Media Ownership in 2001 Chart - this is one of those interesting things you find: the top 6 media companies and what they own. Interestingly two of the big ones Viacom and AOL/Time Warner are joining to provide a TV network of their own CW which will reduce the diversity of control of TV networks further.

And we still haven't heard if Supernatural is going to get picked up!

Books Online...

We all know that the last ten years has seen some major transformations to the face of the WWW. Changes in technology, particulary the advent of relatively-cheap accessible broadband and faster computers with greater storage capabilities, have had major impacts on what we can do online and the ways that we interact with each other using these technologies.

One of the interesting changes is a project called The Internet Archive (TIA) which houses a variety of projects including Project Gutenberg, The Million Book Project and the BBC Documentary archive. Even ten years ago the range of materials provided would still have been a pipe dream: Audio, Moving Images and Text all form key areas for the collections. We used to discuss being able to access a variety of media, and the idea of libraries with their books online was a distant vision in the future: there wasn't public support and the internet was still a world for the weird and geeky. Now libraries are recieving funding to purchase access to electronic material and to support projects such as TIA in scanning their own resources.

The TIA is part of the Open Content Allliance - it is providing free information and as such is providing an alternative to projects such as Google's Book Search. It has support from companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft. Like Google's project, which scans books and provides pages online, it has to deal with copyright and currently removes content that is protected. Fortunately there is still a lot of works that are available out of copyright protection.

The Open Library project has developed scanning technology which allows pages of books to be scanned at 10c/page with 500 pages/hour and thousands of books have been scanned already. With this new technology open source software (DJVu) has been developed which makes reading these scanned books easier.

An example of what they have done can be found here: Alice in Wonderland There is a pdf and links to the DJVu formats.

I find lurking a really interesting phenomenon on the web - I definitely do it and I think it is an essential part of web life. I'm not sure yet where I'm going with my thoughts on lurking but I came across this post on Teasel/fictualities lj where she goes into her philosophy of lurking.

Blog Article: The Fanfic Community Eats One of Its Own and Spits Out The Bones

Blog Article: The Fanfic Community Eats One of Its Own and Spits Out The Bones - John Scalzi

Fanfiction has always been an issue of questionable legality and one of it's cries to the legal vultures is that it's not for profit but for fun. I've discussed Fanfic and disclaimers and legality here.

In the recent weeks a fanfic writer, cousinjean, has asked for donations to support themselves while they work on writing some novels, including fanfic novels. Now on one hand I kind of think that's pretty ballsy and it recognises a serious issue about the ability to put food on the table while doing things for other people. On the other hand I understand the fear that this will draw attention to the fic that we all write.

What John Scalzi draws attention to is the way that the fan reaction has been so vitrolic. Over 500 comments left on her journal, the overwhelming majority negative. It's more a case of social control than a response to her actual request.

This isn't the first incident I've seen where fan response to money in relation to work can become quite heated and this debate will resurge again and again.

The Gorillaz

The Gorillaz are a 'virtual' band created as the brain child of Damon Albarn, lead singer of Blur, and Jamie Hewlett, ex-2000AD Artist and creator of Hewligan's Haircut and Tank Girl. Their first album, self-titled, was released in 2000 and sold over 6 million copies and was released in three (remixed) versions. The band is 2D, Murdoc Niccals, Russel Hobbs, and Noodle.

They've recently released a new album, 'Demon Days', and in Wired (Issue 13.07) there's an interview by Neil Gaiman with Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, here.

They touch a little on one of the ideas that makes this band kind of interesting:

Not that it matters - Gorillaz is a virtual band. It doesn't quite exist. Its four members (2D, Murdoc Niccals, Russel Hobbs, and Noodle), designed and drawn by Hewlett, are fictional. The group inhabits Kong Studios, high on a mountain in Essex, northeast of London. There are no mountains in Essex. The band exists enough to make music, to produce videos, to remix, and to be remixed.

It's a virtual band - there are no actual 'real' members, like the Idoru in William Gibson's novel, they exist only in the virtual. The Gorillaz website includes interviews, commentary, pictures and develops the identities of the band and by selling music, producing music, 'touring' in the 'real world' they are transgressing the divide between the virtual and the real. And yet the interview is with Albarn and Hewlett reflecting the need for human intervention in the virtual.

Gorillaz also ties into some of the stuff about creative commons, where permission is given to reuse material for remixing. Dj Danger Mouse, who did the Grey album (remixing the Beatles white album with Jay-Z's black album), is also involved with the new album showing that there is an ethos to the creation of Gorillaz that exists beyond just making music. While not directly challenging the status quo (they sell through napster and itunes on their website, are used for an advertisments by itunes and are signed to a commercial label) there is still a transgression in their work through their sampling and intent to be remixed, their virtuality and their support of other entries into the genre (Search for a Star - needs flash).

