On Facebook, your past stalks you like a vengeful ghost carrying a litany of your indiscretions written on (pick one: damaged car doors | overdue library books | your grandmother’s linen tablecloth) with (pick one: warm beer | bicycle chain grease | all-weather deck stain).
Your only escape routes are blocked by your present and your future. Your coworkers have decided to be Facebook friends, and so have a number of your business contacts. Every time a post on your wall starts with “Doooood…” or “Your Father and I were wondering…” you cringe at the thought that what comes next is visible to people you are hoping will see you as a professional genius well on the way to world domination.
If this is a fairly accurate description of how you feel about Facebook, there’s a good chance you’ll prefer the granularity and control over interactions offered by Google+. (There’s also a chance you’re a psychopath, but we’ll get to that later.) The implications of preferring one social network to the other goes deeper than just the practical considerations of obscuring references to beer bongs from your boss. The differing approaches to how we control our information have societal implications.
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My last posts about Flip the Media caught the attention of the faculty and students involved in running it as an independent study. After few emails back and forth I agreed to come back on board in an advisory capacity. Specifically, I’ve agreed to work on SEO (I’m thinking of it more broadly as “user acquisition” or SEO+), but it’s not possible to do effective SEO on a site that hasn’t defined a target audience or any success metrics. So I’m trying to help push in those directions as a precursor to any other work. That said, after the first meeting I attended, I spent less than 30 minutes with some very basic tools and learned some things about the site which I shared in an email, reproduced below. (Continued)
Saturday, February 19, 2011
It’s been almost a year since I contributed a post to MCDM’s Flip the Media blog. This hasn’t been because I didn’t want to post there. Instead it’s because, just as the blog felt like it was reaching a groove of sustainable editorial policies encouraging quality content, decisions were made to change who was in charge and how work was solicited. Since that time, I haven’t really known who the editors are, how I should submit posts, or really anything else about the blog. I’m not even sure why I used to have an administrator account on it, why I don’t anymore, or when the change was made. It’s all a mystery to me, and with only a quarter to go until graduation I’m not going to try to unravel it.
Recently, the blog has begun adding features that, instead of being integrated with the WordPress platform it runs on, are hosted on Google Docs and displayed on the site in an iframe. This is the sort of HTML hackery that I help companies avoid or fix in my professional life, and which I wince to see my writing associated with on a site managed by the program in which I’m getting my Master’s Degree. It’s not my fault, but it reflects poorly on me.
Rumors that are going around have led me to suspect that Flip the Media’s days in its current form are numbered. Which might be a good thing considering its rickety state. But I’ve written some good stuff for the blog, and I don’t want to see it disappear in any sort of curatorial meltdown. So, using the RSS feed for my own posts, I’ve imported them to Blue Collar Rocket Science. They all appear with their original publication dates, and are in the category First Published on Flip the Media. I did discard one that was about an MCMD Wiki I set up, which never got any traction and is long since defunct.
My decision to duplicate my Flip the Media posts on to a blog I manage myself is tied to my decision some months back to archive all the Twitter posts I’ve made with my primary account as blog posts in the category Twitter posts. When it comes to curating your work, it’s best to take matters in your own hands.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Over on Flip the Media, the blog of the MCDM program, a new poll asks two questions:
- Did social media tools like Twitter and Facebook drive the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions?
- Could social media tools like Twitter and Facebook spur widespread demonstrations in the US or UK?
I find it hard to answer these questions as posed. Not only are “drive” and “spur” vague terms open to interpretation, but answering them invites a deeper discussion of Malcolm Gladwell’s article Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted, which simply is not possible in the binary mechanism of a poll. From the moment it was published, Gladwell’s piece has been the subject of many strawman challenges, in which many people have deftly countered all sorts of things that Gladwell never actually said. The poll also comes at the end of an article called “Could Online Political Activism Ignite the US like it did Egypt?” which seems to more or less give away the poller’s opinion even before the questions are asked. (Continued)
Brook Ellingwood
COM 588: Digital Media Law and Policy
Instructor: Kraig Baker
August 20, 2010
Introduction
In 2006 the term, if not the concept, of “net neutrality” gained a sudden popularly currency as media coverage of debates over how Internet traffic was handled and prioritized increased. In testimony before Congress, important architects of the Internet expressed concerns about the medium’s health if service providers were allowed to choose what content was allowed to pass through their systems, or at what speed it was allowed through.
Illustration 1: Google search for the term “net neutrality” over time.
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COM 558: U.S. Digital Media Law and Policy
Instructor: Kraig Baker
Brook Ellingwood
July 9, 2010
General Position Statement
It is time to revisit the foundation of United States copyright law, simplify it to make it more comprehensible and reconcile conflicting philosophies concerning ownership of intellectual property and how the benefits of ownership accrue to individuals, business interests and society.
