Note 5 Why Culture isn't Free

. The industry began in the early 20th century as a rebellion of outsiders—a generational rebellion against live theater, against 19th- century technology, against the dominant cultural establishment, and against conventional ways of profiting from entertainment.

. the motion picture industry has established an orthodox economic method for the making, distribution and selling of movies.

. Its manifold accomplishments include building a highly profitable business model by charging consumers to watch presentations of the same movie and transforming the idea of a mass audience and, last but certainly not least, globalizing culture.

. The rebellion of the outsider has also become one of the most storied subjects for movies themselves.

. Movies might have fundamentally changed the world, but today, in the first decade of the 21st century, global change threatens to fundamentally change movies.

. Today, there’s a new generational rebellion of outsiders against the system. this digital revolution is, in part, a rebellion against the man with the movie camera. It is the revolt of a naively idealistic Internet generation against traditional mainstream media.

. This early 21st-century revolution—a populist movement of outsiders comprised mostly of academic theoreticians and an army of angry online foot soldiers—is a cultural, political and economic rebellion against the centralized, hierarchical media of the Industrial Age.

. Most provocatively, it is a rebellion against the very cornerstone of the 20th-century information and entertainment economy—the idea of "authorship" and its legal corollary intellectual property ownership.

The Pirate Party

. In the old industrial copy economy, it was hard for content to leak out of the system because books, records and movies were hard to steal in large quantities. But the technology of the digital revolution has changed all this. By enabling the replacing of physical cultural goods with digital bits, digital technology has essentially done away with the monetary value of online content.

Pirate Ideology

. Once content is digitalized and distributed on the Internet, it becomes harder and harder for its owners to protect the financial value of their product.

. But it is "control"—economic, political and, above all, cultural control—that is the primary enemy of the digital rebels.

. Author and audience therefore converge together in a deafening cacophony of user-generated content.

The Battleground

. Lessig’s misty-eyed academic dream of the cornucopia of the commons brings us back to Mason’s celebration of content "leaking out" from "the private domain" into some idealistically altruistic public space.

. Their goal in the copyright wars are to give consumer-artists the right to "remix" content, the creative pasting together of different forms of media which current copyright law restricts.

. The problem with the cult of the remix, however, is that it conveniently ignores why the majority of consumers steal content on the Internet. ---> Instead, they are downloading the latest Harry Potter movie or hit song by Madonna so that they won’t have to pay for it at the cinema or record store.

. The other problem is that most of the pirate theorists have an idealistic vision that culture should be free

. Despite trumpeting the rights of the individual creator over their corporate exploiters, none of these tenured ivory tower theorists appears to particularly respect the sensitivity of freelance artists dependent on the security of their creative content.

Solutions

. One solution that has been advanced is to punish the perpetrators of online theft.

. Perhaps most importantly, it requires the industry to do a more creative job explaining its own economics to the public

Note 4 Identifying Global and Culture-Specific Dimensions of Humor in Advertising: A Multinational Analysis

. Which aspects of humorous comm are likely to be amenable to global standardization and which should be adpated to local exepectations?

The Advertising Research Stream of Humor

Domestic Research

. Humor is more likely to enhance recall, evalutaion and purchase intention when the humourous msg coincides with ad objectives, is well-integrated with those objectives, and is viewed as appropriate for the product category.

. Under such circumstances, HA is more likely to 'secure audience attention, increase memorability, overcome sales resistance, enhance msg persuasiveness'.

Cross-National Research

. differences on key variables ---> levesl and types of infor/ reflection of cultural attitudes toward consumption/ portrayal of sex roles

. use of 'prototype' standardisation ( same ad with only translation and necessary idiomatic changes)/ 'pattern' standardisation ( the overall campaign is designed for application in several national markets with some adaptation of content and execution)

. Killough (1978), 'buying proposals' (basic offer) ---> can be used across culture without modicication more often than CP vs. 'creative presentations' (package the buying proposal) ---> tend to interact with local cultural factors

. Both UK and US, humor employed most often with ' low involvement/feeling products' vs. least often with 'high...'

