When the Sheen Is Off

As someone who has written about web generators and mash-ups, I have to say something about the latest series of Internet memes involving rehab-refusing actor Charlie Sheen and his wild statements in recent transgressive public appearances. In the mash-up category, we have Cats Quote Charlie Sheen and online quizzes about "Whose Line Is It Anyway: Gaddafi/Sheen," as well as a YouTube video in which Sheen serves as Gaddafi's translator.

The Charlie Sheen Random Quote Generator is also making the virtual rounds. You can even have a quote generating widget as a Wordpress plugin.

To the Victor

The digital rhetoric surrounding the victory of artificial intelligence in a match against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter seems to benefit both the corporate sponsor, IBM, and a last-century television gameshow that is now hoping to promote its various digital brands, which range from a Wii game for at-home family entertainment to an iPhone app for would-be contestants on the run.

The heavily hyped "man-machine" competition designed to garner ratings and media attention seems to have had its desired effect. It even has merited its own TED talk to narrowcast to the digerati, and the company is declaring broadly that "humans win" in presenting its own teary online drama about the computer scientists behind the scene.

Certainly the technical challenges faced by the IBM team grappling with the rule systems of human language and knowledge representation made former victories by IBM computers against human chess champions seem like relatively simple feats by comparison. Based on the company's triumph on the game show, their corporate public relations is now promoting the machine's efficacy in fields like health care, although those who remember the computer's bungled answers might not yet be ready to place their lives in its care.

In a statement, longtime Virtualpolitik friend and former Jeopardy winner Jerome Vered doesn't give as much credit to the technology as he does to the way that the game itself is structured as a competition between self-interested agents that unfolds according to the logic of an individual game.

Note also that "Watson" is not named for Sherlock Holmes' famous sidekick in solving crimes, but for the father-son successive IBM heads "both named Watson," as Peter Lunenfeld tells us in his "genealogy of digital visionaries" in The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine.

Facebook Showdown

As someone who writes about gender and technology, of course I had to be in the audience for the film The Social Network this weekend.

Luckily the movie was a little more sophisticated than the overly simple explanation in the plot line in which Mark Zuckerberg launches his famous Internet start-up to impress a girl who dumps him and to compensate for not being part of the final club scene at Harvard.

There were certain hackneyed generalizations about dystopia (social network sites being addictive) and utopia (the ecstasy of real-time experience bridging two countries) in the film. And women tended to be the prototypical users of software (a Stanford girl, an Oxford girl, etc.) while men are depicted as its creators. Also annoying were the "Eureka" moments on screen: our hero invents relationship status and the Facebook wall as we watch.

In general, the gender politics depended too much on clichés about women abused by distant men who could exploit their anonymity and indulge in the voyeuristic desire to surveil.

Fortunately, Justin Timberlake was there to steal the show as the co-founder of Napster and to define the parameters of Silicon Valley/South of Market cool. And the premise of presenting the story essentially as a courtroom drama (okay, a deposition drama) was somewhat interesting.

I just wish that all the onscreen action about Facebook lawyering could have been about the company's user agreements not the contract disputes between the many alleged founders of the site.

The Sixty Million Dollar Man

Virtualpolitik friend Kembrew McLeod recently wrote in the Atlantic about "How to Make a Documentary About Sampling--Legally."

While we raised the money to license about two-dozen songs and some footage, our film nevertheless contains over 400 brief-but-unlicensed uses of copyrighted material. When I can't sleep at night, I sometimes count how much we'd be liable for: up to $150,000 in statutory damages, per infringement. 400 x $150,000 = $60,000,000. Sixty. Million. Dollars.

Why did we use so many clips? Ben and I wanted the film's aesthetic to reflect its subject matter: collage, hip-hop sampling, and the rise of remix culture. Copyright Criminals documents how hip-hop producers have, since the genre's origins, cut and pasted portions of old records into their own music. For years, hip-hop stayed beneath the commercial radar, which gave producers a lot of creative freedom to make their art however they wished. The music that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s often featured densely layered musical collages that were groundbreaking.
. . .
Fun fact: If they sue us, the case would be called Bridgeport v. Copyright Criminals. Something is fundamentally wrong when a professor who studies copyright has problems making and distributing a documentary because the film's subject matter stands in the way. But after a lot of hard work, our film made it into the world.

So, how did we pull it off? Two words: fair use. This U.S. statute allows you to quote from copyrighted works without permission for the purposes of education, commentary, criticism, and other transformative uses. In 2005, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Social Media worked with documentarians to develop and publish an influential document that helped strengthen fair use. The Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use provides clear guidelines for quoting copyrighted content in ways that documentarians considered fair.

Given that courts pay attention to a particular community's standards when deciding copyright infringement cases, this was a key factor in successfully persuading broadcasters, DVD distribution companies, and insurers to relax their stringent rights clearance policies. This made it possible for Copyright Criminals to air on television. In fact, fair use might very well apply to the many examples of transformative sampling documented in Copyright Criminals; even music industry attorneys have privately admitted this to me. One major irony of our film is that if fair use had been more firmly established for sampling twenty years ago, things might have turned out very differently for Public Enemy and others.

