Media Tracking

“The contradiction between media as the product of global powers and media as technologies for local meaning and use is central to our daily experience of media and technology.” This quote is crucial to help understand the difference between media’s intended use, and how it differs from how it is actually used today. Students of this generation tend to spend their day browsing different channels social media. It becomes a necessity to have a smart phone with the demands of this generation in order to know the weather or news events in your area, keep up with important emails from your employer or professor, stay connected with the lives of ones friends throughout the day, and most excitingly, hear the latest trends topics and secrets that have been revealed on a Twitter or Facebook feed. In this day and age, all different types of demographic are being affected in some way by social media, myself included. This multi-tasking lifestyle does not seem to be going away any time soon so as a business perspective it is important to keep up with new trends then to dismiss them as a waste of time.

Everyday I set my alarm for an hour before class. Exactly when the alarm goes off I grab my phone and instantly check a few of my social media accounts. It is almost a ritual performance because I first check my e-mail to make sure none of my classes got cancelled so I could go back to bed, then, I proceed to check my Twitter line, Facebook notifications, Instagram photos, and finally I check my horoscope app to see what the tone of my day will be looking like. After the 48-hour study that I performed it was really pointed out how I definitely use some forms of social media more than others within the course of the day. For instance, I did not watch television at all, but I am updating my Snapchats, and Instagram constantly throughout the day. Even more than this, I always have my ear buds in passing through class to listen to songs on Pandora to get me through the day in a happy mood because I absolutely love listening to music. Pandora was definitely the most frequently used after the study. The first day, I listened to it getting ready for my 9:30 am class on my speakers, and then proceeded to listen to it on my headphones for the 10-minute walk to class, and all the class walks throughout the day. In the course of 48-hours I had used my Pandora for 13 hours and that is probably on the smaller side compared to most days that I listen to music.

Surprisingly to many, the form of media that I used least during this assignment, as well as always use the least was television. I absolutely hate watching television. I never get myself involved in sitcom shows or phone or computer games because I would absolutely never get anything done and would feel like I wasted the whole day after getting to addicted to it all. I am a very fast paced individual and I am always on the go so sitting down waiting for a show between commercials is just not ideal for me when I have all the information I need at the click of a button on my smartphone in a matter of seconds. In the course of 2 days I didn’t use the TV on my own time at all, but I did have to account for the TV episode that we watched about the students multitasking during our Visual Rhetoric class on Tuesday, which ended up being around an hour after the WIP presentations were finished.

The bulk of my time was actually spent communicating with my friends, professors, and family over forms of social media. I love to keep in touch with my friends and family so I am constantly catching up with them throughout the day. Most of my call log reads my mom, dad, grandma/grandpa, brother, and two of my best friends repeated over and over again. I love catching up with them since I don’t get to see them too much throughout the school year. Opposed to this, to keep up with my friends I mainly just Snapchat or text them throughout the day but I don’t text back too much because I get sidetracked too easily. The overall time that I spent speaking to another person in the course of 48 hours was around 4 hours a day totaling to 8 hours between calls, texts, Snapchats, and e-mails. As mentioned before, television is not an important part in my life. Monologic media consisted around 14 hours. This included the TV show from class as well as my Pandora station, in which I avidly listen to.

I learned from this assignment that I use media a lot more than I thought I did. I was absolutely shocked by the amount of time I spent engaged in the use of media because my friends always tease me and say I never use my phone or social media and I am one of the hardest people to keep in touch with because of this. I think that I was most surprised by the fact that I spent the first day talking on the phone for around 3 hours and 30 minutes alone and before I counted the time on my phone long I would have figured I was talking for around 15 minutes because I made so many quick calls, but they clearly added up.

In the future I will definitely be more aware of my social media use and try to decrease the use especially during important assignments. For example, I put my phone on the charger and in a drawer during this assignment so allow it to charge up before the gym, as well as not get me side-tracked the whole time by an incoming and funny Snapchat picture from my friends. It really was an eye-opener and I’m glad that I carried out the assignment.

I believe that the PL thinker that best fits this assignment would be Canadian communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan, because he argued that television and radio were like natural resources, waiting to be used for the benefit of increasing mankind’s collective and individual experiences of the world. He also stated that the media were simply extensions of our natural senses, helping us to connect ourselves to geographically distinct communities and bodies. I use media daily as a source of maintaining a close connection between others and am glad it was created to benefit me in this way.

