war on piracy also needs to be understood as a public relations exercise aimed at reinforcing a deferential relationship to copyright and showing the vulnerable side of a powerful industry” (74).  This short passage does a fantastic job showing that the fight against piracy, for a company like MPAA, is about more than just the revenue leakage.

Jason Koebler elaborates on what Lobato is hinting at towards the end of this passage.  Koebler describes that piracy actually helps musicians sell albums in his article Album Piracy May Help Musicians Sell.  Koebler describes a study done by Robert Hammond that shows sharing albums on file sharing sites prior to its release date do not hurt sales but may actually help them.  Hammond watched over 1,000 albums that were leaked on BitTorrent, the end results were positive for the album.  Albums that were shared 30 days in advanced averaged an extra 60 copy sold.  In the grand scheme of album sales this difference is practically nothing.  Hammond ends by saying that the results of his study are “good news for individual artists but not necessarily good for the industry”. 

Hammond’s result undermines the “Industries” excuse for taking a rigid stance on copyright infringement.  Lobato claims that the purpose of copyright as regulatory system is to ensure that levels of protection for IP rights-holders; thus in this instance the artists (the creators who own the IP rights) are capturing more profits from this copyright infringement, but the labels cannot collect on it.  While piracy will always be a form of theft Koebler’s article undermines the “industry” reasoning for such a rigid stance.  Koebler shows exactly what Lobato is hinting towards in the final part of his “Piracy As Theft” section and that is: Piracy is not about IP rights, artists losing money, or any of that but instead about major studios receiving a cut.  This new “Big Brother” is the only one losing money on piracy will lessen the sympathy of the public.  Piracy as theft may not be a face at all, but instead a mask major corporations have used for years.

Rome Wasn't Built in a Day but a Reputation Can Be

In Worship at the Alter of Convergence Henry Jenkins focus on the changing manner of media circulation.  In the new world, media goes through several different outlets; big media must now interact with the noble amateur to maximize exposure and profits.  He also comments on participatory culture.  Participatory culture is only possible if users make creative changes to already established big media products.  The example Jenkins uses is that of Bert is Evil, which involves a photo-shopped version of Bert from Sesame Street with Osama Bin Laden.  This image was eventually used in a protest and from there the Bert is Evil concept went viral.  Convergence is everywhere but the most prominent example is large broadcasting companies having YouTube channels (NBA & CNN).  This allows persons without televisions to access their content.

A fantastic example of this is the Rome Wasn’t Built in One Day (The Decision Remix) by dj steve porter.  This video chronicles a tumultuous 2010-2011 season for Lebron James.  It features several different press conferences, highlights, and events that encapsulate the narcissism he displayed throughout the season.  It gives the viewer a musical summary of that year for Lebron personally along with the Miami Heat’s “Big Three”.  This video quickly went viral and ESPN actually aired it on SportsCenter.  After airing the video ESPN hired dj steve porter; he now does a “month in review” video every month along with doing special videos for athletes, sporting events and sports commentators like Randy Moss, Skip Bayless and the NFL Draft to name a few.

This is a prime example of convergence.  All of these Lebron James moments were scattered through the year.  Dj steve porter brought them all together to paint a narcissist picture of LBJ.  This video has changed the way people look at Lebron all together.  While Lebron supports upwards of 10 charities and donates the most money in the NBA to charity, dj steve porter’s video demonized him to the point that charitable acts cannot change his image.  Lebron did not make the best public relation decisions in 2010, however it would not have been as condemning without Rome Wasn’t Built in One Day (The Decision Remix).  Also, this is a great example of participatory culture.  Dj steve porter went from a consumer to a producer with this hit.  Also, ESPN now hosts video remix contests among their viewers regularly.

Andrew Keen's (Not So Keen) Outlook on Citizen Journalism

Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur takes a very pessimistic look at the Web 2.0 and the effects on the real world.  In chapter 2, Keen outlines the “noble amateur” and what that means for society.  Specifically he uses the example of citizen journalism.  Keen warns against the citizen journalist culture.  First, he describes that these amateurs do not need to tell the truth.  They do not have the editor of the New York Times over there shoulder fact checking.  Keen uses the example of Hurricane Katrina where bloggers were the first “reporters” on the scene.  It turned out that “inflated body counts and erroneous reports of rapes and gang violence.” (48) were reported by said bloggers. While they do not need to tell the truth; Keen also shows that citizen journalists do not the resources to bring reliable news.  A CEO, political figure, or celebrity (usually) will not give an amateur blogger the time of day, thus they do not get the news straight from the source.  Instead they get their news from a source of a source or from the major news outlets.  This can lead to a watering down of factual information or misinformation all together.  Finally, Keen speaks to the seriousness of misreporting news with the comparison of a journalist and a blogger.  A journalist can go to jail for telling the truth, while a blogger cannot be prosecuted for lies.  All of this freedom can be used irresponsibly to mislead and betray the public.  Keen’s point of view that citizen journalism is a negative part of the Web 2.0 is clear throughout this chapter.

While Keen is not keen on the idea of citizen journalism, there have been instances where these amateurs have been crucial in breaking news.  In 2002, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott made racist comments during Storm Thurmond’s birthday party.  Thurmond ran for President on a segregationist platform in 1948.  Lott claimed that “..if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years” (Shirky, Everyone is a Media Outlet, 61).  The typical news outlets did not pick up these racist remarks; so then why did Lott resign fifteen days later?  How the Trent Lott-Storm Thurmond Story Grew Legs and Crushed a Political Career describes how Lott’s ignorance would have went unnoticed if not for citizen journalism.  All of the journalists at this event were considered ‘insiders’, thus they did not want to upset their patrons by reporting an unflattering story on one of the Republican Party’s leader.   A report like this would have led to an insider being out casted from the group and losing their professional edge. However, a blogger has no such commitment.  The blogger’s took this story and ran with it until the traditional big guns in the US journalism took notice.  Once that happened, Lott was doomed.  He lost his post later in the month, losing the backing from his own party. The “noble amateur” was crucial in breaking this damning story.

Keen is overly critical of the Web 2.0 culture, especially in reference to journalism.  While the checks and balances for the truth do not exist, this can be advantageous to noble amateurs.  The Lott story illustrates that the free reign of the blogosphere can lead to the bigger, more official, news outlets picking up a missed story.  Bloggers do not have alligences to groups, they just want their version of the story on the web.  This severely weakens Keen’s observations that citizen journalists are killing the profession and American culture.  Instead of weakening journalism, bloggers can be used as a support system that help journalists get a head start on a story.