Homework: November 30, 2007

Here are the three things I'd like you to look at for Friday's class:

1) Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, pages 5-18.

2) Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain's "Tales From the Public Domain" (the link takes you to their download page where you can get it in a variety of file formats). Read as much of it as you can, but at least the first 20 pages or so).

3) The Center for Social Media's "Remix Culture"




For each piece, ask yourself the following questions:

• How important is it for a society to allow free circulation of ideas?
• Is a "meaning" the same thing as an "idea"? If media are the technologies and practices used to circulate meanings, how central is the concept of intellectual property to it?
• How much should the government be involved in the process? Would Verhulst's argument about self-regulation be a reasonable remedy for figuring out how to assess propriety in the cases raised in each piece? Why or why not?

For Class: The Daedelus Project

For class tomorrow (Friday, November 9), I would like you to look at the following website:

http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_intro.html

Look through at least the first several pages (intro, demographics, etc.) and ask yourself the following questions:

• What are the benefits of gathering media consumer direct responses to specific questions as compared to observation in a laboratory setting?

• Can you see any detriments to this approach to media research?

• Are there any moral or ethical challenges you would face in either kind of research? What are they? How could you overcome them?

Reading Questions: Baym's "Interpersonal Life Online"

• What are Baym's communication-related characteristics of online media? Do you find any of them relevant to your own interactions with family and friends online? If you have started your Consumption Analysis already, how well do these characteristics apply to the people you have met in the forums?

• According to Baym, how do online relationships compare to real-life ones? Do you find this to be accurate in your own experience? Do you regularly keep in touch with someone online whom you do not know in real life? How would you describe your relationship with that person or people compared to your face-to-face friends?

• What is the controversy over the use of the term "community" when discussing computer-mediated communication (CMC)? What do you think about this debate?

Reading Questions: Media and Behavior

• According to McQuail, what are the different kinds of changes media may lead to? Have you experienced these in your own life?

• What is the basic presumption of social learning theories of media effects? What did the Bobo doll studies seem to prove about social learning?

• How do the McGuire Process Model and The Theory of Reasoned Action differ? How are they the same? Apply them to one of the two advertisements we watched in class on Monday: how are they helpful in understanding how those ads were produced?

Reading Questions: Grossberg 1

As you prepare for Wednesday, consider the following in response to the Grossberg reading, "Media and Money":

• What is the difference between "use value," "exchange value," and "surplus value"? If you bought a DVD at a video store of your favorite movie for $24.99 and it cost the production company $0.99 to make, which is which and where does the third one come in?

• What is an "economy of scale"? How do many media companies benefit from them?

• Do media companies tend to prefer a maximal or minimal amount of risk? What strategies do they employ to address this preference?

Reading Questions: Croteau 1

For Monday, consider the following:

• How do horizontal and vertical integration differ? Looking at the lists of holdings for the major media conglomerates (in the reading and also at the links below), which of the two types of integration is more prevalent? Why do you think this might be?

[For these questions, it may be helpful to visit the following site:http://www.cjr.org/resources/ It has current holdings for several giant conglomerates. Take a look at, at a minimum, entries for Sony, Disney, and GE.]

• Think about how the concept of "synergy" would apply to a property like "Spiderman" from Sony (use the holdings list to spur your thinking). What kinds and in what ways have media texts been produced and circulated, motivated by the concept of synergy?

• How does the need to make money shape the kinds of decisions that media companies make? What do you think about the concept of "advergames"? It is a necessary and appropriate development of our system of media production, or is it problematic? If the latter, in what ways?

[Take a look at the following site: http://mysoup.com/ It is part of the web presence for Campbell's soup. Use what you find there to answer the question above.]

Questions for Games homework

Hopefully you have had the chance to play two different games for 20 minutes each. There are numerous places on the web to find both Flash-based games playable in your browser and free downloads of current and classic PC/Mac games. You may wish to post as a comment to this entry those sites you found particularly useful in this regard.

While playing, ask yourself the following:

• How do each of Manovich's Principles of New Media enable what you can do in these games? Are there any that stand out more than others?

• How do McMahon's criteria for presence work in these games? Are there any that do not apply? Is this different between the two games you chose? If so, how does the difference affect your sense of presence with the each game?

• How is the experience of playing each game different from and similar to the experience of watching a film in the theater? Watching a film at home? Watching a television series? Watching a video clip online?