My Media log: https://docs.google.com/a/g.rwu.edu/spreadsheets/d/1pHkGwqnF1jLSDDtGBTKS-D1dpyamx6It5EMl-kn2EtU/edit#gid=0

Creative Commons

Copyright laws were created in the United States in order to protect original works of authorship. The protection is included but not limited to literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, amongst other intellectual works. Copyright laws were created long before the Internet and are extremely strict, making it difficult for individuals to use the Internets assets properly and do things such as copy, paste, edit sources and post to the web without infringing on certain rights. The creators of Creative Commons understand these complications and allow individuals to work together and share work without worrying about breaching a copyright law, or citing a work of art or document the wrong way.

The Creative Commons project alters the way we understand ownership and copyright because it provides a simple way to give the public permission to share and use another individual’s creative work under his or her own conditions instead of the government deciding what can and cannot be allowed. For example, Creative Commons allows people share and use another individuals photographs while being able to put restrictions on companies trying to sell them, re-publish blog posts, and choose from a large list of songs to remix as long as credit is given where it is deserved. The way that the Creative Commons project is allowed to change such strict copyright rules is by giving the option to change the copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved” in order to modify changes to the creators preference. The describe in their vision, “Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet-universal access to research and education, full participation in culture-to drive a new era of development, growth and productivity.” This is really interesting because it benefits students like myself who need to access course materials from other universities or other websites in order to maximize their research and create the most factual paper possible.

The Creative Commons project affects the subjects of a work because it gives individuals the option to place their own restrictions on their work and set limitations for what another user can copy from their original piece. The original creator is initially asked a certain amount of questions such as, “Do you want to allow commercial use or not?” and after this set of questions if finished, the new and improved copyright rules are also established. This helps creators retain a copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make use of their work for other purposes while still giving the original creator the credit that they deserve. This changes the subjects of a work greatly because if loose restrictions are placed on the original work, than it can be shared more frequently, or even repurposed to have a completely new meaning then the original user intended. This website is an example of how things such as remixes and repurposed advertisements are allowed to be created.

Here is a picture of the original  book cover by to get a visual what the case study referred to.

Gone with the Wind was published before the Creative Commons project was made possible, disabling any sharing or altering the original work. This is because “Gone with the Wind” is licensed and protected under the original copyright laws that would incriminate a person that tried copying or changing the original document for their own purposes, explaining why no sequel was ever developed. If Creative Commons were established at this time, the authors of “Gone with the Wind” would have been able to set their own limitations to their copyright laws, allowing the possibility for sequels, alterations, and interpretations of the novel.

The Creative Commons project does not protect the owners right to publicity, privacy or personality. When an individual applies the latest version of a Creative Commons license to their material, they are also agreeing to waive any publicity, privacy or personality rights that they hold in the material they are licensing, to the limited extent necessary for others to exercise the licensed rights. Similar to the limited personality protection of the Creative Commons project, the case of Bela Lugosi vs. Universal pictures in 1979 stated that copy could not copyright his personality as the character Dracula. Although Bela Lugosi was so similar and became known for his role as Dracula, no personality or privacy protection was granted because they were not a part of the copyright rules. Also, the final court decision stated that since Lugosi was deceased and his heirs were arguing for these “rights” that a dead person had no right to his likeness, and any rights that existed did not pass to his heirs.

The thinker from the Practices of Looking that best fits this assignment is Walter Benjamin because on page 123 of the text he points out that “the original of a reproduction is understood to be more authentic than the copies made from it.” By this he means that authenticity cannot be reproduced. (PL, 123) This coincides with the idea of Creative Commons because it allows people to repurpose a work of art, and change it for their own benefits, without it taking anything away from the authentic meaning. Alike the Creative Commons website, this allows the original users to still get the credit they deserve and not take anything away from that.

I learned from this assignment that Creative Commons existed. I never knew it was acceptable to be able to alter copyrights or have the option to change it from “All rights reserved” to “Some rights reserved.” I was aware that this happened because I constantly use the internet to do things such as download music off the internet for things like our basketball warm-up CD, copy photos online for a presentation or paper due in class, and many other things. I just never asked why or how this was allowed and hoped that I wasn’t infringing on any rights by doing so. The image provided below coincides with this assignment because it spells out “Copyright infringement” in all different channels of media that are protected under copyright rules. It is important to be aware of all these different companies and ways they are protected, especially as a marketing major because I constantly need to take information from different websites for my marketing projects, and it’s extremely important to know what is legal so I do not get in trouble with the law. I am happy that I learned about this website and will keep it in mind if I create any work in the future that I would like to be shared amongst a great amount of people for beneficial purposes.