April 25, 2007
Lessig has a huge head
Jason's right, Lessig has a huge head. Check it out here
April 18, 2007
Oh Toby Keith, keep on rocking
I know the introduction of this post has but a tenuous connection to our class work but i felt it was interesting, so what the hell.
As someone relatively new to the culture of a place like Southern Ohio, let me just say that a 4 hour drive south to the 'boonies' was most illuminating.
What was most illuminating was my personal discovery that I don't like listening to the same song(/shit?) over and over again. While the simple, earthy denizens of the area may know something about achieving nirvana that I don't, the fact that the repetitive song had to be Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red White and Blue made me almost want to gouge out my eyeballs.
After about the 100th playing, I had internalized his lyrics sufficiently to be disturbed by a fascist aesthetic that seemed to permeate the song. Starting with a description of a certain attack on America as a 'sucker punch' (which is something, being from manhattan, i wouldn't exactly characterize as) , Toby moves onto a gleeful metaphor of the U.S. retaliation as seeing through a black eye in order to 'light up their world like the Fourth of July."
It seems as if Mr. Keith has taken a page out straight out of the work of cultural theorists on how language obfuscates in order to compartmentalize something into easy categories. But I digress as this post is not (entirely) about why I think Mr. Keith is perhaps pandering to a disturbing ethic.
But enough of this hyperbole (or so you think).
After I returned, I wanted to post his deplorably moronic lyrics on this blog (and poke fun at them). However, I found out that such an act was an apparent infringement of copyright law and was something NMPA president David Israelite calls an "unauthorized use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing."
However, such an act is hard to define. What constitutes use of lyrics: the essence of the idea or using the words verbatim? For example, our good friend Toby uses the line "we'll put a boot up your ass, its is the American way." One has to wonder if he has exclusive rights to such a phrase. If so, are we doomed to a banal life that has lost the public use of such a delicious witticism?
I'm not so sure. But there's one thing I am certain of, for this city-boy, there's going to be no more trips down to southern Ohio unless I have a car that has more than just an AM/FM radio.
Oh and if some copyright mole is reading this, I made slight alterations to Toby's lyrics so they aren't repeated verbatim. So rest easy G-men and please don't 'light up my world'.
April 15, 2007
Anarchists?
I seems as if one of the major issues Siva Vaidhyanathan wants to bring up is the pervasive ethnocentrism of the United States in the exchange of information. SV implies that many of the restrictions that Americans are trying to impose upon the world are very imperialistic in nature.
It is fairly ridiculous when Western companies demand first world prices for their merchandise to the rest of the world. This kind of rhetoric is dangerous and damaging in that it demonizes the poor as 'pirates' while simultaneously keeping prices too high for them to integrate into the information community.
April 05, 2007
RIAA: The true number of the Beast
After reading Free Culture in both digital and print format (which can be found online for free here), I realized something: I don't like writing in my book. I had first read chapters 1-3 in my print copy of the book which had cost $13.50. I didn't take many notes in my fear of marking up the book too heavily with my heavy handed penciling. When I read chapters 4-6 in printed format, I wrote copious comments, read the material more carefully and basically became a lot more intimate with the stuff. This brings up the real point that Lawrence Lessig is trying to make, at what point does regulation interfere with innovation?
Lessig makes a claim that innovation is as much based upon the modification of existing technology as the creation of something uniquely 'original'. Through the manipulation of logistics, Lessig details instances where the utilization of various technologies have been stopped by various regulatory mechanisms: primarily the Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA.
The RIAA seems truly pitiless and ruthless in its hunt for 'pirates' as lessig describes. The case of Jesse Jordan, who paid $13,000 for modifying an existing program to make it more palatable to human habits seems to make Lessig's point relatively clear. However, I was even more shocked to discover in the Harvard College Free Culture blog that the RIAA suggested to an MIT undergrad that she should drop out of school in order to pay her legal settlement. (Details can be found here )
More than anything, these examples reveal an interesting point about the RIAA and their extremely unscrupulous tactics.
March 21, 2007
Savage: God's Gift To Man
The Sublime melding of First Person Shooter and Real Time Strategy can be found here:
(as with all of God's other creations, its free)
March 09, 2007
Baudrillard
I happen to agree with Virilio that "there is a nihilistic dimension in Baudrillard's writings." The fact that Baudrillard gives up on the social brings up Virilio's point that "reality is produced by a society's culture, it is not given." Interstinly enough, it reminded me of the movie The Matrix. (without delving into the questions of the 2 sequels, whose strange mysteries could be debated ad nauseum)
In the The Matrix, Neo is to be admired for choosing "the real world", a planet where the sun has been blackened out, where there is nothing living, in essence a very unpleasant place. In the "the matrix" or the "fake" word, one encounters a seemingly typical human metropolis, one that resembles the society of our own. What the Matrix and Baudrillard seem to suggest is that somehow, the "fake" world is inferior to the "real." However, if one is to assume that the fake world created by the machines is operating as closely to man's "social" from before, why would anyone want to return to the cesspool of the "real" world?
February 26, 2007
A Second or First Life?
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,71657-0.html
The death of the "patriarchal" author is one thing but user interactivity seems to have gone a little too far.