The Second Life of Harry Potter-Final Project

"After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition...

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"After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition has always supported a second life as well. A newspaper delivers the news every day to the doorsteps of America. The very next day, it is used to wrap fish or fill boxes with fragile gifts or to build an archive of knowledge about our history. In this second life, the content can continue to inform even if that information is no longer sold.

The same has always been true about books. A book goes out of print very quickly (the average today is about a year). After it is out of print, it can be sold in used book stores without the copyright owner getting anything and stored in libraries, where many get to read the book, also for free. Used book stores and libraries are thus the second life of a book. That second life is extremely important to the spread and stability of culture.

Yet increasingly, any assumption about a stable second life for creative property does not hold true with the most important components of popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For these-television, movies, music, radio, the Internet-there is no guarantee of a second life. For these sorts of cultures, it is as if we've replaced libraries with Barnes & Noble superstores. With this culture, what's accessible is nothing but what a certain limited market demands. Beyond that, culture disappears."

-Lawrence Lessig, "Free Culture"

Just to brighten your day..

I thought that since everyone is most likely incredibly stressed right now i would share a little something that always makes me laugh.  It's no surprise that I LOVE Harry Potter and if you do too then read this!

Lessig Passage

Free Culture-Lawrence Lessig
Chapter 9-Collectors
Page 113

"After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition has always supported a second life as well.  A newspaper delivers the news every day to the doorsteps of America.  The very next day, it is used to wrap fish or fill boxes with fragile gifts or to build an archive of knowledge about our history.  In this second life, the content can continue to inform even if that information is no longer sold.
The same has always been true about books.  A book goes out of print very quickly (the average today is about a year).  After it is out of print, i can be sold in used book stores without the copyright owner getting anything and stored in libraries, where many get to read the book, also for free.  Used book stores and libraries are thus the second life of a book.  That second life is extremely important to the spread and stability of culture.
Yet increasingly, any assumption about a stable second life for creative property does not hold true with the most important components of popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  For these-television, movies, music, radio, the Internet-there is no guarantee of a second life.  For these sorts of cultures, it is as if we've replaced libraries with Barnes & Noble superstores.  With this culture, what's accessible is nothing but what a certain limited market demands.  Beyond that, culture disappears." 

Copyright News

After our discussions the past couple of classes i thought some may find this interesting. Studios are suing a company called Family Edited DVDs, Inc. for editing out "dirty" material from movies and then selling them for profit. To read the whole article click here.

Mashups

Enjoy these mashups!

Wikipedia Screencast

Here is my screencast for the web writing assignment #2

Web Writing Assignment #2 Revision

Hi, My name is Anna and I am a Wikipedia junkie.

I honestly don’t even like to think about what we did before Wikipedia came along. I remember using the ever-complicated CD-ROMS of Compton’s Encyclopedia and using random books found in my house or school library to look up information, but never anything the likes of Wikipedia. It is a truly amazing site that allows me to not only look up educational information but also anything that happens to pop in my head at the time, which I feel the need to learn more about. This brings me to let you all in to a little aspect of my life that I would not say I am embarrassed about however I do not tell many people about, I absolutely love to watch Degrassi! For those of you that may not know what Degrassi is, It is a fictional, Canada-based show which follows a group of high school students through the trials and tribulation of growing up. It sounds typical yes, but the ensemble cast in this teen drama makes it somehow different from all the others in such a way that I cannot help but get attached to it.

I am in love with this show. I can’t say that I watch it on a regular basis as it is in its tenth season and I did not receive the channel that it is plays on until later in life. About a year ago, TeenNick, which bought the channel Degrassi used to play on, decided to do an “Every. Degrassi. Ever.” marathon. I cannot explain to you how excited I was to be able to see every episode. However, I wasn’t able to be at my television for days on end to be able to watch all of the episodes. This is where I turned to Wikipedia. When I missed a day during this marathon I would go to Wikipedia and search for the season, character, episode or even the actor and learn pretty much everything I needed to know about that specific character, their background, what caused them to do what they were doing in that episode and even what happened to them in future seasons. Wikipedia is like a Mecca of Degrassi information.
If it weren’t for Wikipedia I would have been in the dark about so much concerning this show. I began to think about who actually sat down and wrote the vast assortment of information I was reading. The answer is simple: someone like me. In order for Wikipedia to thrive, the community that involves itself in this wealth of information has to constantly add information to it. In their essay, YouTube: online video and participatory culture, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green discuss how the value of YouTube is “partly generated out of the collective creativity and communication of its users and audiences” (Burgess, and Green 77). The same can be said with Wikipedia, those who voluntarily add information to this site in order to enable others to learn more about it are what makes it continue to be valued by millions of users. The constant need to know more influences the addition of information that continues to flow from Wikipedia.

Burgess and Green discuss Virginia Nightingale’s suggestion that the “availability of a range of modes of participation, including ‘listening’ (or viewing) as wells as ‘speaking’, is one explanation for the mass popularity of YouTube and Myspace” (Burgess, and Green 82). Those who participate in deepening the amount of knowledge on this social media site are more or less the “speaker” in this instance and the “listener”, or reader, is able to use the information and even discuss it. Wikipedia allows a discussion section as a message board that brings many users together in order to share their opinions on the topic rather than just edit the information that is already there. Wikipedia users can engage in many different roles such as editor, critic, educator, writer and many more. By participating in this large mass of information they find a place where they can share their opinion or let others read and learn more about something they find important. This encyclopedia develops a way to not only learning about a specific event or person but information on whatever the user feels like adding. Wikipedia holds mass amounts of data, facts and figures that spans across many different subjects. Aniket Kittur and Ed H. Chi studied what topics are most covered on Wikipedia and which had the largest percentage in the whole of Wikipedia (shown below). This shows only a broad outlook at the type of information on the site all of which has been accumulated by people like you and me. The authors simply want others to have the knowledge at the tips of their fingers.

Wikipedia is an online community that is rapidly growing and building itself much like a real community does. This community stretches all over the world using different languages and topics that do not rest simply with America. Dr. Michael Wesch discussed in his anthropological introduction to YouTube that we build a community through webcams and screens yet we have no idea who we are talking to. There is an invisible audience that we create before posting videos. With Wikipedia, those who post information onto the site have no idea who will see the information. They are typing to an invisible person and audience. The group of people who helped to write the page on Degrassi had no idea that Anna Goodrich would be reading about Episode #123 in 2009, they simply created information to share. It helps create a community of people who really enjoy watching the show. On the Wiki homepage, original authors state “the wiki format allows anyone to create or edit any article, so we can all work together to create a comprehensive database for fans of Degrassi.” The collective work that is created by authors of the Degrassi Wiki page also translates to all of the pages on Wikipedia. It is a comprehensive creation that we all lend a hand in whether we participate as an author or simply a reader.

I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t look for something on Wikipedia. Well in all honesty I Google it and then click the Wikipedia link, but still. It has helped me learn so much about many different subjects for classes as well as many random facts. One actual example: The study of baseball statistics is called sabermetrics. It not only enables me to look up whatever comes to my mind it helps me have a wealth of knowledge at my fingertips. Everyone participates in making Wikipedia what it is today whether they realize it or not.

Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. YouTube: online culture and participatory culture.
Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009. 77 and 82.

Kittur, Aniket, and Ed H. Chi Bongwon Suh. ". What's in Wikipedia?: mapping topics
and conflict using socially annotated category structure. ." The 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems. Boston, MA, 2009. 1511. PDF.

Wesch, Michael. "An anthropological introduction to YouTube." Web. 11 Oct 2010.