Monthly Archives: May 2016

Media 1, Readings

Audiences

The “audience”, since it first became codified in the 18th century as a term for those who are consumers of an event of some sort, has been evolving along with the rest of thought around media/communication ever since. First it was extended to the mass consumption of media such as books in the 19th century, and then again expanded with the development of cinema and television in the 19th and 20th centuries.1

A mediated audience is one whose experience is restricted or directed — by, for example, the publisher of a widely-read newspaper. The publisher’s decisions about what to include in their newspaper, and what angle to take on particular issues, places them in a position of power as a kind of “gatekeeper” to the audience’s experience. Throughout history this has led to huge amounts of power being restricted to a very small number of (white, rich, old) men.

The development of the internet completely broke down this paradigm, as one-way broadcast media was quickly replaced with interactive, two-way communication. Now, instead of having to watch a news broadcast on television at 6:00pm, consumers can discover news direct from the source in real time. Instead of having to buy a DVD copy of a television show, consumers can stream it whenever they like. Publishers and broadcasters, who used to wield the majority of the power in their relationship with their audiences, lost much of this power to democratisation and the increased choice of unmediated experiences offered by the internet.

Today, audiences are just as likely to be creators as consumers. We have seized the means of production from monolithic overseers (through blogs, podcasts, web series, etc.) and have transitioned from passively consuming media to actively engaging with it through discussion, discourse and sharing.2 The fundamental distinction between creator and audience essentially no longer exists, and although there are remnants of the Old Way still present in society, they are actively losing power and relevance, not gaining it.

  1. Morley, D. (2005), ‘Audience’ in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Bennett, T, Grossberg, L. & Morris, M (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell, pp.8-10. ↩
  2. Rosen, J. (2006), ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink, June 27. ↩
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Media 1, Thoughts, Workshops

Don’t read the comments

In my personal opinion comments have a net negative effect on the quality of discourse on the internet. For every wonderfully considered, well written and pleasant comment, there are a thousand hissing piles of disgust and vitriol, from the racist and misogynist to the plain incorrect. I genuinely don’t believe that the potential for constructive, positive comments justifies enabling the internet’s worst tendencies by allowing people to place their comments on the same page as an article.

For publishers to place peoples’ comments at the bottom of an article is to say “your opinion is as valid/worthy as the author’s”, which is now and has always been wrong. Everyone is entitled to hold an opinion, sure, but they’re not necessarily entitled to have their opinion legitimised. Some opinions deserve to be amplified more than others. This is a fine line and opens the door to nebulous accusations of “censorship” and “political correctness gone mad”, but the alternative is to enable racists, sexists and the absolute worst of humanity to promote their terrible opinions to the world unfettered – which is infinitely worse than some casually racist bogan from Ringwood feeling “restrained” from expressing their opinion of Muslims on an article on the Herald Sun website.

As Karl Pilkington would say… comments: get rid of ’em.

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Assessments, Media 1

PB4 inspiration

I happened to download this Planet Money episode on class action lawsuits the week we were choosing topics for PB4, so I listened to it with interest hoping to find formal elements we could borrow for use in our own essay. It turned out that Kat and Emily really liked the format too, so we decided that a Hack/Planet Money style podcast would be the perfect format for our PB4 audio essay.

Specifically, the elements we will be using in our audio essay include vox pops, a host providing context and driving the narrative, interviews with expert speakers, and sound effects/musical cues. With such a short production schedule and limited length our essay will necessarily be less in-depth than this Planet Money episode, but I think it’s still a handy model to try to emulate in limited form.

For the video component, Kat brought to the table a fantastic series of essays by PBS called Idea Channel, which “examines the connections between pop culture, technology and art”. There are dozens and dozens of such videos in the Idea Channel stable, and although they have a very particular style and personality (which we won’t be recreating exactly), some of the broader conceptual ideas on which Idea Channel is based will provide excellent reference for our own work.

