Now that I am all graduated and such, I know some of you wanted to read my graduate thesis. It’s titled Our Foreign Selves: Mapping Transnational Media in a Real-time World. The (revised) abstract and PDF download link are below.

News and entertainment media once limited to their home regions now find a global audience, bringing with them messages and cultural idiosyncrasies to an audience adjusted to simple media consumption. As these cultural ideas enter transnational conversation, societies passively appropriate them into everyday discourse. Recognising those messages and understanding their effect is imperative to managing each society’s cultural development and identity. In analysing two transnational media events for their messages, this paper reveals the similarities and differences in major media reporting in separate cultural contexts, offering an entry point to the development of a transnational media literacy.

Download the PDF with these restrictions:

Our Foreign Selves: Mapping Transnational Media in a Real-time World by Joel G Goodman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

“Steve Jobs is dead” read the headline on many a news blog last evening. For more than three hours my Twitter stream was filled with quotes, condolences, epiphanies of the frailty of life, and tributes to one the greatest inventors, innovators, and marketers ever to live in this earth. A connected globe of humans mourned this man’s passing in the same instant, connected to each other, united with each other, by way of their media extensions. Millions of people who, even six years ago, would mostly be considered strangers in the others’ minds were instantly family.

The transient nature of these connections is interesting–and probably a deeper topic for another post–and it led to a specific group of people (call them trolls or otherwise) who just could not understand the outpouring of tribute for a man they had never met. “Why,” they asked, “would we mourn someone who made mistakes? Who behaved, sometimes, like a terrible person? Whose life was focused on business?” ¶ Read More…

While I don’t believe that Amazon’s Cloud Drive is all that innovative or special or game-changing, the way they are handling the Big Four music labels very well could be. According to this story at Ars Technica, Amazon did no license negotiation with the Industry, opting instead to put up a logical defense that could be the beginnings of a major sea change in consumer media consumption.

“[W]e do not need a license to store music in Cloud Drive,” Griffin added in an e-mail to Ars. “The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive or even iTunes.”

Amazon is practically begging the RIAA and label legal counsels to break down their doors with lawsuits. However, I believe this act is what could be a major turning point for both major media creators and distributors, as well as for consumers.

If the Big Four were smart, they would work with Amazon, leave it alone for a few months, and more than likely see their sales rise. This is the next logical step in convenience purchasing for consumers. No longer do you have to download, toss into iTunes and sync the song with your player – now you can buy it and have it instantly available to stream, anywhere (well almost – there’s this whole issue of Cloud Player being desktop or Android-only). If that doesn’t stimulate impulse buys, then I don’t know what will.

But, as we’ve seen over the past nearly-a-decade, the Big Four are not smart. As @fienen noted earlier:

The music industry is like the only place that expects you to buy their product, but then they do everything to prevent use.

So this is Amazon’s big chance. If they get taken to court–and seriously, how could they not have been expecting to?–and get a good judge, this could be a pivotal moment in how we access media. I’m not getting my hopes up that it will be, but it will be interesting to see how things play out.

I spent the last few days sitting in various meeting rooms, talking to a great community of people whom I normally only interact with over Twitter or otherwise, and having a good bit of fun. I love the HighEdWeb conference. I missed it so much in 2009 when I was unable to attend. This year was just as much fun, if not more, as I’m no longer the new kid.

But. My entire outlook on the web in Higher Education has changed. And I realized that it hasn’t changed to be in line with the rest of the community.
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I have just finished my final project for Media Literacy entitled, “Are You Media Literate?”

Are You Media Literate?

Check out the project →

Where do the lines stand? We now live in an age where borrowing, copying and reusing creative works is the rule. From music remix culture to the more current trend in lifting authored written works for use in new publications, the boundaries of fair use and appropriation are blurred through the lens of this new participatory culture.

