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Digital Culture Links: January 16th
Links through to January 16th:
- Beatles’ First Single Enters Public Domain — In Europe [Techdirt] – The Beatles remain the iconic pop group, so news on VVN/Music that their very first single has now entered the public domain is something of a landmark moment in music:
The Beatles first single, Love Me Do / P.S. I Love You, has entered the public domain in Europe and small labels are already taking advantage of the situation.The European copyright laws grant ownership of a recorded track for fifty years, which Love Me Do just passed. That means that, starting January 1 of 2013, anyone who wants to put out the track is free to do so.
Unfortunately, if you’re in the US, you’ll probably have to wait until 2049 or so. And things are about to get worse in Europe too. As Techdirt reported, back in 2011 the European Union agreed to increase the copyright term for sound recordings by 20 years, - App Store Tops 40 Billion Downloads with Almost Half in 2012 [Apple – Press Info] – Apple passes 40 billion app downloads: “Apple® today announced that customers have downloaded over 40 billion apps*, with nearly 20 billion in 2012 alone. The App Store℠ has over 500 million active accounts and had a record-breaking December with over two billion downloads during the month. Apple’s incredible developer community has created over 775,000 apps for iPhone®, iPad® and iPod touch® users worldwide, and developers have been paid over seven billion dollars by Apple.”
- World Map of Social Networks [Vincos Blog] –“December 2012, a new edition of my World Map of Social Networks, showing the most popular social networking sites by country, according to Alexa traffic data (Google Trends for Websites was shut down on September 2012). Facebook with 1 billion active users has established its leadership position in 127 out of 137 countries analyzed. One of the drivers of its growth is Asia that with 278 million users, surpassed Europe, 251 million, as the largest continent on Facebook. North America has 243 million users, South America 142 million. Africa, almost 52 million, and Oceania just 15 million (source: Facebook Ads Platform). In the latest months Zuckerberg’s Army conquered Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia and Vietnam.”
- Over 8 million game downloads on Christmas Day! [Rovio Entertainment Ltd] – Rovio’s big Christmas download haul: “Wow, what a year! We released four critically-acclaimed bestselling mobile games, developed two top-rated Facebook games, and reached more than a billion downloads — all before our 3rd “Birdday”! Angry Birds Star Wars and Bad Piggies in particular have dominated the app charts, with Angry Birds Star Wars holding the #1 position on the US iPhone chart ever since its release! To top it all off, we had 30 million downloads during Christmas week (December 22-29) and, on Christmas Day, over 8 million downloads in 24 hours alone!”
- R18+ game rating comes into effect [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – Finally: “An R18+ video game rating has come into effect across Australia after a deal between the states and the Commonwealth last year. The change means some games that were previously unavailable to adults can go on sale, whereas others that could be accessed by children will become restricted. The issue had divided interest groups, with some claiming the new classification would protect children but others feared it would expose them to more violent games. Legislation to approve the rating was passed by the Senate in June. Under the previous classification regime, the highest rating for computer games was MA15+, meaning overseas adults-only games were either banned in Australia or given a lower classification, allowing children to obtain them.”
- Two billion YouTube music video views disappear … or just migrate? [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – Despite rumours of massive cuts to major record labels’ YouTube channel counts, the explanation is rather more banal: “Universal and Sony have, since 2009, been moving their music videos away from their YouTube channels and over to Vevo, the music industry site the two companies own with some investors from Abu Dhabi. YouTube, meanwhile, thinks that is only right to count channel video views for videos that are still actually present on the channels – which means that whenever YouTube got round to reviewing the music majors’ channels on its site, a massive cut was always going to be in order.”
Digital Culture Links: December 13th 2010
Links for December 7th 2010 through December 13th 2010:
- The state, the press and a hyperdemocracy [Unleashed (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – Mark Pesce provokes a much larger debate about Wikileaks … is it really ‘the press’? “WikiLeaks is the press, but not the press as we have known it. This is the press of the 21st century, the press that comes after we’re all connected. Suddenly, all of the friendliest computers have become the deadliest weapons, and we are fenced in, encircled by threats – which are also opportunities. This threat is two-sided, Janus-faced. The state finds its ability to maintain the smooth functioning of power short-circuited by the exposure of its secrets. That is a fundamental, existential threat. In the same moment, the press recognises that its ability to act has been constrained at every point: servers get shut down, domain names fail to resolve, bank accounts freeze. These are the new selection pressures on both sides, a sudden quickening of culture’s two-step.”
- The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web [NYTimes.com] – The Atlantic turns a profit by thinking digitally, and employing bloggers: “How did a 153-year-old magazine — one that first published the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and gave voice to the abolitionist and transcendentalist movements — reinvent itself for the 21st century? By pretending it was a Silicon Valley start-up that needed to kill itself to survive. The Atlantic, the intellectual’s monthly that always seemed more comfortable as an academic exercise than a business, is on track to turn a tidy profit of $1.8 million this year. That would be the first time in at least a decade that it had not lost money. Getting there took a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue. “We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic,” […] “In essence, we brainstormed the question, ‘What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?’””