It's a rhetorically interesting piece in which McLeod wants to distance himself from "the rant of a spoiled child" and uses the language of civics to make his point, as when he says that the public needs a "democratic system of checks and balances developed by real people."

It's My Party and I'll Fie If I Want To

Fallout from social computing snafus associated with the Oscars and the Olympics has caused award winners at both to be treated with persona non grata status. According to this story in the Los Angeles Times, a producer of the critically acclaimed film The Hurt Locker was to be barred from the ceremony because of trash-talking about another best film nominee, the sci-fi extravaganza Avatar. Allegedly Nicholas Chartier sent an e-mail urging academy members to vote for films from his production company rather than "the $500-million film" alternative.

Bronze medal winning snowboarder Scotty Lago was punished for allowing slightly racy pictures of erotic horsing around with his medal to be photographed and then disseminated virally on the web. This round-up on "Scoring Social Media Use in the 2010 Olympics" describes controversies, crowd sourcing, and new types of information graphics playing out in the winter games.

The YouTubing of ABC

Virtualpolitik friend David Folkenflik has recently reported on how layoffs at ABC indicate that news programmers there might follow the lead of other networks and news broadcasters and adopt the techniques of so-called "citizen journalism" in which participants record events without management by media professionals.

You know, one of the things that ABC has been experimenting with is being much more nimble. Think of some of the footage we saw from Haiti in recent weeks. Anderson Cooper of CNN among many others, holding his own camera getting exceptionally good digital footage out there. There have been number of anchors and correspondents at ABC, you think of people like Dan Harris and Bill Weir, have been experimenting with that over the last year.

Conan the Contrarian

The fight between Conan O'Brien and NBC executives over the network's evening late night schedule would seem to be hardly a digital rhetoric story. After all, this is all about local affiliates, conventional ratings system, and the norms of prime time programming in the traditional one-to-many broadcast model, as the NBC network tries to respond to the perceived failure of comedian Jay Leno in the nightly ten o'clock spot, which has become associated with scripted crime drama not cheap-to-produce talk shows.

However, O'Brien is counting on the power of the fan culture that Henry Jenkins has described in the book Convergence Culture in entering into a stand-off with NBC brass, where he has refused to leave the traditional Tonight Show spot inhabited by Johnny Carson for many years, right after the eleven o'clock local news. In issuing his widely reposted "people of earth" statement, O'Brien has dared NBC to force him to move. Since issuing this refusal, he has also run comedy bits on the Tonight Show that mock NBC's corporate business decisions, including its historic losses on the Winter Olympics.

Now fans of Conan may join one of many Facebook pages, including this one, and have begun to Twitter up a storm with the hashtag #teamconan.

Disclaimer: Okay, I know Conan from college, as a number of incriminating photographs, including this one, demonstrates. But it is still an interesting digital rhetoric story nonetheless.

Glossed in Translation

The magazine for one of Italy's largest newspapers has done a two-page story on my work. Check it out at "Lezione minima di virtualpolitik." It includes some of my favorite minor meditations about how powerful women are treated by the web, oddball government sites around the world, a mention of Virtualpolitik friend Geert Lovink, and my thesis about pseudo-participation.

Losing Touch

A Recent Wall Street Journal Opinion piece, "If Odysseus Had GPS," points to a relationship between technological innovation and narrative genres that might not be necessarily there. Of course, telephone communication is often featured in movies, and cell phones have become an important part of plot lines that once created suspense by having characters out of contact, but the continuing contemporary fascination with castaways seems to indicate that the Odysseus storyline is a permanent part of our culture. It could be argued, in fact, that the more we are connected, the more we experience anxiety about disconnection.

Thanks to Peter Krapp for the link.

Tagging Someone's Property Because a Website Tells You To is Thinking for Yourself?

This is a line that I heard last night as I watched the premiere episode of V, the remake of the 1983 TV miniseries about aliens who pose as humans to disguise their identities as carnivorous reptiles. ABC is trying to encourage online fandom by plugging the "Peace Ambassador Program" and emphasizing the plot device that aliens are recruiting human collaborators by using the Internet to spread their propaganda. (Of course, the Internet is also the source of paranoid conspiracy theories that bring doubters to the resistance movement as well.) Given all the online tie-ins, it is surprising that the network didn't make the website that they show in the series "visitmothership.com" a working site.

Revival House

Although media companies often express anxieties about film and television shows being posted on YouTube, more media conglomerates are actually sanctioning the free bandwidth that YouTube offers for older entertainment properties that could have new licensing lives with renewed interest from younger audiences. For example, one of the blogs for the Los Angeles Times has highlighted how YouTube is showing Ghostbusters for the film's 25th anniversary. Of course, the Abba channel may be my favorite site for hawking retro sentiment in the digital age.

Update: And, of course, as a convention attendee back in the pre-cool days of junior high, who can forget the original Star Trek series on YouTube. Luckily only family members remember when I had a pattern book for Enterprise uniforms and a communicator replica that I had airplane glued myself.

