Monday, April 30, 2007

reading diary

creators:

i'm really digging how all of these articles mention "borrowing" one idea, making it your own, and then putting it back out there. bricolage is coming up in pretty much all of the articles that i read. i wonder, though, where the line is between plagarism and bricolage. regarding disney, all of this bricolage is fine and good, but what happens when you begin to have a major corporation (like disney) and they start extroting little kids, feeding them the same stories over and over again (ever think about how every disney princess only has one parent? ever wonder why that parent is always a doting, ignorant father, or, a cruel step-mother? ever think about the vast number of orphans in stories we tell kids? ever heard of Freud's family romance?), giving them the wrong impression of family, love, and life, and telling them stories that are just wrong. if you want to tell a kid a grimm fairy tale, tell it to them, but don't leave out the really tight parts. if you want to tell them a story and leave out the tight parts, don't tell them a grimm fairy tale.

pirates:

interesting to see how we really did live with piracy for every new invention and piece of new technology. what's the big deal now? is it just a renewed sense of capitalism? are people pissed off because they're being "swindled"? this piracy debate is so antiquated, you'd think that by now, we would realize that if you create something for the public, they're going to try and find a way to get it without paying for it, just as much as you want to be paid for it.

declaration:

this is my favorite part, regarding the "building of cyberspace": "...It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions..." my only response to this is that government, to this day, sees nature as a thing to be tamed. government is there to border off nature from civilization, and eventually, to conquer everything--moving everything from nature to civilization. the language that the author chooses is illuminating, and self-destructive.

digital speech:

"the purpose of freedom of speech...is to promote a democratic culture." fine. but this assumes that everyone is equal under the law, and i'm sorry, but everyone isn't. does this apply to every citizen? everyone who just happens to be in the us at this point and space in time? what about people who can't vote? what about students? what about illegal immigrants? does freedom of speech really exist for these people, and if it doesn't, how can it promote this democratic culture? does it do this through the interent? what about people who don't have access to the internet? what about the people left out?

a lot of what the author says in part ii suggests a reversion to oral tradition, where everyone could hear a story, keep it with them, remember it, make their own changes and adaptions, and then retell it in their own way. internet culture is a reversion back to oral tradition.

and when the author claims that "mass media products...have become the common reference points of popular culture," isn't that a horrible claim? isn't that kind of heralding the disintegration of our society? what about the reference points that we already have, like history and literature and art? what's to become of those?

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