As the debate stands, there are quite a few sides to join. In this essay we will examine the scope of the copyleft movement and identify the beneficial aspects of adopting a Creative Commons-style approach to appropriation. In doing so, we will gain support from original copyright provisions in the United States Constitution as well as current real-life examples of the benefits. In appropriation of others’ works, it is important to respect the copyright holder’s rights. At the same time, in order for creative culture to progress, creators must be open to allowing their works to be referenced, used, and incorporated into new art forms.

Modern copyright law is a far cry from its roots, and provisions on fair use are not so fair. The United States Constitution declares,

“The Congress shall have Power…To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; (Article I, Section 8, emphasis mine)”

Today, copyright provisions last too long and in turn stifle the “Progress of Science and useful Arts.” In 1998 the time limit became the life of the author (or creator) plus 70 years with the passing of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. As Marc Garcelon (2009) points out, this is far longer than the “original 14-year limit that copyright established in 1790 (p. 1308).” In doing so, Congress further blurred the distinction between ideas and expression that Thomas Jefferson originally intended in writing the constitution (p. 1308). ¶ Read More…

Recently I wrote about Google Buzz and some of its shortfalls, detailing what it does and doesn’t do well, along with some speculative scenarios that could see Buzz becoming a dangerous infraction on privacy. I think this did well to give a very basic overview of what Buzz does and, hopefully, help us be on the look out as responsible media users for things that seem just a little bit fishy in the Google world.

What that little project didn’t do is look at the inner workings of Google the parent company or how Buzz was birthed. Now, I’m not an insider and Google itself isn’t the most vocal about its trade secrets. However, with a little bit of research and the help of people who keep track of acquisitions, I think we can start to get a pretty good picture of what makes up Buzz.
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Today Conan decided to finally follow someone on Twitter. His choice was random (so he says), but the lucky Sarah Killen has no doubt felt the power of his action. And it’s an interesting case study in the power of celebrity in the new digital participatory culture.

When Conan O’Brien first created a Twitter account we students of social media had a fun new game to play: Guess how many followers Conan will have after each refresh. When I got into the game, he had around 71,500 followers and jumped up to over 72k in less than a minute. And kept climbing. That was eight days ago.

What’s really interesting is Conan’s foreshadowing:

Today, Conan has 535,275 followers as of this writing (and climbing, no doubt). Sarah, the one person he decided to follow, gained over 2000 followers in a matter of minutes. And, as in Conan’s case, that number is still climbing.

Behold the power of celebrity in participatory culture. This makes me wonder if Conan and his crew realize the amount of influence they have on the web. I’m sure they do. Now, Sarah Killen’s life probably isn’t changing all that much. But she has been brought up alongside Conan’s image and, holding onto his coattails, so to speak. Pretty fascinating. I wonder if NBC is noticing this and realizing how incredibly bad their move to get rid of him was…

Online search giant Google recently made its foray into the formal social media sphere with its Google Buzz service. Tied into the popular Gmail web-based email client, Buzz was rolled out to Google’s approximately 146 million most active users, the company saying that a social network has always been beneath the surface of its email technology (WSJ.com). But even with the current social-media craze, many users were unhappy with what seemed to be an intrusion on their everyday social routines. We’ll look at some of these users’ comments and I’ll espouse what I see to be some of the possibilities that we might not be hearing over the Buzz. ¶ Read More…

It’s no secret that I’m addicted to social media, or that my favourite outlet is Twitter.

Why? So many people I (or my friends) come into contact with don’t get it. They say Twitter is stupid. Given, most of them haven’t checked out the service. But while they’re making fun of Twitter, they’re off spending hours on end on Facebook or MySpace. You know, the old social media. (Strange we have old New Media already, yes?)

But Twitter is the anti-Facebook. On Facebook you’re bombarded with photos, fan suggestions, ‘Become a Zombie’ requests, snowballs, and God knows what else that is hiding in the depths of their app schemas. Last week it was suggested I become a fan of curly fries. Really? Curly fries?
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