Article: Chav: The emergence of a new identity

Chav': The emergence of a new Identity by James K. Walker

Chav is a UK based interpretation of what we'd call bogans/bevans/westies. Walker refers to two definitions for Chavs: 'at its most derogatory chav is believed to stand for 'Council Housed And Violent' and is synonymous with ignorance, poverty, violence' and 'at the other end of the spectrum the chav are mocked for their supposed lack of aesthetic and cultural sensibilities through caricatures. By this definition they are the Can't HAVe's.'

He describes the emerging subculture as being mediated - it's not an identity that is being formed by the Chav's themselves, which isn't to say that it's not an identity claimed by the participants. He talks about the way that the media, and various communities on the web, in the UK has taken to using the Chav as a label to define a particular style and lifestyle of some UK suburban/council housed communities. The media and internet has led the development of this subculture.

The article expands into an analysis of the emergence of this social identity and it's political place in the current UK climate of muliculturalism which is quite interesting as well.

One of the things I find fascinating is that this identity/term has come out of nowhere - when we were living in the UK, three years ago, it wasn't being bandied around and I worked with people who would have fit into the type. It's also really location based, like our westies/bogans and the american hillbillies - all aspects of poor western usually white subcultures (even where they appropriate 'black' subcultural property eg hip hop) but they're very different because of the areas they live in. Would be a fascinating subject to examine.

And to give a little more understanding of what a Chav, I'll link to The Streets (who I love - they did 'fit but you know it' and 'don't mug yourself'). The video for 'fit but you know it' is very suburban UK and is a great flash into the lifestyle. Posh and Becks are often cited as uber!celebrity Chav's and I'd have to say that Rose, Jackie and Mickey in the latest series of Doctor Who are pretty Chav. When you're watching where they live it's all in council housing estates on the outskirts of London.

Links:
ChavScum - a site where people can nominate other people as chav's
The Streets - band site with videos and samples etc.

Article: Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Article: Clay Shirky - Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

This article has a really good summary of ontology and the differences between different categorisation systems and the impacts that the web has on these. Traditional systems are hierarchical because they depend on being able to place an object into a place and category. In web based systems we lose the sense of a physical object - each 'item' or url, for example, doesn't have a physical location and so it can be linked many times from many different locations. There's a great set of diagrams expanding on this here.

It also highlights some of the biases inherent in ontological categorisation. It talks about the way Yahoo's cataloguing sets up a bias towards a commercial venture and a specific hierarchy by allowing any link to have only three entries and by specifying where these entries are. It goes on to compare this to a search system, like on Google, where the user gets to decide what links and what each page means.

Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user's needs and the user's view of the world. If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.

The search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure.

Newer systems such as tags and the way that LJ defines it's interests act in a different way to categorisation. Because the users get to define what the meaning of a link is, and each user can define it in a different way, it no longer functions in a hierarchical way. Instead the meaning of the link is partially dependant on the way, and who, of where you encounter it - whether you trust the source or have a relationship or whether you have a similar understanding of what their system means. The following explains the difference quite well.

I learned this from Brad Fitzgerald's design for LiveJournal, which allows user to list their own interests. LiveJournal makes absolutely no attempt to enforce solidarity or a thesaurus or a minimal set of terms, no check-box, no drop-box, just free-text typing. Some people say they're interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in film. Some people say they're interested in cinema.

The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches.

The new service del.icio.us, a 'social bookmarking site' is also examined as an example of this concept where the links is coded and explained by other people who share a similar meaning and possible relationship with you.

It's a fascinating article on the shape of the web and it's well written and pretty easy to follow. I think there's something in this that ties into some of the concepts of multiplicity (more on this later) and the way that each person's view/shape/encounter with the web is a very different experience. Hierarchical systems don't quite work because we don't have a central meaning for our experience or our desire and participation on the web. Each of us wants and is something different.

Fan Production - Smile Time: The Comic

Smile Time: The Comic - astridv

This is a watercolour comic that relates to a specific episode of Angel, Season 7.14 Smiletime, where Angel gets turned into a sesame street like puppet and has to fight a children's tv show for the souls of its viewers. The episode is one of the highlights of a brilliant season.

The comic itself captures essence of the humour inherent in Angel and the dynamic between Spike and Angel, the comic's protagonists. It's also used the comic medium effectively using standard comic panelling techniques to tell a story.

It's interesting because it is an example of fan production and intertextuality. It brings the elements of the Angel verse and transforms them into a different medium, purely for fan entertainment.

And it's a lot of fun!

“Self-esteem is for everybody
Self-esteem is for everyone
You can dream and be anybody, but
Self-esteem is how you get it done.”

