Transcribing US Weekly

For my cut-up experience I brought in a bunch of my roommates' old US Weekly magazines. As you can imagine, there are lots of trashy articles I could have pieced together. Here is what it looks like:
I pictured this being read with the left column first, then the right rather than straight across. In that case, here is the transition between articles in the left column: "Shes smart and sharp-witted, and has a lot less high fronted with the image of an (unimpressive) penis poking out of smiley face-covered boxer shorts." Haha, can you tell where the transition is?

Here is the one in the right hand column: "The gold bauble, which TMZ.com claims to be worth dochine with John Mayer August 14 for an evening of flirting and sipping wine, they settled into a cozy booth."

Personally, I don't understand how anyone can cut and transcribe and have it make sense-this was hard!

Rythm Science

First of all, props to all the presenters this week, this book is hard to understand at points. In class on Wednesday we discussed a little what this idea of the influences of culture means to creativity. I guess I did not stop at this point in the book, simply because of my Human Development major background. There is a theory by Bronfenbrenner called the "Ecological Systems Theory" that explains how a person's life and personality (and therefore also their creativity) is created through the world around them. Below is a model of this theory. As you can see, there are many factors that influence who we all turn out to be, and of course this differs between people. As you can see there are many different levels at which an individual is affected by these factors, and Paul Miller is mainly talking about culture in his book, saying that we need this to reflect in our creativity to allow others to relate to us. Just take a minute to think about how each of these factors above plays into your life....how have each shaped you? How would, for instance, your parents' job choices have an impact on your creativity?

Reflection on Sampling Project

Let me first say that this is the most fun I have ever had doing an English Assignment. While I also spent about twice as long on the project as I would on a normal paper, it proved to be worth it. I really used alot of ideas from Lessig's Free Culture book to create my image about the public domain being off limits and the law cracking down on piracy.

For me, the second version (the one with all pictures from the public domain) was easier, simply because I took my own pictures. However, I feel that the first version where we could "rip, mix and burn" fully captured my ideals more and was definitely more challenging, but also more fun to create. I was able to search ideas on the internet, and most often I ended up finding more pictures that I hadn't even thought to use. This experience really showed me the value that other people's work can hold in sparking our own creativity.

Doing this assignment, and especially reading Lessig's book really helped me get a grasp on copyright policies. Overall I really think that since technology has come so far in the past few years, there definitely needs to be changes to copyright law to allow a "some rights reserved" type of society.

Just for fun, here are some of the original pictures I cropped/etc. to create my first sampling project-see if you can tell where I used them!

Free Culture

I surprisingly enjoyed Lessig's book for class. While I did write on my blog earlier that there was too much political mumbo jumbo in it, I actually ended up enjoying it by the end. While I did think that Lessig's own experience about the Eldredge case was relevant, it did get drawn out and again portray too much politics. However, I did not see this the reason that Lessig wrote the book to being with. Lessig was obviously upset about losing his case, as anyone would be, and I felt he did a great job making the reader feel like they were in the moment during this case. (Of course then in class we found out he took alot directly from his blog and plugged it into the book.)

Overall, I ended up being convinced by Lessig's argument. I do think that technology is ever changing, and that laws need to keep changing as well. There is so much creativity that will be lost, physically, if we do not do something about it now. I think that the e-books online are heading in the right direction-they limit users, but still allow users to have some privileges.

In one of my other classes we were actually talking about how one day, libraries may be obsolete due to new technologies. I would really hope this wouldn't be the case, but what do you think? Do you think we will ever see a day when we cannot take our kids to the library to pick out books on a rainy day?