week 3: blogging task

image by shutterstock/Ribah

"But deep in your heart you know the guilt would drive you mad
And the shame would leave a permanent scar
'Cause you start out stealing songs and then you're robbing liquor stores

And sellin' crack and runnin' over school kids with you car!" 

— Weird Al" Yankovic, "Don't Download This Song”

One of my fondest memories in primary school was the two week break we would get after every term. These two weeks meant bonding time with my older sister and what better way to bond than through watching blockbuster movies.

Watching blockbuster movies meant watching the same Interpol notice or PSA at the beginning of every movie explaining why piracy is wrong. I never completely understood the seriousness of piracy and downloading.

I remember the first time I was introduced to downloading, I used a software called Limewire. Now it was not my intention to go against the law when I first downloaded my first song, but the message I was getting from my peers at the time and even to this day is that everyone is downloading and that getting caught or charged is close to never happening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euqB9KJUIqU

 You can find the beginning of the episode at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eP_i2ZBqYo

  

‘Sharing music files: tactics of a challenge to the industry’ describes how the sharing of music files has been the focus of a massive struggle between representatives of major record companies and artists in the music industry, on one side, and peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing services and their users, on the other (Martin et al. 2010).

 

It soon became legal to make digital copies for time shifting purposes. Digital files were easier to copy and distribute, which allowed the pirates an instantaneous, more influential ship to sail on: The S.S. P2P. However, the issue with P2P sharing is that a hosted network isn’t needed. All it requires is for a user to upload a file and make it available to others before millions suddenly have unauthorised access to it. Inevitably now thousands even millions are uploading the same file, couple that with protocols like BitTorrent, which provide the user to download small pieces of a file from multiple different users.

References:

"Weird Al” Yankovic  - Don't Download This Song 2009, YouTube, retrieved 15 August 2013, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM8PT1eAvY>.

 

Lime Company 2011, 'Limewire', retrieved 30 August 2013, <http://www.limewire.com/>

 

Martin, B, Moore, C and Salter, C. 2010, ‘Sharing music files: tactics of a challenge to the industry’, First Monday, vol. 15, no. 12, retrieved 5 August 2013, <http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2986/2680>

Ribah, ‘shutterstock’, retrieved 28 August 2013, <http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-112856104/stock-photo-illustration-of-word-tags-representing-concept-of-copyright-infringement.html?src=kSGEdKt_LIBC5PxCoreALQ-1-42>

TechTarget 1999, ‘timeshifting’, retrieved 29 August 2013, <http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/timeshifting>

 

The Proud Family - EZ Jackster Part 1.mp4 2011, YouTube, retrieved 15 August 2013, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eP_i2ZBqYo>

 

The Proud Family - EZ Jackster Part 2. 2011, YouTube, retrieved 15 August 2013, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euqB9KJUIqU>

week 2: blogging task

Image by Miriam Luehrs http://discoursebylalilu.wordpress.com/

The way the human world is imagined of now and in the past, as well as suggesting possible ways and strategies for thinking about it are formed in the term ‘postmodernism’. Postmodernism in itself cannot be completely understood without some sense of modernism. 

 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ehh1b6kNWA

As a way of thinking about the world, postmodernism grounds itself against the credulous praise of science as the ultimate analytical agenda, and ‘grand-narratives’ which seek to define and prophesy human futures through choice to a limited set of ideas. An example would be to argue for why the West possessed the superior form of civilisation is that modernisation theory contained the grand narrative of ‘progress’. As well as to argue for why the rest of the world must follow the Western model of development. Postmodernist thought suggests that these ways of thinking provided an explanation for different forms of oppression, including those linked to colonialism and gender hierarchy.

The critique of what is referred to as the philosophy of the European Enlightenment, from where the modernists drew much of their inspiration, was meant to suggest a more critical and less celebratory attitude towards science, the nation-state, and the idea of progress itself. An example of this is that many pointed to the hypocrisy at the heart of the modernist project: at the same time that Europe was ‘achieving’ modernity and material welfare for itself, and propagating ideas ‘equality’, it was also engaged in the task of exploiting large sections of the world’s population through colonial practices. Where, critics of modernity asked, then, lay the ‘rationality’ and ‘clarity’ of the modern age?
Postmodernist theorists argue that the unquestioning belief in the tenets of modernity led to such ideas as ‘the civilising mission’ that justified colonialism; the marginalisation of ways of thinking which may have been more beneficial for a larger proportion of humanity but which were denounced as ‘un-scientific’ (such as ‘traditional’ medical systems); and an uncritical attitude towards the nation-state as the ideal community of existence. The theorists of post-modernity (such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson) see themselves as acting politically, rather than subscribing to the belief that they are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. They regard their work as situated in a universe of human interaction and thought which is always politically constituted.



Referencs:

Luehrs, M, 'Postmodernism', retrieved 28 August 2013, <http://discoursebylalilu.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/postmodernism-miriam13.jpg>

MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism, retrieved 28 August 2013, <http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/g/r.htm>

Robertson, R 1993, ‘Mapping the global condition: globalization as the central concept’, in M Featherstone (ed.), Global culture. nationalism, globalization and modernity, Sage, London.

Somerset, J 2011, 'What is Modernism/Postmodernism?', retrieved 28 August 2013, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ehh1b6kNWA>

 

week 1: blogging task

'SCAPES

image by chalo84 http://www.flickr.com/photos/chalo84/

In this week's reading we focus on Rantanen's (2005) proposal of an ethnographic investigation of globalisation using the methodology of global mediagraphy. His approach seeks to analyse how the lives of individuals in different locations have changed over some 100 years from 1890 to 2003.

Much influenced by Appadurai’s (1990) theory of scapes in the formation of globalisation, Rantanen develops part of global mediagraphy through Appadurai’s (1998: 33-6) display of what globalisation consists of the junctures and disjunctures of five scapes: ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape, and ideoscape.

The suffix -scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterise international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms, with the common suffix -scape, also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements (whether religious, political, or economic) and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighbourhoods and families. Indeed, the individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes, for these landscapes are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part from their own sense of what these landscapes can offer (Rantanen 2005:13).

Pivotal to the idea of these scapes involve the evolution of meanings, identity, community and cultures that have been influenced by the effects of globalisation. This means that they are no longer considered to be products of singular contained places, processes or phenomena, but generated and experienced “translocally” (Rockefeller, 560).

Rantanen (2005) suggests that global mediagraphy will incorporate individuals and their media use in a structured way into a phenomenon mediated globalisation, to analyse the individual life histories of 4 generations of families in different locations that previously conceptualised primarily either nationally or individually. He employs a range of materials, including oral histories, written accounts (autobiographical diaries or letters), behaviour observation and photographs, and methods including historical research and interviews, reflexive ethnography and comparative reflection to produce a global ethnography of the scapes across time and space

References:

Appadurai, A 1990, 'Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy', Public Culture, vol. 2, pp. 1-24.

Iza, G 2007, ‘Gonzalo iza’ retrieved 6 August 2013, <http://www.flickr.com/photos/chalo84/>

Rantanen, T 2005, 'Theorizing media globalization', The media and globalization, Sage, London.

Rockefeller, S 2001, "Flow", Current Anthropology, vol 52, no. 4, pp. 557-578.