Article: How Battlestar Galactica killed Broadcast TV - Mark Pesce

How Battlestar Galactica killed Broadcast TV - Mark Pesce

"Audiences are technically savvy these days; they can and will find a way to get any television programming they desire. They don't want to pay for it, they don't want it artificially crippled with any digital rights management technologies - they just want to watch it. Now."

This article describes the impact of downloading television from the internet and expands some ideas for production houses and advertisers to develop new ways of working together.

I download most of my TV from bit torrent (and this article has a really good description of how this works) and I haven't watched network television in over two years, I see cable in erratic flashes as I walk from the kitchen or bathroom to Gaius, my computer. I like it better because it gives me a lot more control over the way and the when of watching shows. I'm up to episode 10 of Dr Who, while the rest of Australia is at 2 and I saw all of Battlestar Galactica before Australia had even started showing it. And I get to watch them when my SO and I have the time to sit down together and watch something.

Australia, according to this article, is the largest leecher of TV in the world. I'm not surprised. We're a pretty technically savvy nation and we *never* get the tv the rest of the world does, or rather it can take years to come out here. The US can be seasons ahead of us instead of just weeks and there are a whole handful of cult shows that never get shown on free-to-air.

I don't like ads, but it's not totally a moral issue. The ads that usually end up on my screen are so irrelevant to my lifestyle and they often have creepy gender issues (Meadow Lea's mommy for example). I love ads about new films, computer games and music but we get cars and cleaning products. But ads pay the networks so that they will pay the producers of television and we put up with them for our television This article suggests a way that advertisers could place a 'bug', a little floating image, on the show that gets downloaded, and I've got to agree that it's a pretty nifty solution. I don't notice the little floating 'skyone' or 'saturn' or 'fox' logo and as long as the ad isn't too invasive it shouldn't be a problem.

I've also seen discussion about user pays downloading with subscriptions, for example this random thread on Slashdot. It's an interesting debate which will have implications as people choose to consume their television in different ways.

This debate also ties into some of the issues that were raised in the Serenity write up: the face of television is changing and the relationship between the audience and the producers is dramatically changing. We want it now, we want smart and engaging (24, West Wing, BSG, Firefly, House MD, even Lost) and we don't want to be passively fed our media. And hopefully, less of the really cool shows will get cancelled.

This article is pretty good at raising a lot of the issues that relate to how television will look in the future. Me, I'm happy to be along for the ride!

thoughts on blogging part 2

A blog is an online space where entries are created and stored in a database making each entry accessible and linkable. The entries are easy to add and to edit and usually come with some sort of system where people can comment leading to feedback and continuing conversations about topics.

One of the main differences for me between blogs and paper journals are that blogs exist in a relationship, to other blogs, the internet, and to their audience. They are part of the hybrid between technology and our culture. In a paper journal writers reflect on their experience often with the intent of reading it later or passing it on a personal level to other people. There is still an awareness of audience in the filtering of material that is included when writing but paper journals have a sense of permanency and factuality. When somebody writes on paper, privately, it means that the audience can't refute, or dialogue with it directly.

Online blogs add an immediacy and directness to the interaction with the audience and the writer becomes influenced by the way that other people do, or don't, react to their musings. The engagement in a blog is usually dialogical and it takes a conscious act to block other people's interaction with blog writings.

When people write about their interests or their daily lives they are bringing their real experience into the webspace to share with their readers, both regular and passerbys. The blogs exist within the day to day life of the writers.

Blogs exist in relationship. They link to other blogs, to readers, to websites that are regularly accessed, and to new and interesting things. The new material added is influenced by the reactions of other people and the material discovered around the web. Relationships develop between the writer and the audience.

Blogs are not simply documents on the web, they are part of the technoculture of the virtual community. While they are not the only way that people interact with each other using these technologies, they form a major tool for developing relationships and act as an interface for display within the virtual space. They are an extension of the writer in the sense that they provide a presence for performance of self. The blog acts as a space where people can express themselves and gain recognition for their identity. Academic blogs reflect on articles or issues that are being discussed in their field, fandom blogs reflect on the canon, fanfiction, fanart, what other people think and about the nature of fandom and personal blogs reflect on the day-to-day life of the writer. The aspects of identity that the individual is seeking recognition for is performed through the discourse of the blog.

Both blogs and paper journals are tools for exploring identity although blogs exist in relationship and are a tool for performing and receiving recognition of identity. Paper journals, on the other hand, are a personal private tool for exploring self.

thoughts on blogging part 1

I crashed out this afternoon as I'm still recovering from the flu and my SO snuck onto Gaius, my computer because his machine has just been taken in for repairs (oh teh horr-0R). When I got back I found this on my rough draft of our final writeup:

Reflections on blogging and the difference between web and paper journals.