. cognitive structure: moderate incongruity from expectations produced more favorable evaluations of new product info than did congruity or extreme incongruity

Psychological and Linguistic Perspectives on Humor

. incongruity is a necessary and sufficient condition to produce humor

vs. incongruity alone is not always sufficient to produce a humor response ---> humor reulsts when incongruity is resolved ===> Key tenet: humor is a form of problem solving/ resolution of incongruity make audience 'get the joke' (incongruity-resolution theory)

. not all problem solving is humorous---> humourous response depends on:
1. rapid resolution of incongruity
2. a 'playful' context, cues that info is not taken seriously
3. an appropriate mood of listeners (Suls, 1983)

. Linguistic perspective: Script-based semantic theory : two distinct scripts --- two scripts are opposite in certain definite ways such as good-bad, sex-no sex, real-unreal --- the punchline (Raskin,1985)

. contrasts: 1. actual/existing vs. nonactual/nonexisting 2. normal/expected vs. abnormal/ unexpected 3. possible/plausible vs. fully/partially impossible or much less plausible

Application of Humor Theory in a Cross-national Context
. some: humor is indeed universal and that in-congruity is one of its central cognitive-structural principles
. Joking relationships (joking, teasing, banter, ridicule, insult, horseplay...) are pervasive
. incongruent, outrageous or deviant manifestations of personalities, behavior and so forth, are also important in such joking activities.

Hypotheses 1 and 2: Global Principles
. humor is universal/ incongruity is widely presented ===> incongruity may be a major global component of humorous advertising

. H1: Most TV advertising from diverse national markets in which humor is intended exhibits incongruent contrasts.

. H2: Across diverse national markets, 3 specific types of contrasts (actual/not actual, expected/ unexpected, and possbile/ impossible) are identifiable in TV advertising that is intended to be humorous.

Hypotheses 3 and 4: Culture-Specific Differences

. An important goal of advertising: bring the cultural world and the good together in a 'special harmony' that enables the viewer to see 'this similarity and effect the transfer of meaningful properties' (McCracken,1986)

. content of ads mirrors a society ---> differences reflect major national culture distinctions

. Hofstede (1983): dimensions differentiated of national cultures:

1. individualism-collectivism:

. Collectivist culture: subordination of individual goals to the goals of a few large in-groups

. Individualist culture: be characterized by multiple in-groups that are smaller and less demanding of their members

. H3: The number of individuals or characters playing major roles in ads which humor is intended is greater in high collectivism (low individualism) cultures than in low collectivism (high individualism) cultures.

2. power distance:

. the extent to which power within a national culture is unequally distributed

. H4: Relationships between central characters in ads in which humor is intended are more often unequal in high power distance cultures than in low power distance cultures, in which these relationships are more often equal.

Note 3 Managing in an Era of Multiple Cultures: Finding Synergies Instead of Conflict

More than Geo-political Concepts of Culture
. In the political sphere, established national boundaries have been challenged, and in some cases destroyed, as ethnic or regional identities have grown stronger.

. Economic as well as political questions are increasingly discussed in regard to regions or continents

Business and Globalization
. Globalization of business has occurred predominantly in three ways, none of which necessarily involves national boundaries.
1.Firms have created international, multinational or global firms;
2.they have acquired or merged with firms already established in a desirable market elsewhere; 3. and/or they have formed strategic alliances and networks.

. Joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers, and acquisitions now offer companies --regardless of size -- the chance to stay competitive and the opportunity to participate in resource-intensive, long-term projects.

.The “expatriate” assignment frequently is replaced by “transpatriate” activity.

. Beyond physical relocation or travel, radical developments in communication technology have enabled a global economy to evolve in which companies and individuals have access to markets far beyond those in which they are geographically located.

---> The pervasiveness and power of the Internet have made the entire globe the potential marketplace and workplace, fostering the rise of distant work and virtual teams.

. apart from transfers initiated by companies, the ever-growing global movement of people has also contributed to an increasingly multicultural workforce worldwide.

