Sunday, May 1, 2011

blog #12



1) "Work successfully licensed in a commercial economy can also be freely available in a sharing economy." This reminds me of how Girl talk was using mostly everything illegally that was not licensed.  It wasn't licensed successfully in a commercial economy but he shares his music with everyone.


2) The movie mentions quoting like remixing.  Which is exactly how Lessig talks about remixing also.  Everyone uses quotes, and in class sometimes we get in trouble if we don't reference it.  But we are using those quotes freely, to broaden our knowledge of a certain subject and to help others understand our opinions better.  I remember when the guy who made the movie mentions that his whole movie is basically illegal.  But he made it anyway.  But it helps so much people understand copyright laws and how our laws now are so outdated.  It shouldn't be illegal if it helps others so much.


3)  Lessig talks about how our laws are very outdated and need to be updated.  The culture that we live in is booming with the younger generation remixing and using technology the way it is suppose to be used.  They are sharing everything and remixing anything given to them.  They are adapting at such a fast pace that our laws and rules now will only hinder their advancements.  Just like how girl talk can work his day job and then become a dj outside of his work, so can other people all over the world.  People enjoy his music, so why stop him.  He was mentioning how his music was starting to get so big that he might need to hold of on his next album.  Even his family is scared for him to get caught.  They don't really know everything that he does, but they know it isnt illegal.  Lessig wants us to see that our laws are holding people back from their potential in sharing and advancing communities with their knowledge.  Not only will we create more hybrid economies but we will be able to use every tool around us to the fullest, with less limitations.  Just like how Sousa was shocked when Currier told him that the law already went to far in saying we couldn't sing in public.  We really need to update our laws.







blog #11

     Commercial economy – an economy in which money or “price” is a central term of the ordinary, or normal, exchange. Like a local record store for example, or buying a dvd at walmart for a certain price.  For example, Lessig talks about how you don't argue about walmarts price for a juice thats 2$ and something cents.  You just pay for it because that is what walmart believes is the right price for that particular product.
      
      Sharing Economy – where access to culture is regulated not by price, but by a complex set of social relations.  These social relations are not simple. Insulted by the simplicity of price.  Josh's example of sharing his dvds for free, and everyone reading Lessigs book.  Basically when Lessig was on the plane and asked to rent a illegally downloaded dvd for 5 dollars, Josh got mad.  He said that he would let him watch it for free.  He doesn't collect movies to make money off of it.  So basically this is a great example of sharing economy.  Like me giving a friend a ride if he or she buys me lunch. 
      

      Where commercial is all about the term "price"  sharing is anything but "price."  I think Lessig mentioned both these economies so he can talk about how websites have taken sharing economy to a whole new level.  Not only are you sharing information with everyone with access to the internet, but you are learning also from other people.  Take wikipedia for example.  I know this example is used a lot but wikipedia is a great example of how a sharing economy works.  Lessig wanted us to understand both economies so we can better understand hybrid economies like netflix and youtube who use both but don't let one overpower the other to much to take away from the sharing economy.  For example youtube is free for everyone to share videos and comment, the more the better, but now ads are being used.  But they are sure to keep advertisement as minimal as possible so the experience from the users are not hindered.



Monday, April 4, 2011

Blog #10



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44k8u_sZsVE

Jagged Edge - Lets get married remix


When Lessig talks about his friend Ben on page 52 who can write well he mentioned the reasons why.  He didn't do well in other classes but when it came to writing, he was able to clip quotes from the authors and build his arguments around it.  "He suceeded because the salience of the quotes, in contect, made a point that his words alone would not.  In this remix run dmcs flow, the new beat, and a few changes into the songs lyrics from the original remind me quotes, they string together to make a perfect remix.  They created what was originally a slow jam song to a up beat marriage song.  First time I herd a marriage song that made you want to dance.

page 56 - It is the expression of a freedom to take "the sons of the day or the old songs" and create with them.  Basically this remix used the original lets get married song which was slow beat.  and they added the old school RUN DMC in the song and having rap with a slow jam, and changing the beat made this remix even more popular then the original.

page 69 - "But the internet and digital technologies opened these media to the masses"  Just how sampling and  remixing has evolved and keeps evolving, having rappers have a rhyme or two in a slow jam or different genre song has been getting popular lately.  A lot of songs do this now and this remix is a great example of how successful these two mixings of genres in a song can become.  R&B with RAP is still growing.  A perfect example of a artist who does this alot is trey songz with rapper drake.


