Free Culture

       Lessig’s article on “Free Culture” mainly summarizes the benefits and consequences to creative work that have occurred since the Internet was first introduced. He references the past, possibly around a few hundred years ago, to illustrate how culture was free and law did not intervene unless it disturbed the peace. Today, creative work has been increasingly “protected” by law, and most anything you find online requires permission to reuse or redistribute. He does express his own beliefs on the infringement of creative culture where he explains that while there should be laws to prevent piracy, the law also needs to approach intellectual property with more common sense. I agree with his stance as well since there needs to be equilibrium as protective rights and creative culture is concerned.

“There has never been a time in our history when more of our “culture” was as “owned” as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now. “

              – Lawrence Lessig

       Music and movie piracy continues to come to mind when thinking about this, and roughly a third of America still does this even with all the federal anti-piracy laws that exist. Yet, I believe the birth of iTunes and Netflix have helped lower this statistic given that movies, music, TV shows and other content similar to this is more readily available. I feel like many people, myself included, will pay the cost of downloading content from iTunes for the convenience and guaranteed quality. Video games have also come under the piracy radar and I will admit that most new games are priced unfairly high ($50-$60). Even so, I believe in protecting this work since many games have become a multimillion dollar project.  As an example of a multimillion dollar project, I especially like the remixing and revival of the latest Batman games since they incorporate many classic features of the Batman franchise, such as the ability to play as Robin or Catwoman, as well as incorporating a few elements from the latest movies like the bullet proof armor he wears. Specifically, I enjoy the remixing of Batman: Arkham City since the storyline involves Batman fighting all of his enemies in a futuristic Arkham City, right next to Gotham, which is plagued with all kinds of crime and where all of his infamous nemeses reside such as The Riddler, Penguin, and Mr. Freeze to name a few. To see glimpses of in game play, check them out at: http://community.batmanarkhamcity.com/.

Galloway and Lethem

       If I am following Galloway correctly, he is explaining that in a decentralized society, discipline tends to exist at a general level than if the same society is centralized. To me, this sounds exactly like a sociological opposite: when you force someone to do something, people will resist, however, when no force is involved people will be more willing. Galloway continues this example by essentially agreeing with Hardt and Negri’s position on how the Internet is “an indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of interconnected nodes communicate with no central point of control” where protocol exists simply because of this chaotic network of nodes. TCP/IP thrives off of illogicality between two versions of a similar technology as well. On one hand you have the random information distribution (i.e. an email) that is sent to a self-governing location where the recipient (i.e. email inbox) needs to organize and archive the information. This makes sense since control or protocol is only ever created, in any situation in life, due to a lack of control.

       Lethem basically talks about intellectual property as his main point. Near the title, in which he openly has “A plagiarism” within it, he has copied a quote from John Donne. Lethem said he searched through a number of different mediums to find it, only to discover it in his most popular book. The quote itself pays tribute to the overall theme of his essay, where part of the quote reads: “All of mankind is of one author, and is one volume. “ In the latter part of his essay, he reiterates the same quote but slightly changed: “All of mankind is of one volume.”  Lethem’s idea was that literature and art have instances of repetition throughout history so it would be combining information from the past and present to create ideas for the future. This has been done for centuries and literature/art will continue to be infringed upon in some way. The disadvantages of this are obvious being that big time corporations (i.e. Disney) will continue to bully the independent artist that may ever so slightly reiterate a minuscule detail of one of their products or that information belonging to the public domain may become smaller as time progresses. However, the advantages I see from this is the progression and perfection of information, at least in the literature/art realm. Even in a general sense this can be true since information of the past teaches us to critically think about ways to make something better or different. In my experience it would have to be the book to screen adaptation of Lord of the Rings that I believe was only making the story more vivid, even though I read the books awhile back.

The Medium Is the Message

       Using McLuhan’s quotation “the medium is the message” as foundation, we can define how varying mediums translate into Shannon’s definitions of uncertainty, difficulty, and surprise. More specifically, we need to look at the differences of those definitions by way of electronic media. Since McLuhan’s quote suggests that there is a message associated with every medium, then Shannon’s definition of uncertainty becomes understandable. He states that there is no uncertainty as well as no information if only one message is possible. For example, the sound of a guitar is distinctive and no uncertainty is present since the only message is music. In Shannon’s definition of difficulty, it is actually just the opposite. He states that information is difficult to transmit between mediums so, drawing off of Shannon's definition of uncertainty, if information is present then there is more than one message. An example of this would be to transmit information from a commercial in China to create a logo of the brand or message(s) here in the U.S. Lastly, Shannon’s definition of surprise is focused more on the mathematical perspective of probability. He explains that more information is conveyed when there is a higher amount of improbability. In other words, it would basically be the most detailed and extensive amount of information transmitted in a unit (i.e. a 30 second video). For me, this is difficult to translate into an example of a medium, which ironically, relates back to Shannon’s definition of difficulty. Personally, I envision three dimensional animation because when dealing with words or speech, information can be predictable to some degree as long as it remains comprehensible.  Animation in general can be highly informative yet unpredictable, however, three dimensional animation is more explicit in shape and form so it can have higher amounts of information. The reason I consider animation to be unpredictable is because the medium is relatively non-restrictive compared to other types of mediums such as a phone. An example of this would be a three dimensional animation of a bird flying into the window of a house. The message is clear and text is not needed, however, the animation was not predictable since so many outcomes could have stemmed from the animation of a flying bird.