Immediacy both of updating and availability
No Editor
Personal accountability via site and email
The general perception that it is a personal view point rather than a purely factual medium (like tv or newspapers which are blindly trusted)
Elitist nature in than they must be popularised by their connection to other journals which the common laymen does not seem to have the tools to monitor

The majority of people read papers only when they aren’t doing anything else(as time fillers) eg on bus, train, on their lunch or the toilet. They buy them almost as an unconscious act where as people have to specifically look up a number of different Journals (as 1 person can not write the same amount of articles per day as a crew of people) nor can 1 man as a general rule put such a variety of info in them.
Newspapers are lazy

What amuses me is that my SO is neither a blogger (I'm finally convincing him to get an LJ so he can stay in the loop with his friends, and spy on me, with the promise of a Constantine layout) nor does he read them and yet he actually raised a couple of points that I hadn't considered and managed to cover a lot of stuff that has come up in class and things. I am *so* proud of him!

jrock mp3 rotations

One of the ways that I get my music is through mp3 rotations. These are sites that list usually between 3-8 songs in a regular rotation that someone puts up for downloading. Most of these sites are geared towards people interested in Jrock, Jpop, Kpop, Cpop and Anime music (J for Japanese, K for Korean and C for Chinese). It's a distinct niche on the web that has quite distinct codes and conventions that relate directly to the requirements of the users.

Downloading and/or uploading copyrighted music is pretty much a minefield as we all know, but the music that you can find on mp3 rotations falls into a slightly grey area. One of the arguments against copyright is the access to the original source material. It's legal, for example, to own a pirated copy of a game that is no longer in print and that you can't purchase through any 'reasonable' means. This music often falls under these categories because it's a relatively obscure market that you can't purchase except through a convoluted process of importation.

The other area of grey is that different cultures enact the copyright legislation, which in the first instance may not be the same as ours, in different ways. In Japan, where most of the music that I'm talking about comes from, it's an acceptable practice for fanartists and writers to produce doujinshi, fan manga comics based on existing copyrighted material. In fact one of the best known 'circles' producing manga that gets translated into the west is Clamp who came from a doujinshi circle.

The music that you'll primarily find on mp3 rotations is obscure, hard to find and sometimes out of print material. It's also very often from countries where it would be hard for us in the west to actually find out what the music sounds like anyway.

As I said earlier these conditions really affect the way that the mp3 rotation culture sits in the web. It's a little under the radar, it's hard to find out about and it's quite particular as to the kinds of music styles that use this style of dissemination. Out of the first 50 or so entries on google for mp3 rotations only one of these sites wasn't dedicated to asian or anime music (google accessed 31/5/5; search term: "mp3 rotation"). There are similar niches of downloading music for obscure western music (like new wave or early punk that's out of print) but it doesn't seem to have the distinctive style that I'm examining here within the Asian mp3 rotation community.

The two major constraints on mp3 rotations are the legals of copyright and the space constraints of hosting files which can often have high downloads and therefore bandwidth costs.

Most of the mp3 rotation sites have a set of rules, that are pretty standard, which request as fremito succinctly put it:

* download one at a time.
* do not direct link any files.
* songs are for sampling purposes only.

They will usually ask that you delete the files within 24 - 72 hours and support the artists by buying from places like Yes!Asia, Amazon or cdJapan. Some sites also ask you to comment to let them know what you liked and some will let you make requests for tracks that they have.

There are three main strategies to deal with the bandwidth problem. One is direct hosting and those sites will be the ones where its particularly good form to download only one song at a time. Another is through sites like yousendit where you can upload a file up to 1 gig and it will store it for a certain amount of time, usually a week, or amount of downloads. Megaupload is a newer service which allows files of up to 500 meg to be stored until it hasn't been accessed for over 30 days. The third way I've found is the creative use of webmail such as gmail or yahoo where over a gig is given for storage of email. The site will email to itself the file and then leave the password on the rotation site, usually in the rules (for example shut up, which interestingly is run from an lj blog).

While there hasn't been a major crackdown on mp3 rotation sites they can have a short shelf life as they are relatively high maintenance, with a commitment to regular updates, and often they have little feedback from the 'leechers' (a term adopted from the bit torrent community to describe people who download indiscriminately). There are however quite a few sites that have run for quite a while and regularly update with new music.

One of the other interesting things about the mp3 rotation community is the way that the sites themselves are designed. The layouts are integral to the experience with large pictures of J-rock artists and anime characters form the centre of most site's design. There are usually only 3 or 4 pages coming from the central page (rules, rotation/music, home, links) and frames are prevalent to maintain the integrity of the layout. These can be changed with each rotation or at random periods due to the interest of the site maintainer. And some of them are pretty spectacular.

