Chad Harriss (frogbritches)'s Public Profile in the Diigo Community

Member since Mar 14, 2009, follows 0 people, 0 public groups, 76 public bookmarks (76 total).

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Lessons from Littleton (Part IV) on 2009-11-19
- We should not let moral panic push us to abandon our commitment to free expression and to embrace increased government regulation of cultural content. We should take seriously our children's relationship to popular culture and create contexts where we can better understand what roles media play in their lives.
- Educators should adopt a basic ethical principle -- above all, do no harm
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- - SUPPORTIVE DIGITAL COMMUNITIES FOR YOUTH
  - The online world offers many teens a new opportunity for social connections, for finding friends outside the often closed community of their own high schools.
  - THE DEMAND FOR K-12 MEDIA EDUCATION
  - As media change influences all of our core institutions and practices, we need to acknowledge that media literacy is a basic skill, part of what it means to be a good researcher and writer, an intelligent citizen or a shrewd consumer.
  - ADULT KNOWLEDGE AND RESPECT FOR POPULAR CULTURE
  - Media education too often functions as an excuse for adults to impose their judgments, rather than as a means for mutual learning.
  - A MORE TOLERANT SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT
  - Kids whose cultural tastes are outside their school's mainstream feel at risk, ridiculed by their classmates and held suspect by their teachers. Our schools need to invest at least as much effort into understanding and responding to the cultural differences introduced by contemporary youth cultures as we spend examining the historical differences between various races and ethnic groups
  - PARENTAL DISCUSSION GROUPS ABOUT MEDIA CONTENT
  - If we are going to place the responsibility of policing culture onto parents, then we have to provide the resources they need to respond intelligently to a complex and changing cultural environment
  - CREATIVE RESPONSES FROM MEDIA PRODUCERS
  - Much popular culture isn't so much dangerous as it is banal and mind-numbing. Game designers and developers depend too heavily upon formulas as a safe way of anticipating market demand. In doing so, they fall back on violent content as much out of laziness as from any desire to exploit bloodlust. For those reasons, we need to encourage the game industry to enter a phase of self-examination, to try to better understand what draws children to the existing games.
Lessons from Littleton (Part III) on 2009-11-19
- Media effects research enjoys its current government support not because it is the best methodology for understanding the relationship between media consumption and real world behavior but because its stimulus-response model offers simple solutions to complex problems.
- Rather than starting from the assumption that we are investigating what media content is doing to our children, we should ask what our children are doing with the media they consume.
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- - My field, comparative media studies, adopts humanistic and qualitative social science methodologies to better understand those changes and explain them to the general public
  - media consumption is assumed to be active (something we do) not passive (something that happens to us).
  - media consumption is assumed to be a process; we work on media content over a long period of time; our immediate emotional reactions are only part of what one needs to understand if you want to predict real-world consequences of media consumption.
  - different consumers react to the same media content in fundamentally different ways as it is fit into their larger understanding of the world, and so universalizing claims are fundamentally inadequate for accounting for media's social and cultural impact.
  - consumer response to media is more often creative than imitative.
  - real life trumps media images every time.
  - violent entertainment offers teens a fantasy of empowerment.
  - violent entertainment offers teens a fantasy of transgression, a chance to test the limits of their parent's culture.
  - violent entertainment offers teens an acknowledgment that the world is not all sweetness and light
  - violent entertainment offers teens an intensification of emotional experience.
  - In short, teens aren't drawn to Quake or Scream because they are bloodthirsty or because they think violence is the best real-world response to their problems. These works offer them the best available vehicle for their fantasies of empowerment, take seriously what young people feel and think about the adult world, acknowledge the darker sides of the teenagers' everyday experiences, and offer an intense release from real-world tensions.
Lessons from Littleton (Part II) on 2009-11-19
- The real media critic isn't Siskel and Ebert. It's the American Medical Association and it's time to place them in charge of the FCC and other such organizations.
- Grossman argued that current scientific and medical understandings of "media effects" supported his demands that government actively regulate media content. Grossman proposes expanding the current category of pornography to include violent entertainment. His language consistently pathologizes culture, depicting media products as "toxic substances" analogous to cigarettes in their damaging impact on children's mental and physical health
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- - The shift towards a language of scientific objectivity has made it possible for a significant number of liberal democrats, such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) or Sen. Max Cleland (D-Georgia), to align themselves with conservative Republicans in calling for the regulation of media content.