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Cinema Studies

Style and The Age of Innocence

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

“Style”, when applied to filmmaking, is the unique pattern and use of stylistic choices common to a particular director or group of directors. Style can be identified in several dimensions:

  • Single director, that is, the stylistic signature of a director’s work across their career (e.g. Edgar Wright’s style involves techniques of visual comedy and frame matching, fast-cutting mundane actions, a mobile camera using plenty of zooms, etc.)
  • Genre or a collection of directors, such as film noir, or the unadorned style associated with the Dogme 95 movement
  • A country’s national cinema, for example German expressionism’s heavy reliance on angular compositions and high-contrast lighting to create a distinctive visual character

Although the costume melodrama is not a genre that Scorsese worked in often, several elements of the director’s personal style shine through in The Age of Innocence (1993).

Prominent narration from the point of view of the film’s protagonists or major characters is a device that Scorsese often uses to provide exposition and clarify his character’s mental state. The Age of Innocence utilises narration heavily, but it is spoken from the point of view of an omniscient outsider, who provides the audience with a wider range of knowledge than the characters on screen.

The Age of Innocence also contains a beautiful long take, which follows Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) walking through several crowded, ornate drawing rooms upon entering a party. Long takes, with the camera moving between and shifting focus on several small details in the scene while following behind a main character’s movements, are another Scorsese trademark.

Less obvious stylistic elements are also common to much of Scorsese’s work, such as the use of darkness and colour to express a character’s moods, and timing editing with musical cues to create a fluid, romantic pacing. These and many other elements combine in a unique, identifiable way to make up the signature style of Martin Scorsese.

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Media 1, Thoughts, Workshops

Trigger warning

An interesting and, I’m ashamed to say, surprising conversation was sparked in our Workshop this week. The concept of the trigger warning was raised and I was shocked that in a group of twenty or so young university students there were very few who defended their existence and use.

I honestly (naively) expected the bulk of my class to fall on the same side as me on this issue, but I turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Most of my classmates seemed to agree that trigger warnings had gone too far, and there were some cries that they somehow curtail the inalienable right to free speech or artistic expression. (Note: we don’t have an inalienable right to free expression in Australia, and there are plenty of forms of speech that we as a society have deemed appropriate to curtail.)

It’s so easy for people who have never experienced any real trauma to complain about people (usually rape and domestic violence survivors) asking not to be exposed to material that could have long-lasting harmful effects. But I think if they actually knew the level of damage involved, most people would change their tune.

I understand that it might be slightly annoying to have to go out of your way to post and read trigger warnings, but does your desire to avoid that slight inconvenience trump a DV survivor’s wish to avoid a severe anxiety attack after randomly being shown a video of a woman being choked into unconsciousness in a university lecture (which we were actually shown in our Lectorial three weeks ago)? Personally, I think no – my right to say what I want is less important than the right of another human being to not randomly suffer an attack of PTSD, no matter how important I think what I have to say is.

I’m sure it was also really annoying for people in the 1960s who felt like they were no longer “free” to openly tell racist or sexist jokes in public – but that right was deemed less important than the right for women and people of colour to not be offended or discriminated against.

It’s important to note, though, that nobody argues that content that could be a potential trigger should be censored, necessarily — just that it should be labelled as such so people can make an informed choice to avoid it. We already have classification advice on films and TV shows, and language warning stickers on albums, and trigger warnings are in many ways the same thing — only driven by our desire to be respectful of others. To me, that’s a good thing.

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Assessments, Media 1

PB4 research

Our initial research into topics we could tackle for PB4 mostly consisted of representations in media:

  • Gender and sexuality
  • Race
    • Comparing the depiction of Aboriginal Australians in media to Maori and First Nation peoples
  • Subcultures
    • Music subcultures, particularly punk and hip hop
    • Skinheads / racists
    • Drug culture
  • Media (i.e. how creators and media technologies have been depicted in media over the history of cinema/television)
  • Technology (i.e. the development of techniques like long takes, jump scares, etc.)
  • Genre / subject matter
    • Musicals and the appearance of musical numbers in non-musical films (e.g. Magnolia, (500) Days of Summer, etc.)
    • Romantic comedy and its reflection of wider societal values
    • Time travel

After this first round of brainstorming we settled on the depiction of drug use and drug users in media, because the subject matter appealed to us and we thought it would be easy to find resources and references in an area that has seen significant research.