- Angry Birds, Flocking to Cellphones Everywhere [NYTimes.com] – “It sounds like a tough sell: a game that involves catapulting birds at elaborate fortresses constructed by evil pigs. But Angry Birds, a hit game by Rovio, a small Finnish company, is one of the unlikeliest pop-culture crazes of the year — and perhaps the first to make the leap from cellphone screens to the mainstream. Angry Birds, in which the birds seek revenge on the egg-stealing pigs, is meant to be easily played in the checkout line and during other short windows of downtime — but some players have trouble stopping. Rovio says people around the world rack up 200 million minutes of game play each day. (Put another way, that is 16 human-years of bird-throwing every hour.) The game has inspired parodies, homages and fervent testimonials. Homemade Angry Birds costumes were big hits on Halloween. Conan O’Brien demonstrated the game in a YouTube video promoting his new show, and a sketch from an Israeli TV show about a birds-and-pigs peace treaty was popular online ….”
- Assange And WikiLeaks Have Parallels With Spycatcher [SMH] – Malcolm Turnbull on Wikileaks: “Governments and politicians should be careful not to make a martyr of Assange and fools of themselves. Julia Gillard’s claim that Assange had broken Australian laws, when it is clear he has not, demonstrates how out of her depth she is. One may well ask whether her denunciations would be so shrill if the documents had been handed to a powerful newspaper group – if the contents were being dribbled out by The Australian, would she be accusing Rupert Murdoch of high crimes and misdemeanours? Assange is an Australian citizen. No matter how much the government disapproves of his actions, it should make it clear that he is entitled to return to Australia if he wishes and to receive consular assistance if the charges of sexual assault proceed in Sweden.”
- Wikileaks and the Long Haul [Clay Shirky] – Some thoughts from Clay Shiry regarding Wikileaks which are well worth reading: “Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.”
Annotated Links of Interest: October 2nd 2008
Links of interest for October 1st 2008 through October 2nd 2008:
- Google Search 2001 – To celebrate Google’s 10th birthday they’ve gone back in time and worked with the Internet Archive to let you search the 2001 web … YouTube is a nonsense word, ‘blog’ only returns 76,400 hits and Facebook has just under 1800 results!
- EA Downplays Spore’s DRM Triggered Piracy Record [TorrentFreak] – Despite credible estimates that Spore has been downloaded over a million times via bittorrent networks, EA are playing down these figures and, in a turnabout for a big media producer, are arguing that not every download would have represented a legitimate sale were bittorrent not around (something many downloaders have been arguing about p2p film and even tv for years). Despite EA’s PR spin, it seems likely DRM is one of the big things nudging fans into downloading the Spore (and bypassing the DRM altogether).
- Blizzard wins Warcraft bot payout [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “World of Warcraft creator Blizzard has won $6m (£3.36m) in damages from the makers of a software ‘bot’. The damages award comes after Blizzard won the first round of its legal battle against MDY Industries in July 2008. Blizzard embarked on the case against MDY claiming that the World of Warcraft Glider software produced by the small company infringed its copyright. The Glider software lets Warcraft players automate many of the repetitive steps the game involves. … it helped them automate the many repetitive tasks, such as killing monsters and scavenging loot, required to turn low level characters into more powerful ones.”
perthDAC – The 2007 DAC – Wrap-up Post
The DAC (Digital Arts and Culture) conference was in Perth last week and I was lucky enough to be able to attend perthDAC in all its glory. It was the first time DAC has been held in Perth, and only the second time it’s been in Australia; and at the outset, a huge congratulations must go to conference organiser Andrew Hutchinson who ran a very well-oiled event and brought some an amazing intellectual and social extravaganza to our little city. There were so many engaging and exciting ideas and papers floating around that I’ll never do justice to them in one post, but I thought I’d mention a few things and papers that really stood out for me. That said, if you’re after a robust blogging of perthDAC, check out Axel Bruns’ posts which capture the vast majority of the conference. (I’m starting to think Axel should be up for some sort of prize; he’s without a doubt the world’s most thorough conference blogger, conscientiously acting as a collective scribe whose records prove extremely valuable for giving overviews of conferences and keeping in focus some of those details which when not recorded in the instant tend to get lost in the ebb and flow of conferencedom.)
[X] Christy Dena, “The Future of Digital Media is all in Your Head: An Argument for the Age of Integration” – While perhaps less an argument than a snapshot of the present and the trends being laid bare for the future of media, Christy’s paper illustrated the incredibly rich media world we’re all currently living in. More to the point, in looking at Cross-Media, Transmedia and many other points where media is literally crossing medium boundaries (as the plurality of the term has always implied), Christy ended with the salient point that, in assessing the future of digital media, one core point is that it certainly won’t be just digital! Indeed, the future of all media really stands at points of intersection and potential integration of all media in various complex ways. (This point, incidentally, was powerfully reinforced by Stewart Woods whose paper – “Last Man Standing: Elimination and Risk in Social Game Play” – argued that games studies really still needs to keep looking at the social complexities of physical and board-game play which really haven’t been fully explored in the algorithmically bound play of digital videogames.)