. The mosaic of cultural diversity presents a major challenge both in global and domestic work settings

A Multiple Cultures Perspective
. an organization is not a simple, primitive society...... it is a heterogeneous, pluralistic system whose members live within a larger complex society.

. the organization – the workplace – potentially has a multiplicity of separate, overlapping, superimposed, or nested cultures within it.

. the membership body of any particular group may be... nested within the organization, forming sub-organizational cultures according to function, tenure, hierarchy, ethnicity, nationality, gender, role, location, or work group.

Managerial Concerns
. For the manager, then, identifying the existence of a cultural grouping of any sort should be an empirical question, not an a priori assumption.

. At the individual level, people may identify with, and hold membership in, several cultural groups simultaneously.

. These findings suggest that different cultural identities and values may mediate the way in which individuals within the organization perceive, value, and react to such things as the work environment and how much of themselves they invest in their jobs or the organization itself.

The Concept of Culture
. the core of culture is composed of explicit and tacit assumptions or understandings commonly held by a group of people; a particular configuration of assumptions/understandings is distinctive to the group; these assumptions/understandings serve as guides to acceptable and unacceptable perceptions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors; they are learned and passed on to new members of the group through social interaction; culture is dynamic -- it changes over time.

The Emergence of Culture
. This definition implies that culture is a collective social phenomenon – that it can be created, rather than just inherited, by group members.

. To understand a culture, one must understand the basic assumptions of that particular group. Furthermore, this approach assumes that a culture may exist or emerge whenever a set of basic assumptions are held in common by a group of people.

. Since individuals are seen as simultaneous carriers of several cultural identities, depending on the issue at hand, a different cultural identity may become salient at a given moment.

. individuals’ multiple cultural identities within organizational contexts

. salience of any particular cultural identity will increase when that identity is confronted or perceived to be threatened

What Does It Mean for Management?
. the question may become how to build on similarities engendered in other commonly-held cultures for creative solutions and how to use and manage differences.

. synergy may not just happen in multi-cultural teams in terms of members’ national culture. Instead, it requires active work through a team development process that is based on tolerance and appreciation of differences.