The community itself doesn't have a central space but is recognisable through it's codes and common purpose. Linkages are made through buttons that link to other sites offering similar music. Through the use of similar layout styles, with similar purpose, genre and constraints, mp3 rotations have a distinct place within the internet.

Some hints and links:
Personally I really like the visual kei stylings (which is kinda like goth mixed with metal mixed with industrial mixed with rock mixed with touches of pop - ok you have to hear it) of bands like Dir En Grey, Malice Mizer, Kagrra, Penicillin and Buck Tick. Two of the most popular Jrock/pop artists are Gackt and L'arc en ciel (Laruku) and they are pretty accessible and a lot of fun to listen to. If you search for any of these bands and "mp3 rotation" in google you'll quickly find some sites.
Another great source is the play it loud webring - it actually links to a lot more than Jrock sites so is a good place to look for all kinds of music.

And if you just want to look here's some links to mp3 rotations I like or think are typical or just interesting to look at (check out the past layouts of daybreak - they rock):


BTW I am not suggesting that this music should be downloaded, particularly not from QUT campus due to the questionability of copyright - these sites are presented as an example of a particular virtual community.

Report: McShep Mailing List

The McShep Mailing List

The subject matter of the McShep Mailing List is the relationship between Rodney McKay and John Sheppard in the Stargate:Atlantis television series, a spin-off in the Stargate franchise. This list is focussed on writing stories about two characters and their perceived homoerotic relationship in a relatively new television series at the edge of fandom. It’s a subset of a subset of a subset (Fandom – Fanfic – Slash – Stargate:Atlantis). This distinctly flavours the nature of the interactions in the mailing list.

It’s very friendly and welcoming with lots of varied interactions. Although there are over 700 members, there are two or three regular posters who guide the conversation in the group with about fifteen or so other posters during my two week observation period. A variety of material is posted to the list including fics (stories), challenges (where people give a story idea for other people to write), random discussion topics and questions about canon (or what actually happened on the television show). There weren’t any fic searches (or requests to find a particular story which someone wants to re-read) at this stage of development of its fandom is pretty reasonable.

This list is successful because of its welcoming nature. People participate in the random discussions and give feedback on the stories as they are sent. It sticks to non-controversial topics and its obscurity and specificity helps to focus on the common interest of the members.

Report: Browncoats Virtual Community

Browncoats report

http://browncoats.serenitymovie.com/serenity/

Later this year, September in the USA, the film 'Serenity' will be released. It's a science fiction film set in the same universe as the short-lived television series 'Firefly', part of the Joss Whedon franchise. The television series was run over the end of 2003 - 2004 and when it was cancelled there was a lot of fan disappointment. Joss Whedon was able to negotiate and produce the film 'Serenity', named after the ship in the Firefly series, to much fannish anticipation.

The Browncoats site is an official virtual community designed to promote and maintain the hype for the upcoming film release. Once joined the community rewards participation in promotion and provides upcoming news on the status of the film. Members can participate in, and are rewarded for, both online and offline activities. Points are earned for participation in promotional activities and these can go to earn actual promotional material unavailable anywhere else. The online activities include participating in forums, chats, watching promotional material and fan-production through making banners and icons to be distributed outside of the community. Offline, participants are rewarded for going to conventions or showings and providing pictures of themselves at the showing or with cast members.

The site promotes fan participation in a marketing venture through peer to peer marketing. The 35,000 or so members are encouraged to be fans: to talk about, consume and participate in the upcoming movie developing a loyalty and sense of ownership of the film within the fan community. At the same time its goal is explicitly commercial. It wants to make sure that people will go to see a commercially produced film.

This community is an interesting balance between a commercial space and a fan or participant-based space. The relationship that Joss Whedon has with his fans, and the myth that surrounds his geekdom, interacts with the history of the cancellation of the television series and the 'struggle' to produce more material in the 'Firefly' universe. It provides fans with a sense of genuineness on the part of the promotional tool, the Browncoats community. There is a feeling that the site provides a genuine opportunity to help promote and support something which has given much pleasure to the fan, and act as a formalised, feasible and productive act of resistance to the producers and networks who cancelled the original series.

Lecture: Urban Communitys vs Network Villages

I found this lecture really interesting but a little hard to commentate on. Mostly because I agree and am really fascinated with the concepts.