Sunday, March 27, 2011

blog #9



What I see as Lessig's key argument in the introduction is that every artist at some point in time had to have had reflected on anothers work/art to create what they create now.  "No artist works in a vacuum."  So what the law is saying in the introduction with the mother using youtube for her baby dancing, The Girl Talk mash up, and even the John Lennon piece is that they don't really care in a sense.  In one example, the person they were trying to get permission from didn't even read the proposal, they just said NO.  And this is the problem.  The law needs to understand that this is whats going to happen in the future and that that they need to update their codes,laws, and rules to adapt to the ever growing change in copyright laws.  It should be like how SilviaO experiences music now.  People can sample her LEGALLY.  They even talk about how everyone does it and its illegal.  But if we move forward to getting all the crap out of the way and just getting the permission done right away, works of art like the John Lennon piece would not be slowed and kept away from the public.  We are shooting ourselves in the foot from keeping "remixing" a crime when in reality we have been doing it since the beginning for a long time.  Just like how he explains it with the Africans and they way they share their stories, how they always evolve and get better.  This is how everything we work with in art, music, and creativity should be, moving forward, evolving into something better.


RW (read/write) which is explained as reading their culture or by listening to representations of it.  As for RO (read/only) he explains it as less practiced and more simple with consumptions.  Basically he thought that the culture would be lost from the practice of "real musicians" as more and more people could create what Sousa spent his lifes work on so easily with "machines."  This matters to Lessigs argument in a sense that instead of creating more culture with new ways to be creative and remixing information to create, Sousa is saying we are loosing culture.  Sousa's extremism was based on the fact that we need to go back to RW and less RO or else we will loose our culture.  I guess hes trying to say we might forget our roots.  But how will we forget them, if this notion of remixing is basically uncovering the pass again to create something new.  He argues that people will not even have a vocal chord left.  Jokingly but in a way I get what hes saying.  Hes saying that we as a people will loose the disciplines that create music.  Like practicing with instruments and learning how to make music.  But we live in a new era.  Why stop it from evolving?  Lessig already explains way before Sousa argued about copyrights that its been RO even since the early 1900s.  People buying and selling new technology, he even explains how the piano being sold to the masses more and more was RO.  And then Currier straight up embarasses Sousa in their little conversation telling him that his memory of people singing in the streets, that is illegal.  He showed Sousa that the law has gone far enough with this and shouldnt go any further.  







Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Blog #8

Rhythmic cinema - Woodrow Wilson "Like writing history with lightening" what woodrow was refering to was the recruitment video he saw for the KKKlan and how dangerous/shocking/ and elightening it was.  Miller makes a link in where Griffith, the film maker of the kkk recruitment video and many others were making their own creative way in the narrative aspect of their time.  Just like how he is as a fj in the hip hop community of our time.

Rhythmic space - "from math to code to culture, contemporary art has shifted as well"  he basically compares this to Linux on how we give everyone the source code to create what they want and mix it themselves. our world is so infused digitality that different cultures and styles, bits and codes, converge all together, it all flows

Errata erratum - "The click of a mouse, the roll of a pair of dice, they both have a kind of intentionality  behind them"  he mentions that djing is like this, directly rational and also slightly random.  Which makes sense, you never know what your going to get when your digging in the crates =)

The future is here - "All were kind of like fonts, something used for a moment to highlight a certain mode of expression, and ofcourse, utterly pliable."  the future is always changing and what you did for something earlier, you find a different and better way to do somthing for another task later.  the future is happening rapidly and is already here

the prostitute - "Always try to create new worlds, new scenarios, at almost every moment of thought"  we are no longer bound by one fate, one destiny, one outcome, we have total freedom and the more we create different worlds/ scenarios, you can never play the same way for the same crowd. thats how why we remix, thats why we collaborate. thats why we are moving forward


