Henry Jenkins’ is a professor at U.S.C. and author of many books concerning popular culture and the media.  He wrote an article five years ago that predicted the cultural effects that YouTube has had on our society, and the way it continues affecting our world today.  Jenkins proposed nine important propositions within his article.  However, I will only discuss one of these propositions (click on the article link above if you wish to view Jenkins’ entire article).

The fifth proposition within Jenkin’s article states:

YouTube operates, alongside Flickr, as an important site for citizen journalists, taking advantage of a world where most people have cameras embedded in their cellphones which they carry with them everywhere they go. We can see many examples of stories or images in the past year which would not have gotten media attention if someone hadn’t thought to record them as they unfolded using readily accessible recording equiptment: George Allen’s “macaca” comments, the tazering incident in the UCLA library, Michael Richards’s racist outburst in the nightclub, even the footage of Sadam Hussein’s execution, are a product of this powerful mixture of mobile technology and digital distribution (Jenkins 2012).

This proposition is a clear fact today.  Stories that would not have had or could not have had media attention in the past are now making the Internets’ headlines in 2012.  Now the global community has access to a wider variety of news sources than ever before.  We can witness an event through the lens of a citizen on the ground as the situation unfolds.  Furthermore, this broadcast is not tainted by the political ideological views of powerful traditional media sources.  Recently, we have been able to witness the energy of the Egyptian people marching for their freedom from within the crowd, the terror and tragedy of the Costa Concordia as survivors abandon ship, and police raids on Occupy Wall Street from the view point of the protestors etc.  The media now has a harder time attempting to color an event in accordance with their interest.  A perfect example would be the police raids on the Occupy movement around the world, and especially here in the United States.  Certain traditional-news media groups may attempt to continue their revisions of history, but YouTube has provided the conscious viewer the means in which to criticize the coverage propagated by corporate owned media, and publish and make their criticism accessible for the global internet community.  The following video displays a horrifying display of police brutality carried out on a photojournalist.  The commentator at channel 5 says that the photojournalist “fell”.  YouTube viewers had a different view, and many agreed that the photojournalist was pushed by police.  Take a look for yourself, and see what you think.

Photojournalist Tyson Zoltan Heder beaten and detained by LAPD at Occupy Los Angeles

Danah Boyd has an impressive background in terms of the places she has worked and the amount of research she has been able to put out.  Her blog and publications can be found at her site http://www.danah.org/ .  Recently, I read her article White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook.  Having grown up in suburbia/urban Los Angeles,  the article struck true on a number of issues. Danah explains the exodus from MySpace to Facebook, and the race/class issues implied by the migration.   She displays and describes how MySpace had first been popular for all teens, and why the first youth began to leave the site and emigrate to Facebook.  What these teens left behind was a social map of the segregation that was in plain-sight at their high schools.  I remember my personal high school experience.  Mexicans would kick it at the M (for Mexican) wing.   The White’s would kick it on “the hill”.  The African-American’s at the gym.  The Asians in the own wing etc. etc.  Being Latino, I was one of the last to migrate to Facebook, and only migrated to the site because one of my mentors had urged me to claiming that MySpace was for “cholos and cholas”.  I remember my White friends telling me about Facebook, but never really put any thought into leaving MySpace until an authority figure in my life asked me to.  Today I have neither a Facebook or a MySpace, and my life has been much better because I can now focus on my studies (Facebook was my preferred tool of procrastination). However, after reading this article, I also thought about my current University experience and wondered if it has felt racially segregated.  Yes and no.  However, for the truth, all one has to do is to walk into Benson (Cafeteria) and take into account “who kicks-it with who”, or look at Facebook and see who talks to who.  Peers, what do you think about our campus?

Andrew Keen wrote his book The Cult of the Amateur in response to the growing user-generated media that we can find on the web today. I didn’t read the entire book because the Introduction was enough for me.  Keen’s idea of the internet is a place where the “mob rules”, and equates this “amateur” mob of humans that generate information on the web as “monkeys” on a type writer.  I thank Mr Keen because I am one of those amateurs, and I guess I’ll accept his “monkey” title.  Here is a Monkey’s response.