Obake and I were discussing this and a couple of issues came up. One was the question of whether we've ever lived in 'hobbiton' villages (small rural communities where everyone knows everyone and everyone's intimately involved in each others lives). I think on one hand it's a myth developed and promoted by nineteenth century writers like Thomas Hardy and George Elliot, and then by the Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the twentieth century. An idealised place that the industrial revolution ripped from the bosom of mankind. A lot of the modern day reinactors and the community movements of the sixties subscribe to this idea of returning to an idealised pre-industrial village lifestyle. Fortunately we've also got the post-modernist historians arguing that it wasn't quite like that. Yes the villages were small and dependant on each other, but they were also dependant on the whims of the lords or gentry. And these villages tended to be very insular and demanding of particular behaviours. See The Burning Times. This was mentioned during our lecture in relation to Wellman's discussions about Glocalisation.

The network society, however is really interesting in its own right. Particularly in relationship to the way that technology allows us to become 'technosocial' beings. We use the technology to facilitate our relationships - there's a lot of scholarship on this but for the point of this discussion I'll just say that I agree and go on from there.

So what I left the lecture thinking about was two things: one is how my life actually fits in with the network model and two how can I use the technology to enhance these networks. My eyes lit up at the idea of being able to use bluetooth networks to message my friends as we wander through town. I'm a bit of a social director for our crew, and it's definitely an environment where we try (and from the feedback) to be inclusive - if you can make it to something, fantastic, if you can't, maybe we'll see you next time. We've got an event coming up for which I'll enable the greater network (beyond the crew that usually come to everything) and it'll all be done via messanger, lj and email. We have two people we actually have to ring because the sad people don't have everyday internet. We want community - we want a social environment and a sense of belonging, but we're also all very independent people with lives that exist outside of the network as well as in it. A network village works so much better for us than an insular localised village. But then I'm probably a product of my generation (or the next).

And as an aside, one of the things that I'm kind of thinking about for my briz.au blog is about 'the Brisbane Effect' - the two degrees of separation and I think that fits very well into this idea of networks - that Brisbane exists in a kind of network state where we're all connected socially through a network. Hmmm. My parents raised me with the motto 'network, network, network' and it's catching up to us 25 years later *grin*.

I really want to do some more work on these concepts and how they fit both into a net-enhanced lifestyle and into our lives (I refuse to use 'real life' as if there's a separation between my life 'on the net' and off it - there isn't). But not now, am sick with flu and waiting for some of my 'net-enabled' friends to come round to watch Bollywood flicks as a going away for our friend who's blogging her journey to Europe for 10 weeks for us on lj.

Notes on Virtual Comm and Mailing List Assignment

As you can probably see from most of the postings I'm trying to keep a focus on fandom because I feel it's a topic that's really been missing from out classes as a major aspect of virtual communities.

The Mailing List and Community I have chosen are both fan based.

The Mailing List
I decided on the McShepSlash MailingList at yahoo for a couple of reasons. One is that it's a fic based mailing list where a lot of people post their stories for other people to read. Another is that it's slash: homoerotic stories written about characters where you interpret the subtext to imply a relationship which may or may not be there in the canon (the story as given/original source material). McShep is the ship (or relationship) between Rodney McKay and John Sheppard in Stargate Atlantis. And another is that McKay is the main reason I watch the show so it's a good enough reason to join the mailing list. If you'd like to see what a McShep fic is like here is a rec for one of my favourite series of stories which is PG/M so no naughty unless you want to read it *grin*. Another good site for SGA fic is the wraithbait archive.

The Community
This was a bit harder to decide because I was tempted by Suicide Girls, which is a pseudo-porn site focussing on goth/punk grrls, or by one of the large fic archives like fanfiction.net (ff.net - a multifandom fic archive) or fictionalley.org (harry potter fic archive) or possibly Uniquely Pleasurable (a community dedicated to promoting original slash). Neopets or Habbo hotel were other possibilities. But in the end I decided to go for something which is near and dear to my heart: Browncoats: Official Serenity Fan Site.



Serenity: The Official Movie Website

Serenity is the new Joss Whedon film based on the tv series Firefly which was cancelled mid season due to bad programming schedule by fox executives - there is a lot of bitterness about the cancellation in the fandom and a lot of excitement about the film.

It is a fantastic SF-westernesque show with a great cast (including Nathan Fillion (Caleb in S7 Btvs), Alan Tudyk (I Robot, Dodgeball, A Knight's Tale), Gina Torres (Cleopatra 2525, Jasmine in S4 Angel), Adam Baldwin (Hamilton in S5 Angel)), great plotting and is just one of the best pieces of SF to come out since Babylon 5. You can buy it in Borders and at all good retailers worldwide (if they don't have it they're bad!).

The Community itself is pretty interesting because it's pretty explicitly a marketing enterprise for a film that came from a show that *supposedly* didn't get the ratings (it deserved). There are over 33000 members. You can earn points for promoting the movie in a Peer2Peer advertising exercise. If you get enough points you can get free stuff and status and things. You can also get points for making banners and lj/aim icons - an example of fan production using copyrighted materials (images of the cast/sets/branding) to promote the film in a sanctioned way.