Note 2 Comm and New Media: From Broadcast to Narrowcast

Part 2: Hot Metal to Hotmail: The (Recent) History of Mass Comm
. historical account+ social context
5. From Guntenberg to Global News: A Brief History of the Print Media
Print Culture
. It is not until the invention of moveable type and the printing press that comm media became independent of their site of production.
. Modern mass comm is the liberation of the comm form from its place of creation.
. In the early years of the mass circulation print media: the separation between readers were more likely to e along political lines ---> newspapers and other periodicals: more partisan, propagandistic, overtly proselytising
. The changes in culture of the mass print media: agitational party press---> capitalist conglomerates mirrors and documents the trajectory of the 18th- and 19th- century revolutionary bourgeoisie---> the moribund and corrosive edifice of capitalism today
Gutenberg
. 1452: 200 copies Gutenberg Bible
. Immediate cultural effects: 1. encouraged literacy 2. disseminated ideas more rapidly 3. fostered greater standardisation of texts 4. intellectual and political order ---> 1517, Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther's rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church. characteristics of newspaper: diversity of content+ periodicity of appearance
. 1566, first prototypical newspapers were published in Basel in Switzerland
Journalism and the Age of Revolution
. Father of modern journalism: Daniel Defoe
. freedom of the press
. Kevin Williams: the history of journalism and the news media can only be fully appreciated if one takes into account 'the contervailing pulls on the mass media' exercised by public opinion on one hand and 'powerful institutions in society' on the other.
Typography, Telegraphy, Telephony, and Photography Converge to Make 'News'
. 4 classification of type: serif 衬线体 sans serif 无衬线体，灯芯体 script or manusrcipt, display
. Typefonts are grouped in families: one typeface has different forms--->bold, italics, extended, condensed
. The convergence of pringting+electric telegraph+photograph---> give rise to mass circulation newspaper in the late 19th century +railway
Print Journalism in 19th-century Australia
. The colonial newspaper were divided politically and tended to attract men who had political ambitions.
. Australia: lack of professionalism ( irregular entry, lack of formal training, professional standards, strong newspaper craft unions, paternalistic proprietors and editors....), respectability
Up to a Point, Lord Copper: Media Magnatism(sic)
. The rise of the popular press in the late 19th century brought with it the beginning of a long and dishonourable tradition of media proprietors interfering in and influencing politics.
. UK:
Daily Express: Alfred Pearson, 1900, strongly supported Joseph Chamberlain's policies on free trade
Daily Mail: Lord Northcliffe(Alfred Harmsworth), advocated conscription at the outbreak of WWI
Lord Rothermere(Harold Harmsworth), media magnate Lord Copper
. Machiavellian Lord Beaverbrook: purchased the Daily Express in 1916, founded the Sunday Express in 1921, acquired the Evening Standard in 1929
a campaigning proprietor: the weight of media-led public opinion could change public policy
. William Randolph Hearst: New Your Journal, lead-up the Spanish American War in the late 1890s---> Hearst's jingoism -----> Charles Foster Kane (1941) Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
The Brass Check
. Upton Sinclair's study of American journalism,1920, The Brass Check ---> shift towards monopoly and oligopoly求过于供，寡头主义: crisis in American journalism
---> in essence: a struggle between Sinclair (progressive 'muckraking' journalism that championed the cause of the downtrodden against the rise of monopoly capitalism) vs. Joseph Pulitzer/ Randolp Hearst ( salacious, bawdy, entertaining and less newsworthy 'yellow' journalism)
. dialectic: excessive commercialism vs. tradition of muckrakers and progressive journalists --->'professional' journalism (---> reporter's training became based on the creed of objectivity and on the ideology of pluralism and within the unchallenged context of a free market for ideas)
. physical, economic, cultural, and political closeness that produced radical reporters. They had to rely on personal observation and face-to face interviews.
. Distance between reporters and their sources increased because of thechnologies development: newsgathering became much more about the transfer of information from similarly equipped centers of influence/ national newspaper chains reduced influence of purely 'local' papers
. Technologies ===> decisive social shift: reporters no longer part of the audience they reported for / much more closely aligned to the interests they worked for and share the worldview of the proprietor
. The Brass Check: the bias in the modern press became pro-business and anti-labour
. 4 types of control over journalism: 1. ownership of the papers 2. ownership of the owners 3. advertising subsidies 4. direct bribery
Katherine Graham and the Washington Post
. Watergate scandal engulfed Richard Nixon in 1973
. Graham's conception of propretorship: support editors in the professional judgements they make
.Rupert Murdoch: an interventionist proprietor encouraging an editorial group-think across his empire
Citizen Murdoch
. principal: however massive a paper's circulation was, the aim should be to make as large as a return on your investment as possible
.Murdoch: Australia---> London---> America---> secured a foothold in the lucrative Chinese media market
. Murdoch: 1980s, took on the powerful British union movement: Fleet Street---> dockland, Wapping
. Turned around declining profitablility in the British newspaper industry by embracing new technology and downsizing his workforce of journalists and printers
. News Corporation
The End of Fleet Street: Industrial Processes Win Over Craft
. 1986: Fleet Street---> Wapping (full support of them PM Margaret Thatcher)
. Wapping plant: the first newspaper office in the world to be fully computerised
. Changed working conditions---> develop a competitive ideology/ entrench a feeling of distrust among the journalists/ destroy collegiality in the newsroom
. Enlist the support of conservative British PM Margaret Thatcher in his battle with the unions
The Computer Revolution in Newspaper Production
. Trend: introduction of computing power to replace journalists, typesetters, and printers.
The Future of Newspapers: Circulation and Credibility
. 1. newspaper in competition with broadcasting and the Internet
. advertising revenue is under threat---> migrate to Web / globally newspaper circulation is in steady decline/ diversity suffers/ shed staff, squeeze staff number/ greater competition for eyeballs
. Broadsheet: A2 size/ upmarket form
. Tabloid (Compact): A3 size/ downmarket form/ journalistic practices: beat-ups , sensationalist reporting, photographs of semi-naked women/ poor-quality journalism
. 2. Credibility/ Believability
. credibility: independent journalism, free of conflicts of interest, publishing fearlessly in the public interest... ===> 'compact' format was a natural progression
. readers will always migrate to trusted sources of information wherever that is/ media available 24/7, not just on the lawn at dawn
. demise of paper vs. paperbound books
. Killer Application: A computer application that revolutionises the use of the computer system and renders redundant (kills off) previous applications. Spreadsheets and word processing were the original killer applications; Internet browsers and search egines are another examples.