Copyright law in the United States is built on the comprehensive Copyright Act of 1976. Since the enactment of that legislation it has been amended by a patchwork of statutes passed in reaction to specific situations, often benefiting parties that have lobbied for the changes for their own purposes. The trend in copyright legislation is to strengthening and lengthening the terms of intellectual property ownership.
Running counter to the trend in copyright law is a vibrant grassroots embrace of sharing intellectual property, backed by organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and Free Software Foundation. This philosophy provides the basis for the licenses used in open source software and much user-generated media published on the Internet.Well-known examples of these licenses include the GNU General Public License often used for software, and the various Creative Commons Licenses often used for media content.
Copyright law as it now stands is premised on the greatest benefit to society deriving from profit generated by fees paid to copyright holders. Broadly speaking, proponents of less-restrictive approaches to copyright believe greater societal benefits arise from the value of intellectual property as prior work on which new derivative works advancing the state of the art may be based. Both positions may defensible, but as they move farther from each other they are opening a chasm between law and common practice. Legislators can no longer choose one side over another, but must do the hard work of forging a compromise acknowledging both forms of societal benefit.
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Case by Brook Ellingwood
Prepared for the University of Washington’s Master of Communication, Digital Media Program – COM 597, Transforming Business Strategies for the Digital Age: Cases from Media & Culture Industries
Instructor, Dr. Gina Neff
June 7, 2010
During the spring of 2010 managers at KCTS Television were very busy. Budget plans for the Seattle-based public television station’s next fiscal year were due. Simultaneously an outside consulting firm was working with executive management to craft a new five-year strategic plan, complicating the task of predicting financial and staffing needs.
One thing known with certainty was the station was embracing a broader mission. Under a new Chief Executive Officer, KCTS was expanding its focus after years of retrenchment and stabilization, following an earlier period of overreach and lax financial oversight.
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Wherever You Go, There You Are
Illustration 1: The KCTS 9 television studio
From a remove of 12 years, it’s clear
The Harvard Business Review article “Welcome to the Experience Economy” (Pine & Gilmore, 1998) offers an accurate prediction of things that were then yet to come. Although the authors focus primarily on physical world retail and dining business as staging grounds for experience, many of the concepts of experience have shaped the virtual worlds of media as well.
As has been happening so often in my recent readings, I can almost catch glimpses of myself in the pages, a ghostly figure peeking out from behind the words. The article tips its hat to the Walt Disney Corp.’s entertainment experience expertise, then in the next paragraph describes Recreational Equipment Incorporated’s experiential shopping approach. For me, these two companies are more then just interesting examples in support of a thesis.
Disney and REI are former employers where I helped turn the experiences they offered into something that could be delivered over the Internet. Now, at public TV station KCTS 9, I’m trying to do the same thing. What I’m coming to realize is that while much of television has moved towards experiential programming, public television’s brand identity is built around a premium presentational style that doesn’t lend itself easily to experiential remediation.
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Like The Who, I Sell Out
In 2002 Richard Florida’s concept of a “creative class” resonated with many readers. In his book “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” he had identified that in the latter decades of the 20th Century many of the more lucrative occupations in America did not fit existing economic classes. (Florida, 2002). I didn’t read it, and one of the reasons was certainly due to an aversion I had at the time to anything that carried with it any whiff of the dotcom era. While I’d hardly had to be dragged kicking and screaming into five years working at Internet startups, I’d always resisted the inflated rhetoric that came with them. I wasn’t looking to be part of any “new economy” or “new paradigm.” I was looking to do good solid work that returned profit on investment.
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Introduction
There are many ways to approach studying the business of mass market entertainment. Approaches in material I’ve recently read ranged in focus from a business history of American movie studios written for a popular audience (Epstein, 2005), to sociological perspectives on the culturally transformative nature of creative work (Peterson, & Anand, 2004), to business case studies of prominent entertainment companies (Pisano, & Wagonfeld; Rivkin, & Meier, 2005).
All of these readings have focused on the unique aspects of culture industry. To be sure, as a business culture production sits in a unique spot in society. The mechanisms of creating and distributing cultural goods at any given time and place have not only been similar to, but sometimes have been identical with, the mechanisms for creating and distributing political and religious power. They all deal in display and performance, content creation and content distribution. This contributes to the enormous stature culture production holds in our society.
What I wonder is if sometimes we take this exceptional aspect of culture production too seriously and expect that since it is a unique type of business, the business practices at successful companies in the industry must also be unique. This thought cropped up a number of times during my reading.
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