I will analyse this site more in depth and give updates on some of my observations as I participate in different parts of the community.

Walled Gardens in Mailing Lists

I've been thinking about this issue of Mailing Lists and ownership of the content that's published.

In most of the Mailing Lists that I'm on there is a culture that what the List!Mom says goes. This is considered fair because they are the ones putting the work into maintaining it and are the people who came up with the idea. They usually have a cohort of Moderators who people defer to in the second instance.

Now I've got a situation that I want to discuss, in-Fandom but not here *pokes tongue at readers*, about some culture issues that have developed within one of the emerging fandom's I'm involved in. One of my pieces of evidence comes from a Mailing List (ML) entry and the other an entry on an LJ. (Both different people and I have no intention of naming names because it really isn't relevant to the discussion.)

For the LJ, I'd either link to the post and take the link down if asked, or I'd ask because it's pretty clear that the poster owns the content.

On a ML though does the poster own the content? Do you ask them for permission? Do you cut and paste an entry? How do you reference ML posts? When can you use the post for reference without permission? Is a ML post public or is it part of a walled garden where the moderator/list-mom gets to say what goes? What about the fact that on a ML you don't sign EULA's (with their questionable legality), particularly not with the list owners directly and all behaviour on group relies on moderation/socially accepted behaviour?

And the other side of this is that I'm not actually trying to use this for an academic example (where I'd probably feel a lot more comfortable just using and sourcing) but for a meta-ing and possibly to raise the issues of cultural norms.

Lecture: Digital Divide

Today we had our lecture on the Digital Divide with Tanya Notley who's working on the Youth Internet Radio Network project at QUT. The project itself is quite interesting: providing access for 'young people' to a space where they can express themselves culturally on the web.

The Digital Divide is quite a complex topic starting from who has physical access and who doesn't through to the kinds of access and the ability to actually utilise the access effectively and even whether people have the desire for access.

In this post I've commentated a bit on the meaning of the divide in terms of the poorer parts of the world. The lecture actually brought up some more interesting issues in terms of the use of the access that people have. The point I found most interesting was the idea of access relating not just to the technological access but also to access to participation in democracy and culture building. The project itself is an example of building culture through giving people the tools to participate.

This ties in again to the issues of access to common knowledge discussed in last weeks lecture. The project makes a point of allowing the users to decide how much permission they will give to other internet users to make use of their cultural production. This is based on the idea of the Creative Commons license where people choose to allow their material to be allowed into the public domain (or at least under what circumstances use is allowed).

There's a whole pile of ethical considerations involved in this debate about access to the intellectual commons and the site linked to should give you a further outline. For my part, I think access to the tools to become creative producers or to interact and participate in building culture is an important right that we should be able to rely on. I don't agree with the copyright laws that are tightening our access in a counter-productive manner. I think that Chris's explanation about the stagnation that could occur if the enclosure of the digital commons becomes too tight is quite valid and that the argument that privatising creativity so that people can make a living is just not played out in real life. Either mega!moguls get all the profit, or people choose to be creative for personal reasons, including self expression, that never gets paid for.

The Digital Divide is also interesting because for most users (read: American teenagers), particularly in the forums where its an expression and reaffirmation of Western culture, these issues never come up. Most of the Fandom forums never discuss the access issues and in fact people can be quite surprised when you mention that not everyone has seen all episodes of a television series that has finished showing in the USA.

Fandom and the way it is

In this entry I linked to an article about Fandom and what it means to be a fan by a girl into the Slayerverse.

In the article there is a quote:

Jim Ward, Lucasfilm's vice president for marketing, offered his company's take on fandom: "We've been very clear all along on where we draw the line," he said. "We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is."

and you know, I just don't get it. In a real nut shell I don't think we ever just celebrate a story the way it is. The King Arthur stories and their constant retelling (even the canon is split into to versions: The Chronicle Tradition (England) and The Romance Tradition (France)) is often cited as one of the early cases of fandom - people retelling the stories to make them more relevant to their lives and their local context.

When I watch Buffy or House MD or Battlestar Galactica or Smallville or when I read Teen Titans or Outsiders or Harry Potter or Lucifer or Preacher, I'm not just reading the story as given. I finish the story, I pimp it to my friends, I talk about it with the people I know who've seen it. We extrapolate what's going to happen next and we talk about how we would have done things, or what we like about the way the writers have written things. Our fandom is not passive, even before getting into the fan production of fic, pictures, fanvids and playing Sims 2 with Clark and Lex and Bruce and Dick and Tim.

As soon as we put down the media we are immediately reinventing the text. We don't even all remember it the same, and some of the conversations are about coming to common ground about what the story actually was.