[X] Mark McGuire, “Virtual Communities and Podcasting: the emergence and transformation of public electronic space” – Mark used the work of Jurgen Habermas on the public sphere and combined it with a solid overview of internet communities (like the WELL) and community-practices (such as those encouraged and facilitated by Amazon.com) to interrogate the relatively new history of podcasting. The shift from the utopian ideals of Dave Winer (and to a lesser extend Adam Curry) to the commercialisation of podcasting – in terms of accessibility and distribution, if not creation – is seen as another instance where community-led ideals and interaction are undermined by a lack of public ownership and public institutions (exemplified by Apple’s commercial iTunes Store becoming the default podcasting directory, and thus major podcasting portal).
[X] Axel Bruns, “The Future is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage” – Axel has been sharing his work on ‘produsers’ (producer/users) for some time now, but each time I hear or read his work, I’m impressed by how carefully situated it is. While produsers are clearly part of the same realm as participatory culture and citizen journalism, Axel takes great care in showing that a change in the modes of production and consumption in the era of networked communication and distribution (the core of the produser) has great social and democratic potential, but is sure to acknowledge that produsage still needs political drivers in order to avoid being co-opted (Amazon.com is a great example of produsage, but the social networks and user-generated content on their website is clearly working in financial terms primarily for Amazon). One slide Axel showed which I thought summarised his take well was a fairly complex dynamic which showed culture in the double sense of both our world and of a scientific Petri Dish in which something is refined and grown before it becomes fully realised and useful for the real world:
You can read Axel’s full paper and get the full set of PowerPoint slides over at his blog; I can’t wait for the book! (On another note, I didn’t manage to convince Axel of Twitter’s value – not for lack of trying – but we did chat about the Mashedlc project which I’m very interested in and think it could be of very real value for educators using web2.0 tools in their teaching.)
[X] Jill Walker Rettberg, “Blogs, Literacies and the Collapse of Public and Private” – In a nutshell, Jill argued that while traditional (print) literacies was part of the reification of a divide between public and private, newer digital (network) literacies are leading to the blurring, or even collapse, of that neat binary division. Of course, many cultural commentators and others have vested interests in the public/private divide, and the blogging ethos or every reader potentially being a writer has produced something of a backlash (albeit as much due to skepticism of the shift rather than a deeper engagement with it). Jill and Axel’s papers had a lovely symmetry, both arguing for new ways of conceptualising fair traditional things on the back of the shifts toward a more meaningful participatory culture. Jill’s paper is also part of an upcoming work, her Blogging book due from Polity Press next year. I think that, too, is well worth watching for.
While I shan’t go into any depth, DAC also had quite a few papers on games (both digital and otherwise) which I really enjoyed and, for a game studies novice like myself, game a very accessible overview to current trends. The two stand-out papers for me were Torill Mortensen’s, which looked to synthesize the current multiple directions of games research into a menaingful single framework, and a paper by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost (delivered by Fox Harrell) which looked at the idea of Platform Studies which explores the way actual game platforms influenced the design, agenda and possibility for game play and game design. Another exciting area were papers from Lisbeth Klastrup and Larrisa Hjorth (the later of which was presented by Christy Dena) both looked in depth at mobile phone culture in relation to community-building and story-telling respectively (although obviously with large points of intersection).
Outside of the formal academic papers, two things about DAC really stood out: it’s as much a community as a conference, and it’s heavily invested in maintain connections with art and pratice beyond the formally academic. Case in point: this year’s DAC was perfectly integrated with the larger BEAP and as part of DAC we visited I took a deep breath…, Impermanence (PDF), Still, Living (PDF) and other exhibitions, complete with artist and curator talks. This, mixed with DAC’s informal performance night, meant that broader discussions art, digital media and interaction, were focused through shared experiences and provocative installations. On the social side, DAC folk combine intellectually exciting and socially engaging in impressive proportions! In that spirit, I took a few photos which are in a perthDAC Flickr set and Lisbeth Klastrup has posted a DAC 2007 photo set, too. Of course, the thing that everyone really wants to know is who’s the best DAC dancer, and, somewhat surprisingly, thanks for Scott Rettberg (part of the GTA team), we now know:
Fox Harrell is an excellent dancer, and Mary Flanagan does some amazing hyperkinetic lawnmower-and-grocery-shopping-moves. Lisbeth Klastrup was clearly the most agile of the Scandinavians, though Jaakko was nearly as fluid and he won the prize for the coolest T-Shirt — the “conference moderator” shirt with the built-in-clock. I was shuffling at about an equivalent level to Raine Koskimaa, average Finnish dancer.
Follow Scott’s post back for a cameraphone video capturing the DAC dance action (and, no, I’m not there on the dance floor you’ll be relived to hear).
Finally, here’s a picture of Mary Flanagan from Lisbeth’s set, reminding us all to be there for DAC 2009 …