Mr Keen claims that there is abundance of “political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels (Keen 2007),” on the internet. Furthermore, Keen claims that this information might confuse the masses somehow.  Poor Mr Keen, it seems like he has read a lot of monkey generated information!  Too bad Mr Keen doesn’t know how to browse the internet like the rest of us “monkeys”.  Mr Keen is doomed to read and pay attention to every source of information he comes across!  Most of today’s mob knows the difference between good and bad information, and what is purely entertainment.  If Keen thinks that people will be fooled and captivated by “false/faulty/useless” information on the Internet, well, there is a lot of “false/faulty/useless” information in print, TV, or the radio also.  We can find those magazines in most local grocery stores that lie about celebrity break ups and claim that their source was abducted by aliens; or turn on MTV to watch Jersey Shore (no offense, I know it’s fun to watch sometimes) and be captivated by the raw drama; or turn on the radio and hear some radio host or hostess rant and rave about their political opinion without facts to back them up.

So what’s the issue with the internet?

The problem lies with the viewer, not the internet. The above issue Mr Keen finds with internet existed prior to the internet. People are going to believe what they want to believe.  Maybe Mr Keen’s focus should be to attempt to implement some form of awareness about the internet and/or what sources to trust and not to trust.  I’m sure we’ll be able to understand this warning, since somehow us monkeys have evolved into being able to read, write, and use technology.

Mr Keen also claims that the internet is “flattening… culture… [and] blurring the lines between traditional audience and author, creator and consumer, expert and amateur (Keen 2007).”  This argument sounds amusing, but what is Mr Keen really trying to say here?  That there is some type of line between the professional and amateur.  Okay. Doesn’t that sill exist within the internet? Even in my “monkey” state I know that there are paid bloggers, internet reporters, and staff.  The internet didn’t mean the downfall of the “Best Sellers”, or our favorite music artist, actors, reporters, and political commentators.  People still read those sources on the internet that Mr Keen holds in such high esteem such as “CNN and BBC”(I wonder how Mr Keen even knows if his sources are even telling the truth? Or know who controls the media?).  Mr Keen is worried that the print-media has lost money, but that’s the price of living in a democratic-capitalistic society.  Well, those companies will just have to adapt in order survive as their predecessors in the industry did with the invention of the radio and television.   As for piracy, it will always exist, and we’ll just have to find just and democratic ways to check it.  Whatever, Jay Z, Beyonce, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Lady Gaga are still filthy rich despite the millions of times they’ve been pirated.

So what’s the issue with the internet?

Mr Keen argues that all these “monkeys” are not worth being heard.  As if we don’t have a soul such as his that wishes to reach out, be heard, and maybe be an inspiration, a comedian, consoled, or a source of change etc. as Mr Keen wishes to be.  He wants the “professionals” and corporations to be the only sources who can reach out to the masses. Sounds like Mr Keen is a bit of an Elitist.  I think Mr Keen’s true issue is that with all of this amateur work on the web, his amateur work doesn’t receive enough attention. He should be careful about who he offends since he does rely upon us “monkey” to put his book on the “Top Seller’s List”.  So far his book only has 131 responses on Amazon’s Web 2.0, and a majority of the reviews rate Mr Keen’s work poorly.  Sorry Mr Keen, maybe once you evolve into one of us “monkeys” you might receive a bit more attention.  Until then, I’ll teach you how to peel a banana.

Basically, I’m just going to restate and agree in this blog with what Lathem said in his article The Exctasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.  Everything has been said or seen before, or the foundation of what is being said or created has been laid down by previous artist and innovators.  Lathem makes a strong case for his argument by giving examples of all the works that seem to mimic each other; he states,

then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and    Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism (harpers.org 2012).

We do want more plagiarism.  This list is a short list of “plagiarism” that has occurred over history.  If we wanted to, we could start even earlier, with the story of Gilgamesh and the similarities found within Noah’s Ark in the Bible. However, people tend to forget about the history of borrowed ideas.