  - there are many problems with this "scientific" approach to culture
  - the American Medical Association has no specific cultural expertise
  - the medical establishment promotes a fairly conservative agenda, suspicious of those cultural forms associated with the working class or ethnic and racial minorities, making recommendations that ratify their own tastes and quarantine works they dislike
  - cultural works are not carcinogens. Cultural works are complex and contradictory, open to many different interpretations, subject to various unanticipated uses.
  - Popular culture's complex relationship with its consumers cannot be reduced to simple variables or tested through lab experiments.
  - The best media effects researchers qualify their findings and few argue for a direct link between consuming media images and performing real-world violence. If video game violence was an immediate catalyst, we would have difficulty explaining why none of the shootings involving teens have occurred in movie theaters or video arcades where the direct stimulus of game playing would be most acute. Instead, these murders have tended to occur in schools and we need to look at real-world factors to discover what triggers such violence.
  - A more careful analysis would read video games as one cultural influence among many, as having different degrees of impact on different children, and as not sufficient in and of themselves to provoke an otherwise healthy and well-adjusted child to engage in acts of violence
  - Our current legal definitions of obscenity insist that the work must be "taken as a whole," read according to prevailing community standards, and judged to be "utterly without redeeming ...value." Media effects research, on the other hand, displays little or no interest in the work as a whole or in the work's meanings or values. It adopts a crude stimulus-response model of media consumption and focuses on localized "media images," not on their function within larger stories.
  - Much media effects research removes media consumption from real-world contexts and situates it in a laboratory. But media never function in a vacuum.
  - Media effects research shows limited interest in what those stories mean to the people who consume them. The focus has been on measurable biological responses -- neural stimulation, pulse, heart beat, pupil dilation.
  - Much media effects research assumes a casual connection between the physiological reactions or attitudinal shifts measured in the laboratory and subsequent real world behavior.
  - Children at a relatively early age, around four or five, began to make basic distinctions between realistic and fantastic representations of violence, with documentary images (news reports of local crime, historical footage of war, nature footage of predators and prey) far more emotionally disturbing than cartoons or video games.
Lessons from Littleton (Part I) on 2009-11-19
- Mary Douglas describes the cultural basis for witch hunts in traditional societies
- A moral panic starts with an unspeakable tragedy which sparks an attempt to ascribe blame and responsibility
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- - . Initially, accusations flow freely but focus on those targets who are already the subject of anxiety.
  - To be successful an accusation must be directed against victims hated by the populace.
  - The cause of harm must be vague, unspecific, difficult to prove or disprove."
  - Our rush to judgment overwhelms our ability to rationally assess the evidence. Our need to take action supersedes our ability to anticipate consequences. Moral panic shuts down self-examination at the very moment when real problems demand careful consideration.
  - The phrase, "cultural pollution," of course, already presumed a consensus that popular culture was a worthless irritant responsible for various social harms.
  - William Bennett, former Secretary of Education and self-proclaimed guardian of American virtue, called on Congress to make "meaningful distinctions" between works that used violence to tell "a larger story" such as Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, or Clear and Present Danger, and works that "gratuitously" exploited violence, such as The Basketball Diaries, Cruel Intentions, or Scream. His "commonsense" distinction was at heart an ideological one, separating works that offered adult perspectives from those which expressed youth concerns.
  - Adult fears about popular culture were being transferred towards those people who consumed it.
  - From the outset, Congress was unlikely to set federal policies to regulate media content, which would not have sustained constitutional scrutiny. They counted on public pressure to intimidate the entertainment industry into voluntarily withdrawing controversial works from circulation.
  - Many schools took away web and net access. Many kids were placed into therapy based on their subcultural identifications or interests in computer games or certain kinds of music. Students were punished for taking controversial positions in class discussions or on essay assignments.
Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Part One) on 2009-11-15
- What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
- What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
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- - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
  - What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
Courtney Love redefines music piracy and blasts the RIAA | Salon Technology on 2009-10-07
- I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:
  
