Unit 13: The Internet, Sex, Social Media, and Narrowcasting

Question 1

Articulate a rationale for the commercialization of the Internet and digital media.

Answer 1

• One element remains common in relation to commercial use of media. Social media earns its business income through advertising and tracking.
• New media instruments are more like the television, which is an instrument typically used to watch programming that the user does not possess but accesses through subscription services.
• In addition to being used for direct advertising and the accumulation of demographic data for the purposes of marketing, social media is aggressively and carefully used for the development of networks to promote or develop celebrity.
• Media can be used to track user activities to focus marketing campaigns, or to sell access to these uses to third parties, such as marketers or political organizers

Question 2

Distinguish between democratizing and surveillance elements of new media.

Answer 2

Democratizing:

• Social movement mobilization
• Decentralized networks of communication
• The technology to create and distribute materials to billions is democratized
• Digital video editing software is pre-installed on many computers, and open source software is available

Surveillance:

• Data farming
• Monitoring internet movements
• Advertising based on activity
• Governmental attempts to shut down or monitor activity
• Copyright violation
• Restricting internet websites

Question 3

Identify commercial and economic pressures on the popular culture industry that are created by digital media.

Answer 3

• New media have intensified media convergence; the economic pressures that lead to mergers and acquisitions in major business also drive media consolidation.
• Fan newsletters and magazines (print or online), or interviews in other magazines in which the producer has an interest, also contribute to media convergence.
• the Big Three in the music industry and their partners in film dominate commercial distribution and access to media, end users increasingly can create and distribute their own content in their own network at little or no cost.
• the technology that allows cultural producers to bring products into fans’ lives in new ways can also wrest control of that content from the producers
• The increased convergence and consolidation of media has been paired with increased pirating and copyright violations

Question 4

Identify relationships among genre, remediation, and forms of hegemony with regard to media convergence.

Answer 4

• “Media convergence” refers to the centralization of a specific item of content.
• Content or ambitions converge across several forms of media in a way that is deliberately synergistic or collaborative.
• the “collect all three” concept of making ads into valuable products themselves encouraged loyal media consumers to seek out the advertisement in all its forms.

Question 5

Reading - “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence.”

Answer 5

• Russo’s attempt to “queer” the process of convergence is both metaphorical and literal. She considers fan intrusion into established media and “queering” of content
• Russo broadens the use of “queer” as a verb to emphasize the disruption of the established sense of how a media product functions.
• Highlights Roland Barthes’ theory of inoculation by having a small amount of a socially unacceptable topic (homosexuality, queerness) is accepted into the mainstream to remove its threatening elements.
• Fair Use are making crucial interventions to protect the possibilities for queering both media form and media content.
• The relationship between consumers and media industries are undergoing continual negotiation.
• Fan vids render queer dimensions of these sources visible by telling homosexual stories through viewing and editing techniques.
• Marking campaigns that solicit user-generated content offer an instructive contrast to the horizontal creativity of vidders.
• Fan films (primarily produced by men) differ from fan videos (primarily produced by women).
• Fake trailers combine an edited sequence of video clips with new or borrowed trailer audio to suggest a humorous reinterpretation of the source

Question 6

Reading - “The Role of Digital Media.”

Answer 6

• Outlining the Arab Spring social movement
• Digital media provided both an awareness of shared grievances, and transportable strategies for action.
• Such media were singularly powerful in spreading protest messages, driving coverage by mainstream broadcasters, connecting frustrated citizens with one another, and helping them to realize that they could take shared action regarding shared grievances.
• The arrival of new digital media became an occasion for individuals to restructure the ways in which they produced and consumed content.