Archive for December, 2007
Voices Of Uncertainty - The AMPTP In Their Own Words
Jennifer Holt, University of California, Santa Barbara — December 20th, 2007|
Members of the AMPTP are seen here sounding quite certain that the internet is the future of entertainment and the key to the continued good fortunes of global media conglomerates everywhere.
With the sounds of old media typing away underneath, reminding us that indeed the entertainment at issue still needs to be written, the CEOs seem to be very clear that digital revenues will be a windfall. The only thing they are not sure of is exactly how huge that windfall will be.
Still, due to [...]
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Strike You!
Ellen Seiter, University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts — December 19th, 2007|
YouTube has been an amazing resource for me—as a teacher of television. I especially like the way that it enables me to show historic television clips and TV from other countries. I also get as much fun as anybody out of watching amateur videos: the favorite in our house is watching the vast repertoire of amateur musical theatre classics either performed in school auditoriums or teen bedrooms. (Go ahead, I dare you, search under a favorite show tune and see what comes up.) Yet nothing on [...]
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The AMPTP vs. The World
Derek Kompare, Southern Methodist University — December 18th, 2007|
Seven weeks into this strike, you almost feel sorry for the AMPTP.
This video, from SNL’s Fred Armisen, illustrates precisely why they’ve irrevocably lost the PR war on the internet. The tone of their rhetoric has thus far run the spectrum from mock concern to mock outrage (taking in mock conciliation and mock impatience along the way), and videos like this (and trulydangerous’ “The AMPTP Responds” series) easily reveal the vested truth behind all the smarm. It’s hard to believe [...]
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Of Scabs and Cats: The WGA’s Internet Campaign
Miranda Banks, University of Southern California — December 16th, 2007|
Hollywood knows the importance of media attention better than almost any industry. With negotiations between the AMPTP and the WGA again called off, the two sides have been strategizing on how best to sway public opinion. While the AMPTP has been running full-page ads in national newspapers and has just signed with the formerly union-friendly P.R. firm Fabiani & Lehane, the WGA does not have such deep pockets. Rather writers have been using the Internet—the key site of debate that, in may ways [...]
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Alternative, mainstream or ?: The case of Radio Bilingue
Dorothy Kidd, University of San Francisco — December 14th, 2007|
This clip comes from "Linea Abierta" (Open Line), the national Spanish-language call-in show of Radio Bilingúe. For twelve years, the program has been the only live network-distributed talk show on Spanish language radio, airing on 56 stations (34 in the US, 20 in Mexico and 2 in Puerto Rico). It’s produced by the six-station network Radio Bilingúe, the national Latino public radio network headquartered in Fresno and San Francisco, CA.
I picked this clip for a couple of reasons. First, [...]
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Citizens’ Media in Southern Colombia
Clemencia Rodriguez, University of Oklahoma — December 13th, 2007|
The English translation of the text in the video is:
“Fabián, Juan Carlos, Mono and Yason present to you “Los Raspachines” (term used in Colombia to call laborers who pick coca leaves)
Fabian and Juan Carlos are picking coca leaves. A farmer buys the leaves from them. We go to the corner store to shop for groceries. Fabián buys the coffee. Juan Carlos buys the panela (dark sugar-cane paste used by Colombian poor families to complement a low-calory diet). Fabián and Juan Carlos pay [...]
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Jesus 2.0: Christian Identity and Community on Godtube
Allison Perlman, Penn State University - Erie — December 12th, 2007|
Founded by Dallas Theological Seminary student and former CBS television producer Chris Wyatt, Christian website Godtube combines user-generated video, live webcasts (many of church services and ministries), and social networking opportunities. Godtube is a for-profit enterprise, earning revenue by accepting secular and religious advertising spots, charging subscription fees to ministries, and selling demographic data to marketers and media producers. The hundreds of videos that are uploaded e [...]
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Deconstructing Television from Within: the Alternative Aesthetics of Paper Tiger Television
Laura Stein, University of Texas at Austin — December 11th, 2007|
This year is the 25th anniversary of Paper Tiger Television (PTTV), an alternative media collective best known for its verbal deconstruction of mainstream media programs, products and practices and its aesthetic deconstruction of television. This long running public access cable program pioneered a punk, DIY look that included painted backdrops, hand made and hand held graphics, a mix of black & white and colored footage, rough edits, meandering camera work, informal hosts, and irreverent cuta [...]
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Rory Bremner as Ahmadinejad: The Purity of Alternative Media
Chris Atton, Napier University — December 10th, 2007|
There is much talk about the ‘purity’ of alternative media. But are we simply to think of alternative media in terms of their opposition to a mainstream (whatever that is)? Alternative media can be just as subject to the same economic and political pressures that are present in more dominant forms of media. In addition, alternative journalists and commentators do not necessarily reject all existing forms of representation (there is, after all, relatively little avant-garde or experimental [...]
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Writers & Authorship
Julia Himberg, University of Southern California — December 21st, 2007