The day after we settled on that topic, we discovered an article that discussed the rise of sequels in mainstream American cinema, which appealed to us all as an idea. We decided that we would change the topic of our PB4 essays to non-original narratives, i.e. sequels, prequels and remakes, and trace their rise from basically non-existent in the early days of cinema to practically dominating the box office today.

There is a vast body of research into this area in academia, and there are some incredibly interesting examples and case studies that we could explore. We’ve also already managed to secure interviews with a film journalist, a film producer and a media academic to drive our essays, which will hopefully provide an interesting baseline of opinion to build upon.

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Lectorials, Media 1

Copyright

I found today’s presentation on copyright to be extremely interesting and valuable – the rules of copyright seem so vague and constantly changing that it was great to hear from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. The most surprising thing I learned from the presentation was that there’s actually a lot more infringement going on than I would have guessed, but most instances of infringement go unchallenged in court. It’s something that we, as media makers, need to be constantly vigilant about.

The example of GIFs in Facebook and on Tumblr got brought up, which is especially interesting because people would use such GIFs on social networking platforms billions of times a day, every single day, and yet Facebook isn’t constantly being served with takedown notices about peoples’ Parks and Recreation GIFs. But since every single rights holder would need to individually challenge Facebook’s legal right to publish those GIFs, at the same time, for any real action to be taken, it will probably never end up in court. I’m glad I’ll be able to post the Tom Haverford “baller time” GIF with impunity into the future.

I don’t usually do this, but since I think the copyright lecture will be relevant to me and my work well into the future, I’m going to basically just copy my notes from today’s class into this blog post, for future reference:

  • Copyright is automatic
  • No requirement to add (c) symbol
  • No registration requirement
  • Ideas are NOT protected by copyright
  • Facts are NOT protected by copyright

Copyright protects material form or expression of an idea (degree of skill and labour required to create), not the idea itself.

Ideas can, however, be confidential. To mark your ownership of an idea, express it in some physical form and then mark your work with a statement: “The information in this document is confidential and must not be used to without first obtaining written consent.”

Potential exceptions to copyright being automatically owned by the work’s creator:

  • Employer ownership
  • Contract or license (can be non-exclusive)
  • Assignment of rights

Moral rights apply to all copyright works, but can be waived:

  1. Right of attribution
  2. Right of false attribution
  3. Right of integrity (deals with honour and reputation – e.g. if someone remixes your work in a way that harms your reputation)

In Australia, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, but different countries have different terms. Factors influencing duration:

  • published/unpublished or made public (even unpublished works are copyright)
  • published anonymously / pseudonymously
  • film made before 1st May 1969

Copyright cannot be renewed in Australia, because there has never been the requirement to register a work for copyright.

Exceptions (when a license is not needed):

  • Fair dealing
    • student research and study (only applies while studying)
    • research or study
    • criticism or review
    • reporting the news
    • parody and satire
    • (public use is not OK)
  • Education
  • Libraries / archives
  • Cultural institutions and museums

For infringement to be considered the following could have been breached:

  • Rights of ownership
  • Substantial part of work (quality not necessarily quantity)
  • Moral rights
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Media 1, Thoughts

How to Become Great at Just About Anything

The latest episode of the Freakonomics Radio podcast is called “How to Become Great at Just About Anything“, and it’s all about the concept of concerted practice that we tackled in the first couple of weeks of Media 1. There are some great interviewees including Malcolm Gladwell and psychologist/sociologist Anders Ericsson, who has done some prominent work in the field of expertise and development.

It adds some important context around the concept of the “10,000 hour rule”, including that just practice by itself is not enough – one must also have a number of other advantages too (talent, opportunity, support, etc.). Good things to keep in mind!

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