I chose the song "SWV love will be right here" and it sampled from michael jackson - human nature.  I love this song, and i love human nature, so this song "love will be right here" with a tyt beat. is perfect.  i can listen to this anytime, even at a party.  I new that it was a sample cuz me and my friends would always try to see who would get the sample and the song from playing only 5 seconds of a track when we were young.  Back in the day when napster was a baby.  Just like miller says you can never play the same way for the same crowd.  Human nature had a whole different vibe to it, michael jackson had a different "message" to put out.  but with the same beat, swv got a different message out about love and it got people like me to love it.  And it might of even got people who loved human nature to love this song as well, who knows, but i can see how the sampling aspect of it created something new from the old. it really is where we should focus on as a society and community, the more we share, create, the better

blog #7

The Debourgoing piece was a really interesting read.  I never really gotten to hear anything from LA or even cali for that matter besides the mainstream songs.  One of the arguements that really got me thinking was that they talked about how New york and ATL and other east coast rap cities are still sounding the same.  The havnt moved on passed their ancestors while LA/west coast are.  There sound is much more different then that old school beat/basic drum that you use to hear.  The rappers rap differently from slow/fast/ putting their own flare to it.  And twitter and the web has really helped local artist keep doing what they want to do.  You dont have to get signed to keep doing what you love as these rappers talk about.  Also one of the rappers gave a great example El Prez, he mentioned that he got a beat that sounded like another "9th wonder" beat but didnt want that. he wanted something different. Which kind of hurt me cause I love 9th wonder haha.  But after listening to the other beat, it really did meld together well with his style of rap, and it sounded great.

 What im trying to say is that rappers are moving forward with a great future ahead of them.  The tools they can use, the way they can collaborate, spread out to different markets has really expanded their talents.  They are being more inovative and creative as technology advances.  As the rappers said, they are moving on from their rap ancestors and growing into something new.  Like how Doc Adams talked about remixing and sampling, we all do it, and we can create something better out of it.

More on sampling and remixolgy.  It really compares to what we have talked about in class and also what we have read about.  Access to information is vital in our world, and sharing is just as important.  The more you know, the more tools you have, the better equiped you are to take on the task at hand.  Just like how wikipedia uses this to the fullest, so do these rappers for example making one of their rap videos as cheap as possible with the resources they had to work with.  They posted it up online and now others can see it.  They even got the idea from another source online so that is how they got the idea. So the creative inovative way that rappers are moving forward to get their music out and get known, is really no different then how a journalist wants to branch out and write a piece on blogger that they couldnt do at work.

The Miller book was a pretty hard read haha.  I feel like hes the smartest dj in the world. His choice of words and metaphors are out there.  But what I really got out of the reading was that your environment you put yourself in is just as important as your ideas you have.  We live in a technology advanced day in age where if you want to do something truly, you really have to put yourself out there.  You have to be open to listen to different music if your a dj.  You have to use the web as a means to branch out and even expose your work also. Sharing is key because you are doing the same thing when you take ideas from other djs.  And the environment, wither its living in new york, or going on blogs about different sampling techniques.  Its all changing, and you need to change with it.

What I can put in comparison with the article, miller, and the class is that taking something old, and adding something to that idea or just doing it in a different way is perfectly acceptable.  And it should be, this is how our world has worked for so long.  If people wernt so greedy for money, sampling would have never had to go through those stupid cases about taking something that wasnt theirs.  We live in a world where folksonomy is important for moving forward.  Even if its for djing, or writing a article on how you feel about the current day politics, your not only helping everyone around you, but yourself as well.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Blog #6

The key points that Jenkins mentions were about convergence, black box, and participatory culture. I think its interesting how Jenkins talks about how players are becoming participators and participators are becoming players now.  There is no one sole role for each. Basically thats participatory culture.  Each of us can have our own say, opinion, way we view things and help each other.  In media today there is no black box now, we are moving towards convergence. Uniformity if you will with different characters, kind of like how Weingberger talked about the miscellaneous. For example you can be a writer, a publisher, a spectator, and more on the web.  The internet is not a black box or a delivery technology.  It is the understanding that all media is always changing, its right in front of us on the internet.  The way marketing, communication, and other technologies is changing, he talks about how we have to keep up.  And for the businesses who don't want to try and stay in the game, they will be left in the dust.  This new folksonomy is the future. Whether or not we are ready for the change is clear. We are not, but it will take some time and he talks about how we have the choices to sort through these many uncertainties.

Splashy pants story was crazy haha, and I always wear old spice, even before the commercials =)

Monday, February 7, 2011

Blog #5

Weinberger, relying on German philosopher Heidegger, says that "the meaning of a particular thing is enabled by the web of implicit meanings we call the world" 


Basically what I got out of the reading was that the philosophers example about the hammer. If you didn't know what the hammer was used for, you wouldn't know its meaning. Also he talks about its relationship to wood, trees, all the way up to the sun.  To the sound it makes when hitting a nail to how humans need it to build and are not gods.  He makes it very clear that to understand the hammer, you have to understand much much more.  And what Weinberger is trying to say is that all the implied meanings that we put on the web and all the relationships/tagging, gives our world meaning. 