Note 1 Comm and New Media: From Broadcast to Narrowcast

Foreword
. The democratisation of information will eventually lead the democracy itself to be the victim.
. The genesis of evolution from broadcast to narrowcast is technological, but its impact is sociological and political.
. The mode and content of the msgs themselves are changing as the platforms that carry them change.
. One-size-fits-all is being replaced by customisation.
Mass media --- micro-targeted media
Traditional broadcast model --- a vastly superior technological delivery system: the Internet ---> slice and dice a mass audience into mini-audiences.
. Schumpter's famous description of capitalims itself: creative destruction

Preface
. Comm: the process of sending and receiving msgs
Media: the means of comm and transmission
. For the media today, 'interactive' means that someone finds a way of tunnelling into your bank account!
. utopian- dystopian digression 题外话

Part 1 Political Economy, Technology, Culture, Media and Capitalism
. Technology: a process of linking useful knowledge and science to the ways in which society organises its productive (and destructive) relationship with nature and the material world.

1. Digital Futures: How the Mobile Phone has Replaced the Television?

Digital Futures
. contradiction in the new media technologies: hold the promise of a bright abundant future vs. the threat of increased surveillance, even greater monopoly over resources and greater control over our citizenship
Keeping up with the Future
. there are several possible futures associated with digital technologies
. process of convergence: the melding of one technology with another ---> produces a range of new hybrid technologies
. technologically pessimistic: more effective social manipulation and control / human society 'groaning in chains of its own construction' (Amis, 1960) / moves us inexorably towards a totalitarian world state, widens the rich-poor gap, enslaves us to the machine/ comm-oriented---> surveillance-oriented
technologically optimistic : technology somehow equals 'progress'
===> utopian vs. dystopian dialectic
. tech itself has no inherent social values---> social process of convergence will shape the converging tech
. first clue of digital future: broadcast ---> narrowcast: highly targeted narrowcasting: the mass audience is split into its individual particles, the single receiver-consumer ---> Internet / mobile phone/ digital set-top box
. eclectic approach: political economy+ cultural studies
. second concern: technological convergence : emphasise the social relations of convergence
. dialectical method and a philosophical outlook
Structure of the Book
. audience's make-up: two distinct but integrated aspects: consumers+ citizens ---> narrowcasting is all about finding and exploiting the niche market
Part 1: Political Economy, Technology, Culture and the Myths of Cyberia
Part 2: Hot Metal to Hotmail: the (Recent) History of Mass Comm
Part 3: The Emergence of Convergence: New Century, New Media
Part 4: From Broadcasting to Narrocasting: The Emergence of a Surveillance Economy
Young Voices, New Perspectives

