Web Culture in our Digital Age

In Part One of Lawrence Lessig’s Remix, he discusses two main key concepts: “Read/Only” culture (RO) and “Read/Write” culture (RW). RO culture is a less practiced in performance and more comfortable with simple consumption. Lessig connects this to the consumer, to consume the product and do nothing more with it. It is fueled by professionals. This provides a sort of hierarchical where we only become the readers and consumers and those creating the music or text are the elite. In RW, however, this reading does not suffice. We must add to the culture we read by creating and re-creating the culture around us, by remixing it.

Remix is an essential act of RW creativity. It is the expression of a freedom to take “the song of the day or the old songs” and create with them.

Lessig describes remix as a collage :

It comes from combining elements of RO culture.

There are two goods that remixes create: the good of the community and education. Remixes occur within a community of remixers; he gives the example of the community creating anime music videos (AMV). Remixes also

excite “interest-based learning” (Mimi Ito)

Lessig explains that this RW culture is not something new; on the contrary, it is something we have been doing for some time. A form of RW culture that is closest to our tradition is the remixing of text. As a matter of fact the blog I’m typing now is an example of this remixing of text. I utilized the internet to retrieve Lessig’s Remix and now I’m remixing it by recreating the text, adding my own thoughts and opinions. The internet is the place where all writing gets to be RW, where it encourages the ethic of democracy (opposed to hierarchical).

Lessig argues that one should not be more practiced than the other because even thought RW is more encouraging, we can’t re-create what is not created. However, he does say that RW has been practiced less and we should in turn try to balance both out  Currently, copyright laws favor one kind of culture over the other. It supports the practices of the RO culture and opposes practices of RW culture. In RO we have no legal permission beyond the permission to consume. However in RW, with the technological and digital advances, we have been given the opportunity to remix,

but “can” doesn’t imply  “may”.

If the copyright laws do not change and people continue and attempt to practice RW culture, the extension of the Web will continue to raise a number of copyright issues.You can see an example of the great amount of copyright reports on Google’s transparency report.

Google regularly receives requests from copyright owners and reporting organizations that represent them to remove search results that link to material that allegedly infringes copyrights. Each request names specific URLs to be removed, and we list the domain portions of URLs requested to be removed under specified domains.

In the week of September 17, 2012, it reported over 1,500,000 URLs requested to be removed from search. This also does not include requests for products other than Google Search, such as YouTube or Blogger, or requests submitted by means other than their web form, such as fax or written letter. This shows just how strict our copyright laws have become and who knows how many of these sites were written as remixes.

I agree with Lessig in saying that piracy is wrong and credit should be given to where it is due and that the laws current attitude toward RW should be reformed.  It has caused issue for many and even stopped many from practicing RW culture. It will completely affect the younger generations if we live in solely RO culture. We will become nothing more than consumers in a consumer world and creativity will be left to the elite.

“Reading” Cybercultures comes from Pramod K. Nayar’s book, An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures. Nayar begins with defining cyberculture to be the electronic environment where various technologies and media forms coverage; and cyberspace to be the worlds and domains generated by digital information and communication technologies (ICTs). Nayar describes the virtual world to be, in a sense, our Second Life. With the technological advances that have come to light, Nayar argues that this virtual world has very much become a part of our identities and that cybercultures and virtual worlds have a material dimension.

 

 

The formation that is cybercultures is at various points, and in different ways, attached to, connected with, replicates, extends, and augments real-life material conditions.

Nayar discusses the different issues that arise in cyberculture studies: globalization, technocapitalism, and cybercultures; material and corporealty; E-governance; civil society are among the many. The issues that caught my eye were the digital divide and the issues an individual can experience in our material life, such as race, class, gender and sexuality. The internet has both linked together and divided individuals. While many can connect with different people across the world, the internet has also created what Nayar calls the Digital Divide. The rise and accelerated growth of ICTs are subject to unequal access between countries.

Pippa Norris suggests a three-layered digital divide: the global divide referring to the divergence in Internet access between developed and less developed nations; the social divide, referring to the social divergence between Internet access and use between classes and sections within a particular society;… and democratic divide, referring to the difference in nature/quality of use of the Internet and digital resource between users. (Norris 2001, 4)

Since the virtual is an extension of our material world as Nayar explains, it would make sense that an individual can find the same or similar issues. Cyberspace provides a separation of class by being accessible to only certain individuals.  For the issue of gender and sexuality we can take the example of women. How are they represented in the cyberspace. Cyberspace is gendered not only in terms of access, but also in ways in which women appropriate cyberspaces. When concerning the issue of race,…

Cyberspace is a “raced” medium where disembodiment, transcendence, and fluid identities are privilege of the white race (Nakamura, 2002)

Cyberspace, Nayar goes on to argue, is best read through the lens of cultural studies. Cultures studies are focused on the way meanings are generated in everyday life through mass cultural forms and social interaction rather than within high culture. It contains four basic themes:

agency, genealogy, identity and power, and social space and corporeality. (Slack and Wise, 2006: 143)

I believe that Nayar’s point that cyberculture cannot be treated as simply virtual worlds created by computers is very undeniable. Cyberspace and cyberculture has not just become a part of our lives, but our daily lives and a part of who we are as individuals. Every day I see someone pull out a mobile phone, computer, ipad, or whatever technological gadget it may be; even the younger generations. So therefore, we can’t simply ignore and think that the internet is just this virtual world or “thing” as Nayar put it that’s out there; but rather a part of our society and culture.

Forget about looking on youtube for trailers or waiting until you go to the theaters to watch trailers about up and coming films, The Movie Blog (themovieblog.com) has it all for you, both current and up and coming. Not only does include movie reviews, but also interviews and a lot of news. However as they put it.

This is not a news site per se (although you’ll get a lot of news here), but rather a place to give thoughts and opinions on movies and movie news. A pundit site if you will for the Movie Industry.

The moment you hit the site, it’s pretty straight forward and eye-catching, no mystery or puzzle. It has a casual feel to it, with an easy grey that is appealing and it allows the images and videos to do all the coloring.  It’s not overloaded with junk and unnecessary images and it’s well structured. There’s one ad that pops up every time I go to the website which is somewhat irritating as most ads are, but after around 5 seconds its over and done with.

The movie reviews on this blog are actually very detailed compared to other blogs and reviews I’ve seen. It has the name of the director, who wrote it, the starring actors, the genre, what the film is rated, and the synopsis. It also includes the official trailer and of course the writers thoughts and opinions on the film, for what would a blog about a film be without that. Now, most reviews have the date and the author of the post at the top, under the title. What I like about this blog site is that at the end of the post it also has a little “about the author”, which I appreciate because I like to know who’s writing what I’m reading and how much they have written.

The language of the blog site is casual yet formal. I don’t quite know how to explain it other than its like an extremely well written first draft essay. It’s not too much, not to little with the formality of it which is really appealing because blogs tend to usually be less formal than needed. Overall I rather like this blog site from structure and appearance to the language. It was very well thought out and it runs smoothly