  This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
  
  What happens to that million dollars?
  
  They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
  
  That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
  
  
  
  <script language="JavaScript1.1" type="text/javascript">
  
  </script>
  
  That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.
  
  The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)
  
  So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties.
  
  The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.
  
  The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.
  
  All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.
  
  Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.
  
  If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.
  
  Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero!
  
  
  
  <script language="JavaScript1.1" type="text/javascript">
  
  </script>
  
  How much does the record company make?
  
  They grossed $11 million.
  
  It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.
  
  The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.
  
  They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.
  
  Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.
  
  So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
Courtney Love redefines music piracy and blasts the RIAA | Salon Technology on 2009-10-07
- I don't know what a good sponsorship would be for me or for other artists I respect. People bring up sponsorships a lot as a way for artists to get our music paid for upfront and for us to earn a fee. I've dealt with large corporations for long enough to know that any alliance where I'm an owned service is going to be doomed.
- We suffer as a society and a culture when we don't pay the true value of goods and services delivered. We create a lack of production. Less good music is recorded if we remove the incentive to create it.
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- - When the judgment came against MP3.com, the RIAA sought damages of $150,000 for each major-label-"owned" musical track in MP3's database. Multiply by 80,000 CDs, and MP3.com could owe the gatekeepers $120 billion.
  - But what about the Plimsouls? Why can't MP3.com pay each artist a fixed amount based on the number of their downloads? Why on earth should MP3.com pay $120 billion to four distribution companies, who in most cases won't have to pay a nickel to the artists whose copyrights they've stolen through their system of organized theft?
  - It's a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system.
Courtney Love redefines music piracy and blasts the RIAA | Salon Technology on 2009-10-07
- A new company that gives artists true equity in their work can take over the world, kick ass and make a lot of money.
- The bootleggers have a better distribution system.
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- - I'm afraid of Napster because I think the major label cartel will get to them before I do.
  - Music is a service to its consumers, not a product.
  - But in a world of total connectivity, record companies lose that control. With unlimited bin space and intelligent search engines, fans will have no trouble finding the music they know they want. They have to know they want it, and that needs to be a marketing business that takes a fee.
  - I want to give you some advice: Learn to speak our language. Talk about songs and melody and hooks and art and beauty and soul. Not sleazy record-guy crap, where you're in a cashmere sweater murmuring that the perfect deal really is perfect, Courtney. Yuck. Honestly hire honestly committed people.
  - Don't tell me I'm a brand. I'm famous and people recognize me, but I can't look in the mirror and see my brand identity.
  - I also feel filthy trying to call my music a product. It's not a thing that I test market like toothpaste or a new car. Music is personal and mysterious.
Courtney Love redefines music piracy and blasts the RIAA | Salon Technology on 2009-10-07
- Maybe our culture will get more interesting than the one currently owned by Time Warner
- Since I've basically been giving my music away for free under the old system, I'm not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other threats to my copyrights.
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- - Record companies are terrified of anything that challenges their control of distribution.
  - There were a lot of factors that made a distributor decide to push a recording through the system:
    
    How powerful is management?
    Who owes whom a favor?
    What independent promoter's cousin is the drummer?
    What part of the fiscal year is the company putting out the record?
    Is the royalty rate for the artist so obscenely bad that it's almost 100 percent profit instead of just 95 percent so that if the record sells, it's literally a steal?
    How much bin space is left over this year?
    Was the record already a hit in Europe so that there's corporate pressure to make it work?
    Will the band screw up its live career to play free shows for radio stations?
    Does the artist's song sound enough like someone else that radio stations will play it because it fits the sound of the month?
    Did the artist get the song on a film soundtrack so that the movie studio will pay for the video?
  - [I will] allow millions of people to get my music for nothing if they want and hopefully they'll be kind enough to leave a tip if they like it.
Courtney Love redefines music piracy and blasts the RIAA | Salon Technology on 2009-10-07
- It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'.
- There were a billion music downloads last year, but music sales are up. Where's the evidence that downloads hurt business? Downloads are creating more demand.
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- - Somewhere along the way, record companies figured out that it's a lot more profitable to control the distribution system than it is to nurture artists.
  - Record companies controlled the promotion and marketing; only they had the ability to get lots of radio play, and get records into all the big chain store. That power put them above both the artists and the audience. They own the plantation
  - Being the gatekeeper was the most profitable place to be, but now we're in a world half without gates
  - And filters are replacing gatekeepers
  - The present system keeps artists from finding an audience because it has too many artificial scarcities: limited radio promotion, limited bin space in stores and a limited number of spots on the record company roster.

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