This is related to the third order in that we are giving more information, more relationships, more insight to the web.  We can't just look at dictionary.com anymore for meanings, we can look elsewhere, to blogs, articles, photos, even youtube clips. Basically we are not limited to one source, to one type of meaning, we have everyone pitching in to help each other.








Mobb Deep - back at you  

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

The Jungle Book

In what Wienberg says in chapter 5, the law of the jungle, he goes on about how what we use to do back then is changing in ways that would have been impossible to think of back then.  No one thought our advances in the internet, knowledge managing, and communicating would get this far, but it has, and it will keep advancing at the pace we are going.

For example, back in the day, for a artist to get well known, they would have to be the lucky ones.  I'm not saying that all the famous singers right now are just lucky, of course they have talent, but think about it, there are so many people out there that we never herd of that could probably sing as good or better.

 A line from one of Jadakiss's songs titles Why, he says this "Why is a brother up North better than Jordan That didn't get that break."  And I don't want to take away from Jordans glory, but Jadakiss could be right.  A singer right now was found on youtube and just got signed, Alyssa Bernal.  Its so easy to scout for talent now.  We went from scouting events to just going online and searching for it.  I believe that  Web 2.0 and having youtube being so miscellaneous was Alyssas break.


The good ol days haha




 I saw a connection in what Wienberg was saying and what Tim O'Reilly has said in his "what is Web 2.0" article.  The connection was how Tim was talking about how other applications evolved into web 2.0, like for example mp3.com to napster, or personal website to blogging.  I thought of this when I was reading what Wienberg was saying about how being miscellaneous is how these new web 2.0s got big in the first place. It makes sense, I'm sure that the New York Times are still read a lot even online, but when Wikipedia was being read more then that, you know that being miscellaneous is the right way to go.


"Many people now understand this idea in the
sense of “crowdsourcing,” meaning that a large group
of people can create a collective work whose value
far exceeds that provided by any of the individual
participants."

This quote is from the article Web squared, and it reminded me of how Wienberg was talking about gatekeepers.  That was the limitation of having experts going through all the papers and choosing which ones would make the cut to get published.  But just like what Tim said, "Users add value," and being able to post everything online is catering to everyone online.  Its so easy, and its using the "long tail" really well that Chris Anderson talks about because the chances of someone being interested in your post, tagged photo, and other things is very high, even if its just one more person.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Blog #3 Jan 26, 2011





What I talked about in my blog on Tuesday about organizing was movies and how me and my family organize our movies differently.  Of course everyone in my family is open to each others movies, even I don't buy most of the movies I like, I wait till my family might be interested in it also because I'm a broke college student haha.  Someone else could probably organize our movies by action, comedy, thriller, love, romantic comedies and the sorts.  But when you think about this tree with branches, you can either lump up actions and thrillers together, or slice up action with comedy action or just comedies.  Their are so many different ways of organizing movies.  Its crazy.  Of course organizing it in the tree branch kind of way is easier for everyone in the household to look for a certain type of a movie, IF you remember what the movie was about, what type of movie it was, and how it looks like.  But in my family we watch movies over and over again, for me, I can watch Independence Day a lot haha.  All I have to do is look up section and reach on the top left corner of the shelf, and there it is, independence DAY!!! HIP HOP HOORAY. But if someone else organized it differently, they could have that movie in a different place on th shelf because maybe there not tall enough, or its easier to access somewhere else.  Maybe they don't watch that movie as much as I do and put it in a place where all the old movies go.  