Without borrowing ideas, where would humanity be today? Who knows.  Everything that we see today has evolved from previous ideas to create original pieces similar to building blocks or Lego’s used by children to create some form of structure or figure.

Lathem’s words ring true when he wrote about art and language, stating,

The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

Who owns language? No one, but everyone.  And we all contribute to language in our own original ways.  This contribution is a “necessity”, as Lathem states; a necessity in a sense of the progression of the arts, but also for the progression of humanity as a whole.  Language, stories, and the arts are the foundation of communication; you take them away under copyright law, and humanity will have great trouble coexisting.  What would have happened if countries had copy-written their languages and banded its use outside of their boundaries? I know this is a far stretch, but think of it on micro level, and we began see the vast contributions that people can make by using the existing ideas of others by manipulating and advancing them.  Maybe, without Ovid, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet could not have existed.  Maybe without Einstein’s E=MC2, we could have never made it to the moon.

I agree with Lathem that certain copyrights do have to exist in order for people like him to make a living from their contributions and what they love to.  Give the living acknowledgement and their fair pay for their borrowed-unique gift to the world, and allow their posterity to benefit from the authors work.  However, don’t stop the progression of art by not allowing ideas and art to flow naturally as they have throughout human history.

Bibilography

The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, By Jonathan Lethem (Harper’s Magazine).” Harper’s Magazine. Web. 13 Jan. 2012. <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387>.

The Huffington Post has a base of paid employees and a massive ensemble of bloggers who contribute information for free.  Therefore, the news site acts as a media of information and commentary allowing room for free speech from people who wish to be heard around the globe (huffingtonpost.com 2012).  I read an article published by this site titled EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT: Wikileaks, Assange, And Why There’s No Turning Back, which displays an adaptation of Micah L. Sifry book WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency.  Sifry co-founded and edits the PDF, or Personal Democracy Forum, which explores the effects of the Internet on politics (personaldemocracy.com 2012).  Within the adaptation, Sifry touches on Wikileaks.org, and the effect the site has had on politics, and the future of the internets’ role within global politics and power structures (huffingtonpost.com 2012). Also Sifry explores the role of Julian Assange, who runs Wikileaks.org in collaboration with others, who attempt to bring the truth to the public through anonymous leaks of information previously withheld from the global community (wikileaks.org 2012).   Wikileaks.org is essentially a “wiki”, because anyone can add information to the site, but not just anyone can edit or delete that leaked information (dictionary.com 2012). Therefore, informants can leak sensitive information, but people attempting to hide the information cannot delete it; which in turn protects free speech and flow of information. The publication of Sifry’s excerpt by the Huffington Post seems appropriate due to the nature of the news-website; because the adaption describes the age of transparency brought on by the internet and the free flow of information through sites like Wikileaks.org.  The Huffington Post attempts to act as Wikileaks does, but also sends reporters out into the field in order to collect information as events unfold.  Such information and people like Assange are needed, as Sifry argues, in order to protect democracy through transparency of institutions.  Without transparency, the global community is left in the dark; and as the saying goes, “Knowledge is Power.” The global community is doomed to manipulative propaganda by the powerful without the knowledge provided by sites like Wikileaks and the Huffington Post.  These sites give power back to the people through the use of Internets’ free flow of information. The information, and knowledge acquired by this information, allows people to know the truth behind various political, government, and corporate actions and events.  The global internet community  allows the public to defend themselves from tyranny and excessive greed by allowing the community the opportunity to respond when receiving these truths.

Bibliography

“About Personal Democracy Media | Personal Democracy Forum.” Home | Personal Democracy Forum. Web. 11 Jan. 2012. <http://personaldemocracy.com/static-content/about-personal-democracy-media>.

EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT: Wikileaks, Assange, And Why There’s No Turning Back.” Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post. Web. 11 Jan. 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/09/wikileaks-assange-transparency_n_820348.html>.

“How The Huffington Post Works (In Case You Were Wondering).” Breaking News and  Opinion on The Huffington Post. Web. 11 Jan. 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/10/huffington-post-bloggers_n_821446.html>.

“About” Web. 11 Jan. 2012 http://www.wikileaks.org/About.html