So I find it hard to understand the idea that a fan for a creative piece does not participate in the production and reinterpretation of its meaning. We do this through the conversations we have about it, and the characters, even when we engage with the ungarnished Star Wars (which the production company has reinvented itself - do *not* ask me about the last scene of the latest remastering of Return of the Jedi). In the end, I don't even think that there is a "story the way it is" and I do think that fandom and producerly activities enhance our ability to participate in the forming of meaning for these stories.

Article: Consumers and Creators

Article: Alana Kumbier - Consumers and Creators

This article is a fantastic description of life as a 'fangurl' for Buffy. I laughed out loud at parts because I have done some of the things she talks about (begging a workmate while we were living in the UK to come and watch episodes of Season 6 with him; sitting around the lounge at 10:45 waiting for channel seven to finally get around to showing Babylon 5 (sometimes an hour and a half later) with every member of our share-house of 7, including my 9 year old brother).

But it's also good at illustrating the difference between a fans' definition of what it means to be a fan and what the producers (or at least the companies that own the material) define a fan to be.

Highlights from classmates Blogs V1.1

This is (hopefully) going to be a regular link list to the interesting commentary from other classmates in the unit. Enjoy - and go and comment on the stuff you agree, disagree, think about!

Obake, Virtuosity, talks about Sims 2 and the communities that build around it, here. Good commentary and links.

Virtualamanda writes about different kinds of blogs here. She links to some academic blogs and to a directory about academic blogs. She also asks whether 'we all live in a virtual culture?' here.

Dan, VirtucommBlog, asks whether blogging is taking off all of a sudden or if we're just noticing it now here and talks about a blog he's using to work on a project in another unit.

Cheryl in Manifested Musings talks about mp3 downloading in relation to this weeks lecture on 'Walled Gardens' here. Good commentary and interesting points.

Luke in studio316 writes about whether Sony provides the community or whether the members of the community make the community here. Interesting discussion.

Nascent has some interesting political points which show a different way of blogging.

Article: Welcome to the house of fun: Buffy fanfiction as a hall of mirrors

Article: Linda Rust - Welcome to the house of fun: Buffy fanfiction as a hall of mirrors
Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media, March, vol.2, 2003.

Interestingly, in relation to my comments in this entry, Joss Whedon is both well aware of the existence of fanfiction and more importantly Slash. There are definetly episodes in the later seasons which can be construed as fanservice to all of us slashers!

The article linked to here looks at the relationship between Joss, the team of writers at Buffy and the fans and how the world and series has been developed with the fans involved and in mind.

As the author says:

This sort of speculation has been given Joss Whedon's blessing, with the comment "I think that it's part of the attraction of the Buffyverse. It lends itself to polymorphously perverse subtext. It encourages it. I personally find romance in every relationship (with exceptions), I love all the characters, so I say BYO subtext!"

Also, it has some references at the end of the article that are pretty good and links to Henry Jenkins who is one of the BNA's (Big Name Academic) in the field of Fandom.

Article: Synergy and Smut: The Brand in Official and Unofficial Buffy The Vampire Slayer Communities of Interest

Stengel, Wendy A.F.G. - Synergy and Smut: The Brand in Official and Unofficial Buffy The Vampire Slayer Communities of Interest

This article looks at the way that two sites, (www.buffy.com, an official site that is now extinct, and http://www.planetx.com/buffy/, which now leads to a lj community with little activity), have used branding to develop identities. It looks at the way that behaviour on the communities affect the brand as percieved by users and goes on to describe why Fanfiction actually helps to promote a branding.

Branding is used by the owners of a series to help promote their interests, particularly their financial gain.

After discussing the two boards and the way that behaviour is reinforced through cultural norms, the article talks about fanfiction. The main argument can be summarised in the following:

Stories written by fans—fanfic—helps the fans feel connected to the characters and the brand in the same way that board discussions do. Fanfic allows participants to play with the characters and situations, and become part of the fantasy.

The idea is expanded in the following, which is basically an argument for why 'smut' fanfic should be allowed to exist on the internet:

Smut and porn, like romance novels and pulp detective fiction, is generally formulaic. Character names in one story could be replaced with names from another story, and scenes could be lifted wholesale; Janeway/Seven (from Star Trek: Voyager) is not very different from Buffy/Willow when the lights are off. The difference in Trek slash and Buffy smut lies solely in the characters and plots surrounding the sex.
...
If some Buffy fans are going to read smut anyway, the availability of Buffy smut can only enforce the brand. The brand holders can not produce these stories for public consumption; they should encourage—or at least, not hinder—the smut production by fans. There is no loss to the brand as long as the textual poaching takes place in an unofficial, yet still branded, environment.