Entertainment

Brenda Laurel has written extensively about "computers as theater," suggesting that performance is an integral part of how we interact with computers. When we use computers, we become part of an imagined world in which the representation -- the imagined and enacted creation -- is all there is.

Use of computers, she says, is “a collaborative exercise of the imaginations of the creators of a program and the people who use it.”

Both computer use and theater:

Attempt to amplify and orchestrate experience.
Have “the capacity to represent actions and situations that do not and cannot exist in the real world, in ways that invite us to extend our minds, feelings and senses to envelop them.”

What do you think?

Is the Internet an inherently playful medium? Does interactivity, in particular, facilitate play?

What is the effect of using the Internet to play with ideas, roles or actions that we cannot enact offline for various reasons -- practical, legal, ethical, moral?

Do our tools pose any boundaries or limits on our play? Can we do what the tools or the code does not enable?

Play theory -- yes, there is such a thing -- has some potentially interesting applications to the Internet.

Among other things, it posits that play is self-enhancing and even self-creating: It centers on individual choices about what messages to consume and how to process them.

Play allows us to construct a personal identity, to counter external social control, and to express and portray ourselves.

Will Stephenson (at Iowa in the 1970s) applied play theory to mass communication, which he saw as primarily an agent of entertainment and pleasure. Use of the media is enjoyable or pleasurable in and of itself -- not because of any particular purpose or goal it enables us to fulfill.

Stephenson saw two primary dichotomies:

Between communication pleasure (communication is inherently enjoyable in and of itself) and pain (communication is work).

Between convergent selectivity (the existential idea that we can freely choose what we do -- for instance, what media products we consume -- independent of external forces) and social control (no, we can’t).

What do you think?

How might you connect play theory to use of the Internet?

Are online media essentially play or work?

Even games have rules. Are there rules relating to the Internet? Would you characterize the medium as orderly or chaotic?

As a producer of online content, how might you enhance the playful attributes of the Internet?

The Shefrin article about online LOTR and Star Wars fans raises a number of interesting ideas ...

Are all digital media inherently participatory?

Are we entering a communications era when anyone can and will both produce and consume all content forms?

If so, how will that change the media? Our society?

Does the balance of power inherent in the creation and distribution of media products actually shift ... or just give an illusion of shifting?

Where does that power lie (past, present or future)?

How can or should traditional producers adapt in such an environment?

Shefrin talks about participatory fandom as an online community with a "sustained emotional and physical engagement" (p. 273) with a particular narrative universe.

How do her views compare with those of Dreyfus, who suggests that engagement cannot be disembodied -- cannot be separated from physical presence?

Are online fan sites different from fan conventions? If so, how? To what effect?

Shefrin says this form of engagement "visualizes a non-commercial, shared ownership with the media company that holds the commercial, legal property rights" ...

... Which takes us to music in a digital environment.

Is the Internet a "gift economy," as Web Theory suggests?

If so, how do traditional media fit in? If the Internet cannot sustain their revenue model, then what might replace it?

There have been interesting explorations into moving copyright in new directions, particularly with the idea of partial copyright -- "some rights reserved" -- enacted by such organizations as Creative Commons.

Are such solutions desirable? Feasible?

How, if at all, do the old rules apply when the nature of communication changes?

Whose needs are served, partially served or ignored by the status quo? By changes?

Do new communication technologies provide an impetus for rethinking the relationship (and perpetual tension) between capitalism and democracy?

In general, copyright raises many issues online. How do you balance a desire to safeguard and reward creativity with the need to ensure public accessibility to creative works? How do you do it in an environment in which:

An infinite number …
Of absolutely flawless copies can be made …
Or, if you prefer, indetectably manipulated ...
And disseminated to millions instantly?

Oh, and by the way, our nation’s No. 1 export just happens to be intellectual property. Copyrighted material contributed $400 billion a year to the national economy by the late 1990s.

In a traditional media model, we have creators -- artists, writers, filmmakers ... journalists -- and we have an audience, the people who consume/buy/use the creators' stuff.

And in between, we have a bunch of middlemen: the film or music studios, the publishers, the distributors and so on.

How does interactive technology affect the middlemen -- what happens to the people who facilitated a one-way content flow when the flow goes both ways?
What happens to gatekeepers, the people whose (generally self-appointed) role involved quality control?

The Society Online chapter about music offered a musical stroll through time, with a few interesting ideas emerging. For instance ...

How does the idea of a shift over time from embodied music to disembodied music fit with other technological or social trends (a la Marvin or Carey, say)?

The authors list four related consequences of the digitization of music:

* Digital technology democratizes the recording process, allowing more musicians into the game.

* Sound has become vastly easier to manipulate and replicate.

* ... As well as to disseminate around the world.

* The costs of doing these things has come way, way down.

Which of these has the most significant implications? Does digitization equal democratization, or is there more to it? Is there any down side to democratization?

The research mentioned only briefly at the end suggests support for one of Shanto Iyengar's findings: that the availability of more choices seems to translate into increased sampling of those choices by users.

Does that correspond with your own experience?

Do you think that's a permanent change, or does it have to do with the novelty of the form?

What implications are there at a broader level for society, particularly for civic behavior?

Do these findings suggest causality ... or correlation?

The chapter about book reading suggested evidence of a "more-more" environment (rather than a zero sum or "either-or" one).

The Internet, their data analysis showed, does not compete with time for reading books. Instead, the two forms of reading fill different niches in our day and different needs in our lives ... at least for college students, at least in the short term.

Does this correlate with your own experience?

Where does television fit in?

The authors touch on a "digital divide" concern at the end: whether advantages of reading, online or offline, will continue to accumulate so that the info-rich are doubly advantaged.

"They possess information, social connections and cultural capital, and they know how to get more when they need it."

If so, what should we do about this? Do we continue pushing technology in public schools ... or what?

Finally, a few questions for you about pop culture ...

Is the internet an artifact of popular culture? A vehicle of it? Both? Neither?

Is it possible for the Internet to be a vehicle of “non-pop” culture?

Is identifying "pop culture" in the age of the Internet more about who produces it than who consumes it? Is that a shift?
Does the power dynamic change online? If so, who is newly empowered? If not, why not?
Where is overlap or relationship between mass comm and pop culture, especially online?

What impact do new communication forms have on existing pop culture artifacts?

On "high culture" artifacts?
The Internet (even more than other media forms) is a medium of endlessly fluid reappropriations of cultural artifacts. What are the implications of this endlessly iterative process?
What might a well-constructed study of pop culture in an online context look like?