Hot Babes and Hot Mikes

One of the interesting features of the public disgrace of conservative state legislator Michael Duvall, whose official website is already down, is that it was a sex scandal that involved electronic mediation and remote transfers of information but didn't involve the Internet. He wasn't brought down by traditional means such as an attempted dalliance with an undercover police officer or betrayal by dubious financial records or a madam's black book. But it wasn't a bad e-mail, text message, or YouTube moment either. Instead, earlier this summer, Duvall was bragging about his extramarital sexual conquests to another lawmaker while his microphone for the in-house television station of the state assembly was "live" right below him. Soon a local Southern California news station was running with the sleazy story involving spanking and pirate underwear, as well as improper conduct with at least one female lobbyist. Because the station has been enforcing takedown notices on YouTube, there haven't been many remixes with the Duvall audio track.

Trailer Trash

Although the New York Times is taking the "blockbuster trailer" of James Cameron's Avatar very seriously, YouTube doesn't necessarily treat the impending debut of the film with the same gravitas. A number of Avatar trailers on the site only lead to Rick Rolls, and despite a number of DMCA takedown notices, a number of variants of this humorous jibe at computer-generated animation continue to appear.

A Flare for the Dramatic

I really hate the look of digital lens flare that is manufactured in postproduction software packages, particularly when its used on images that were created without a camera, as in the case of the CGI in films like the 2005 The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. This send-up of the over-use of the effect in the new Star Trek film illustrates how strange the combination of an aesthetic from an obsolete technology with celestial imagery of coronas and other otherworldly lighting could be.

Peep Holes

The premise of this film to be shot entirely with surveillance cameras promises to play with ideas of cinematic voyeurism and urban storytelling in new ways. However, it remains to be seen if the film can get beyond the gimmick. After all, Cloverfield used the perspective of a hand-held camera traded off among a group of friends for considerably more banal disaster flick purposes. Although the film never explored the way vernacular practices could tie into storytelling either.

Thanks to Peggy Weil for the link.

Beyond the Beyond

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this year's Beyond Broadcast conference at USC. They've had a lively pre-conference ning site that has also publicized the work of the Center for Social Media and the intellectual property issues around "fair use" that is "fairly difficult" that are symbolized in the following clip.



For more academic uses of the "Downfall meme," go here.

It may be instructive to see how attendees behave themselves on less normative social network sites, given the use of Twitter at academic conferences.

AutoTuning Them Out

Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction plug-in for music production software, has become almost an auditory cliché, which appears in everything from music by T-Pain to hit singles from the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Now the online version of TIME magazine points out in "Auto-Tune the News" that the software is now being used for satiric purposes, as the video above indicates. I might argue that Obama's voice doesn't work as well being rendered musically by Auto-Tune in this imaginary duet with the Obama girl. And bad compositing was part of the group's aesthetic in an earlier auto-tuning news video as well.

One of the most interesting videos is called "Martin Luther King Sings," which combines an august rhetorical occasion in the history of Civil Rights with computer-generated musical alteration. Surprisingly, the video hasn't yet been hit by a takedown notice from King's notoriously litigious heirs, who rarely allow his voice and image on the Internet.



More on the background of creator Michael Gregory is here.

(Apparently amateur content-creators can't resist Auto-Tuning five-year-olds and babies as well.)

Update: Now there is an Auto-Tune remix of the TV pitches of the Sham Wow Slap-Chop guy.

For more on Auto-Tune, see this NPR story about Auto-Tune and Melodyne.

n00b news

The big digital rhetoric stories of the day probably have to do with how Twitter is being used by traditional television broadcasters to promote one-to-many properties for mass audiences.

Transmedia giant Oprah Winfrey had her first day on Twitter, but was soon criticized by those in the Twitterati who tried to explain the conventions of the 140 character microblogging site to the talk show / lifestyle magazine guru who has launched bestselling books and presidential campaigns in the past. NPR and Yahoo news pointed out that her first tweet seemed to consist of all-caps "shouting," which is frowned upon by netiquette experts. And Steve Garfield noted that she needed to learn to use the "at" sign properly.

Meanwhile, celebrity Ashton Kutcher won a competition with newschannel CNN in a race to the one million follower mark.

Marc My Words

In this conversation on the Charlie Rose show with software engineer and founder of multiple companies in Silicon Valley, Marc Andressen argued that Internet enterprises could often be monetized with the right business plan and that consumers should be more critical about the future of traditional media outlets such as newspapers. As one of the first to invest in cloud computing with LoudCloud a decade ago, Andreesen remains an enthusiast for distributed technologies. However, as the pundit who launched the New York Times Deathwatch, Andreassen has probably made few friends among newspaper publishers.

Just Put Your Lips Together and Blow

Whistle blowers who expose government corruption produce a number of digital genres in the Web 2.0 era. In the forthcoming Virtualpolitik book I write about how waste, abuse, corruption, and incompetence are exposed in YouTube videos, digital maps, and widely circulated e-mails.

As a case in point, the blog Ms Sparky's Mishaps & Misadventures is devoted to publicizing the incompetence of mega-contractor KBR in doing electrical work for the military in mobile encampments set up inside the Iraq warzone. Here she appears in the Rachel Maddow show in conjunction with her domain name.

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