2. Digital Dilemmas: Contradictions and Conflict in Thinking about Communication

What is the Dialectic?
. Dialectic: The idea that history is shaped by opposing force. The dialectic is the process of creation, and resolution of contradictions. is a way of understanding the relationship between things through the ways they are connected and the ways that they also simultaneouly contradicts each other.
. Hegelian dialectic: 3 elements: a. the proposition (thesis); b. an opposite or competing proposition (antithesis); c. the logical resolution of the tension between them (synthesis)
. In the book: The organising principle on which the forward momentum of society is based.
. Principle of the dialectic and dialectical thinking: recognizes that the real world is made up of both 'parts and a whole', organised in a 'concrete totality' that contains both 'integration and contradiction' ( Mosco, 1996)
. The operation of the dialectic in human society: a process of historical change over time, a 'spiral movement' in which each advance contains within itself an element of regression ( Alex Callinicos, 1995) ---> two steps forward, one step back
The Dialectic of Nature
. Basic molecular level: double helix of DNA
. Social level: human vs. nature
Living and Working in a 'Material' World
. Materialsim: The philosophical mode of thought that suggests that events, situations, and relationships in the real, physical world determine, to the largest degree, human consciousness and thinking.
. Historical materialism ( Marx and Engels): human beings' interaction with nature creates the material conditions for the development of social structures and argues that the social force that drives historical change is the struggle between classes for control of the material world, in particular control over the means of production. ---> It is the distribution of power within the production process that ultimately determines questions of ownership, access, and wealth. (Callinicos, 1987)
---> dialectic in human society takes the form of a constant struggle between the exploiters and exploited and violent overthrow
. Idealism: the worldview in which all manifestations of reality actually stem from the thought process of human beings, rather than from their material circumstances.
. In modern capitalist economy: the separation of ownership and control from those who are the direct producers and consumers is the key to all social relations ---> exploitation and inequality in the distribution of resources and wealth were not inevitable and certainly not immutable
. 'revolution': some form of social disruption and period of uncertainty, change, and instability in the economy, politics and cultural life.
Memes: The Dialectic of Information and Comm
. Meme: a small but powerful chunk of ideological DNA that carries ideas, meanings, trends, and fashions through both time and space via the process of mimetic (imitative) transfer. (Richard Dawkins, 1976)
. Memes are the medium of cultural transmission, often at a much faster rate than that of genetic mutation and evolution in nature.
. Mass media play a key role in the process of mimetic reproduction and mutation.
. The speed and the anarchic architecture of the Internet can lead to the rapid circulation of a new meme, create a paperless trail that legitimises information that is functionally unreliable and 'unchecked by reality'. ---> counter-cultural anarchists of Cyberia
. Ideology: a worldview based on principles or intuitions that may or may not be logical or internally consistent. ---> 'false' consciousness tied to the 'social relations of domination'.
The Information Revolution: Digital Dialectic
. industrial-technical relation ---> techno-liberation meme (Mondoids) ---> anarcho-technical meme (R.U.Sirius/ cyberian) ===> much more controlled and commercial/ the meme of the 'knowledge society'/ heavily supported by gov and companies (begin in the late 1970s, circulate during the second wave of digital development )
. various media coexist with the Internet and the wireless comm ---> not 'replace' or 'kill'
. Technology meme: Bronze Age-> Iron Age-> the age of steam-> the epoch of the railway->Fordism-> Post-Fordism
Vectors: A Circuit for the Viral Transmission of Mimetic Code
. Vector: the pathway or pathways open to pathogens 病原体to infect a population / In comm study, vector is a pathway or pathways open for comm, in particular the transmission of ideology via mimetic transfer and mutation.
. vector produces a new kind of experience: telesthesia 精神感应，心心相印: percepition at a distance (Wark, 1994) ---> we are disconnected by this experience in a sense
. The most important of the mimetic vectors in the past hundred years have been the parliamentary/presidential style of civil society and the development of a highly commercial and now globally dominant, media-dependent popular culture.
. vector itself is not necessarily neutral or value-free, it may be hegemonic or subversive
.' We no longer have roots, we have aerials' (Wark, 1994)
. Tension: physical experience vs. what they tell us vs. the mediated view presented via the externally controlled vectors of mass comm
. technologies themselves are often the vectors
. 'digital inclusion' (Microsoft Corp. ) : empower people around the world through digital prosperity
Convergence as a Dialectic
. 'Dialectic of convergence' : technical process ----- result of social process of invention and application / socicial process ----- construced by every tools' ideological bias and predispostion, amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another
Key Points
. principle of dialectic
. 'the material': who owns the technologies of production
. memes and vectors/ narrowcast---> individually targeted, consumers rather than citizens