I think the way I organize my movies are basically lumping up all of my favorites I watch a lot, and leaving all the ones I rarely watch with my families organizations.  And if I want to watch one of theirs, I ask them. This probably says that im selfish because I put my movies in the tallest part so I can reach them while others in my family cant really, "my step dad is shorter then me also and my mom is filipino haha."  And It probably says I value my favorites a lot more then say blue rays or newer movies, because I'm broke and I cant even buy new movies a lot.  And maybe I'am a pack rat, packing all in one section, but thats the easiest for me to remember.  Its like a semi messy room, if someone else comes in and fixes it their way, you'l loose EVERYTHING. I don't mean to really loose it, but you'l have a hard time finding things that were yours that you use to find in a second.  With that being said, I think everyones TREE looks differently, shape, length, height, everything.  And whats better for me might not be better for you, but its all good, because we have the internet, and Google haha.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Everything is Miscellaneous, Wienberer, Prologue and chapters 1,2,3

First of all me start by saying that this reading was a lot of good haterade.  Hopefully my readers know what that means haha.  Basically David Weinberger goes on to just talk about how we do things now, and just say "no, dude there's an easier way to do that if you just stop being stubborn!  For example in the prologue, he talks about Staples and how its all organized to better customers to find what they want.  And he even interviews some of the workers like Mike Morgan for example and Liz McGowan.  These people want us to find things with minimal steps, yet they order things to sell more faster, basically profit is what dominates this whole organization.  They even put the dog treats lower on the shelves because kids are more likely to get their parents to buy them, and also handicapped customers in wheel chairs will have a hard time looking at shelves because they were built for people standing, looking eye to eye, basically taller then 4 ft high.  So what does David say about this? Its all worthless, because now in the digital world, we don't have to be stuck looking for what we want, asking for it, annoyed at how long its taking us, it can only be a few clicks away.  Everything doesn't need to be organized to be faster, because we all have our different wants and needs, everyone is not going to staples with the same grocery list.

In chapter 1 he also hates on some pretty big names.  First of all the most important parts of chapter 1 I found was about the orders.  Like how paper has limitations compared to the third order which is digital.  Before labels had to be smaller then the thing they were labeling, but online labels can catalog, have a link, ratings, and so on.  Way more then the old labels limited to paper.  He talks about Bill Gates who wasted millions of dollars on building a way to preserve the Bettmann Archive.  Which I thought was pretty funny because Bill Gates, seriously, as rich as you are?  You cant come up with a better way to reach information on those photos?  He talks about how long it takes if you wanted to look up a picture with a soldier on the battlefield eating, thats one pictured, but someone would have to take awhile to find that one picture.  If he only labeled it better, like how we find things on the internet, and can actually see the picture of it without taking it out of its freezing state, it would be a lot easier to get to that information.  He basically says that everything doesn't have to be so neat, so organized, that information that is messier in the way we put it could be easier for us, the customer, anyone to find what we need faster.

In chapter 2 David talks down alphabetization a lot. Man I hate typing that word haha.  He simply puts that alphabetization isn't needed anymore.  I mean back in the day it was heavenly, God wanted it. Its funny that Giovanni di Genoa wrote 400 pages explaining how to alphabetize haha.  And he didn't do it alone.  But back to the main point, basically saying screw alphabetization.  Everything has its own places, not just one place, and we are smart enough now to get what we want without it.

As for organizing something in my life, I would have to say movies.  Back home we watch movies a lot.  Im not hardcore but we keep all the dvds in one section, blue rays in one, and vhs another section.  I put all the ones I watch mostly in a corner of the top shelf of the dvd section.  I got my favorites, animes, shows, and so on.  My brother is more into the blue rays so he has his own section within that section. And everyone in the family knows their own spots where the movies are.  We know when someone messes with them and doesnt put something back to haha, it gets bad.  Looking for a movie sucks, especially when you really want to watch it, so bending over on ur knees looking through hella vhs sucks.  Thats why most of the favorites are in the open, and i guess you can say Staple eye level haha.  But im the tallest, and im left handed, so the top left handed corner of the shelf is all me =).

Monday, January 17, 2011

Web Sqaured (Web Meets World) dtc 356





I think the most important idea from this article was about the collection of data in real time.  The example about how if one product isn't selling well, it would take 6 months before for the manufacturer in china to know this, but now it happens instantaneous.  In my professional goals as to work for a certain business firm or gaming company making sure they are using all their information efficiently.  Getting real time feed back will help greatly in fixing problems that would have taken longer in the past.


Flickr is probably one of the most exciting web apps that I have seen in the past year.  Its crazy to think that all those images are from different people, cameras, taken at different times of the day and they still look amazing.  And you can pin point individual points of the pictures and zoom into it, you can be anywhere in the world at your computer.  I think it embodies what web 2.0 is all about, flickr is a collective community of users who share photos to create these massive 360 degree photos. Its simply amazing.