Girl Talk & Fair Use

I found the documentary on Girl Talk to be extremely interesting, because it raised a lot of good questions from both sides of the argument on the legality of mash-ups. On one hand, I feel bad for artists like Girl Talk, who are obviously doing something fresh and innovative, but on the other, I can understand why people have a problem with his unusual methods.

I think what Girl Talk critics have the biggest issue with is his use of the actual recordings themselves, even though they are just chords played by instruments when broken down to their core. As seen in the documentary, artists across generations have used chord progressions and beats similar to songs of the past. If Girl Talk was using his own instrumentation but the same chords as the songs he's sampling, it's doubtful his critics would still be complaining about his music.

For Girl Talk's side of the argument, he claims that songs are "fair use" and that he has the right to use portions of them in his music. He spends hours turning clips of songs into his own creation, so he has the right to defend his art, but their is something unmistakably iffy about his right to use the songs without the artist's permission. I believe there should be a legal amount of a song mash-up artists can use without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on to get official permission from record labels. I feel like a lot of artists would be okay with this, because given from what we saw in the video, it was actually the labels who cried foul.

After some consideration, I take Girl Talk's side on this issue, mostly because of the idea of "transformative use." This concept claims that a "derivative work is transformative if it uses a source work in a completely new or unexpected way", and I think it's safe to say that Girl Talk's music is completely new and unexpected. He edits and splices songs together in a way that they bear no resemblance to their original forms, so to my ears, his songs are completely original. At the end of the day, Girl Talk is an artist too, and deserves the right to create like one too.

Interactivity

I found the article Five Ways to Make your Website More Interactive to be very helpful and interesting when trying to come up with ideas for websites. When reading the article, I tried to think of how I could incorporate the advice into my own website, and thought the article had some great and simple ideas that would be easy for me to pull off.

Specifically, I really like the concept of having links and widgets to my social media accounts on my website. Having readers be able to see how I am as a person on a day-to-day basis is a great way to gain interactivity, because it builds a more personal relationship between me and my readers. I follow all of the writers of the websites I read, and it genuinely encourages me go to their site more often because I feel like I know them and want to hear more of what they have to say. Building a relationship like that with my readers is something I definitely want to do.

I also want to incorporate user-generated content for my site, and I think the best way to do that is allowing comments on my posts. Having people comment on my posts will help me gauge reader's reactions to my content, while allowing me to respond to them and build a connection with them. Comments can also help me monitor the quality of my content. If I see that I'm receiving predominantly negative responses to my posts, then I will know that I need to work on something and make a change.

Lastly, incorporating giveaways could work well with the theme of my website. I thought about the possibility of holding giveaways for whatever album or movie I am discussing at the time to help get readers excited about checking my site. I could make certain guidelines, such as, "you must comment _____ to enter the giveaway," or something similar to make it easy for readers to get involved with the site, and hopefully make someone happy by winning a cool prize!

All of these forms of interactivity can be easily measured to see how effective they are. I can monitor how many new social media followers I gain, check for comments on my posts daily, and gauge how many people enter my contests and giveaways. All of these interactivity methods are simple, yet effective, and I appreciate the article for giving me some great ideas on how to improve my website.

Information and Networks

I think the network law that I agree with the most would be Sarnoff's Law, because it is the simplest and has the most concrete definition of "value" compared to the other two laws. The way the Metcalfe and Reed laws calculate value is very unclear, so I am not sure that those laws would accurately determine what "value" a station has. Sarnoff's concept takes the idea of "value" and puts it in the most basic of formulas; the more viewers you have, the more value you have.

Though I definitely think there is more to value than how many people are watching/listening to your program, the Sarnoff Law is probably has the most accurate way of calculating how much something is worth in a monetary sense. When trying to figure out how much ad time for your station during a given program, calculating the price based off of how many people are watching seems to make the most sense to me. Of course, there are other aspects that can contribute to value, such as how well the typical viewer/listener pays attention to your program, this linear approach stands as a good starting point for better laws to base themselves off of in the future.

And speaking of the future, it is difficult to predict how people will get their information then, even in five years time. The best guess that I can make is that we will (somehow) be even more connected to each other than we are now. Almost all of our technology revolves around networks in this day and age, and is becoming harder and harder to be truly independent of one another. I believe that we will soon see “Internet Everywhere,” with virtually any place having a network connection. In that same sense, I believe that nearly all of our devices will be connected to each other in some way to maximize the potential in how we can communicate with each one another. If technological innovation mirrors social media patterns in any way, then networks are going to become a major part of how we live.

Online Identity

Online Identity:

Social media is a curious thing. It's a place where we want to interact with others, talk about our likes and dislikes, and show people who we are. It's also a place where we don't want people to know we're looking through their photos, where we're afraid to post about something controversial, and where we show people who we want to be, instead of who we really are. Social media gives us a platform to show the Internet and the world either who we are or who we want to be, but it is up to us to decide which route to take.

In The Guardian's article "Online Identity," the writer debates whether online authenticity or anonymity is more important when building your online identity. It's a good question, because you can be as authentic or as anonymous as you desire to be when you're online. You can use your social media sites to post every little thing that comes to your mind (as some of my friends do), or you can use it to post only the good parts of your life, to give a false impression that your life is perfect. The majority of people tend to lean towards the latter alternative, desiring to make their friends think their life is exciting even though it may not be.

This concept is an important one, because social media plays such a huge role in building one's own identity, both online and off. In 2016, nearly every person alive has some form of social media, and in this less interactive age we live in, an individual's social media account is primarily how we form opinions of one another. Of all of my Facebook friends, I probably only see 50 to 100 of them on a regular basis. When I see these people, I rarely think about what they recently said on Twitter, I think about experiences that we had in real life. Whenever I see a friend that I mostly only "know" through Facebook, I recall past opinions and judgements I made about them based on their old posts/statuses, because I have very little else to go off of.

Social media can be a wonderful thing. It allows us to celebrate important life events with one another, such as getting married or having a baby. But it also has the capability to limit how much we can truly know one another, which is why I believe that authenticity is more important when it comes to building your identity.