I’m not that far behind with blogging, am I?

…. Oh…. OH….

Turns out I am, and that it’s time to play a few weeks of catch-up here. Starting with week 9 – which covered the topics of Copyright and Audiences.

I’ve never really enjoyed legal studies – having taken units in high school and a compulsory Commerce Law unit as part of my business degree. So I have to say that I found this part of the lecture very dry – despite it being an obvious necessity given our status as media creators.

The issue is – law is often about interpretation – not a hard line fact. Which makes it tricky to often ask questions of the laws, including those discussed in class. For example – under the right of attribution/false attribution; what kind of attribution is needed? Say I create a piece of music under a pen-name/pseudonym – just for personal reasons. Is my pseudonym correct attribution? Or should my real name be used? If my real name, should it be attributed as “Andrew McGlade”? Or does “A. McGlade” suffice under law? And if the latter does indeed suffice, what claim does my cousin Aaron – who is also an A. McGlade – have to the work?

To me, there just seems to be a lot of grey areas in law (obviously this is where lawyers make their money!). I question, with the length of a lot of these enactments, just how much ownership I have over my creations. What suffices “parody” fair dealing? What suffices “criticism”? It’s not as clear as one might hope.

 

 

What was clearer was the section of the lectorial on audiences – something I have taken a great deal of interest in ever since the days of year 12 media studying media influence and the variety of theories that have been developed, such as the Hypodermic Needle/Bullet Theory; the Uses and Gratification Model; and the Agenda-Setting Function Theory.

The reason I find myself taking a great deal of interest in these is perhaps the sociological aspect of the models and the theories developed as to how audiences react to media. I believe this is an incredibly crucial element of media studies – especially with the emerging use of social media by terrorists – who use sites such as Youtube to get their messages out to mass audiences. I think internet platforms such as Youtube have really made the ability to reach a mass audience FAR easier and I think this is definitely something I would be interested in reading further studies on by scholars (and perhaps, if I can, even conducting studies on this myself).