Intellectual Property and Medical Diagnosis

Looking up articles about the history of intellectual property, mixed with the terrible cold I came down with this past week, got me thinking about how the internet can help the creation of ideas.  Many websites such as webmd offer free medical advice, but more often than not I feel that people (myself included) are reading too much into cold and flu symptoms.  People can put themselves into a panic over something that, if properly diagnosed, could be nothing more than a nasty case of the sniffles.  While the internet can be a great tool for looking up cold remedies, finding opinions on what kind of tea works best to soothe a sore throat, and other non-panic-inducing ideas, I feel it can also put ideas into people's minds that do more harm than good.

love

Originally, I was going to work with language because I thought that the barrier that was/is set up between people who can't understand each other was a huge problem.  I think I might have found something that I am more passionate about means more.  It all revolves around "love".
What can change how someone perceives things. What can change how someone feels. What can change the world. LOVE. Love can do all of that. With love, I believe, we can do great things.
Think about those that aren't loved. People who have been stepped on, forgotten about, and hated. What do they know that others don't. What do those others know that the hated don't.
Now everyone has felt love and everyone has felt hate, but what can be found with this?
This of those in prisons. They need love. I think that is where my mission lies at the moment. Love to the unfortunate. What do they know and what can they teach me.
That is all for now

IP LAW AND DIGITAL CULTURE

This issue raises a lot of important issues and becomes something that individuals are grappling with as I am posting this. Initially, this question makes me consider Steve Jobs- he is a believe that anything that goes up online should be within the public sphere. I think their are many issues with this ideology- due to personal security, labor associated with artistic works, etc.

The issue is that we have developed a culture that operates off of instant gratification- a culture that is conditioned to get it's entertainment for free. Individuals are constantly downloading music, textbooks, films-- when they could very well be bought. If we want to create boundaries and confirm that people's ideas do matter (or that they are of worth and can be legally protected) then I think the psychology of people need to change. In this regard, I think it is happening to some extent. Vinyl Culture is an example of this-- where people will go out and buy records, supporting their artists-- because it is refuting the downloaders and establishing a sense of materiality.

This question of Intellectual Property reminds me of the artist Jeff Koons. Kate Taylor of the NY Times writes, "Over his three-decade career that approach, while helping to make him famous, has also brought accusations of exploiting other people’s copyrighted images. He has been sued for copyright violation four times, losing three of the cases." Here is the whole article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/arts/design/20suit.html?_r=2

Jeff Koons, reminds us that issues with Intellectual Property are nothing new- nothing specific to digital culture- but rather that this issue has been embedded in art history for a long time. Duchamp is a main source of discussion with his piece entitled "Fountain". Duchamp changed the face of art- through incorporating a found object into the gallery space-- a urinal. Art becomes more than it's material or formal structure- Duchamp establishes that art can be conceptual, an idea. But, again-- the question of who owns that idea is something that I'd like to discuss further in class.

Just wanted to share....

An example of a fun/pretty derivative work! This was in a gelateria in Rome.

Are copyright laws good or bad?

On the one hand, I'd argue that they're necessary....at least to some extent. Not everyone shares a respect for art, a desire to build something new from existing work. Some people just want to make a killing off bootleg DVDs.

But this is the 21st century, and copyright laws are dragging their feet. All around us, the world is buzzing with new and old technology--books, TV and movies, youtube videos, tweets and facebook posts, blogs, newscasts, old paintings, new paintings, fashion, graffiti, parodies, remixes of remixes--

It's a little overwhelming. It's also rich with untapped potential.

In our remix culture, new technologies create the potential for new artistic mediums. But as long as art is sold as commodity, copyright laws will play an essential role. So how can we find the balance between protecting an artist's work and locking it away?

P.S. I made a separate blog to document my ideas, because I'm thinking my final project will involve the progression of these thoughts, and it really helps me to see it all in one place...though maybe that's the organized writer in me, getting in the way. :) Obviously I'll make the same posts here, since the interplay between all our ideas is crucial to what we're working towards. I hope that's okay!

Media (Mediums): Media Practicum

Media research:
I'm trying to dig into the words media and medium, to root out their histories and some of the various meanings they've been meant to convey over the years. Where better to turn for the history of an English word than the trusty Oxford English Dictionary?

media 1 mi.dia. Pl. (in sense 1) mediæ mi.dii. [L., fem. of medius middle, used elliptically. ]

2. Biol. Short for L. tunica or membrana media. The middle tunic or membrane of an artery or vessel.

• 1889 Leidy Anat. (ed. 2) 580 The media is composed of transverse muscle-fibres with some elastic fibres.

media2 mi.dia, sb. pl. [Pl. of medium sb.5, prob. after mass media. ] Newspapers, radio, television, etc., collectively, as vehicles of mass communication. Freq. attrib. or as adj.Also erron. as sing. in same sense.

medium mi.dim, sb. and a. Pl. media, -iums. [a. L. medium, neuter of medius middle, cogn. with mid a. ]

a. Any intervening substance through which a force acts on objects at a distance or through which impressions are conveyed to the senses: applied, e.g., to the air, the ether, or any substance considered with regard to its properties as a vehicle of light or sound. Often fig.

• 1794 G. Adams Nat. & Exp. Philos; II. xv. 136 By a medium..is meant any pellucid or transparent body, which suffers light to pass through it.
  

• 1875 Encycl. Brit. I. 100/1 The air around us forms the most important medium of sound to our organs of hearing.

b. The application of the word in sense 4 to the air, ether, etc. has given rise to the new sense: Pervading or enveloping substance; the substance or `element' in which an organism lives; hence fig. one's environment, conditions of life.

a. An intermediate agency, means, instrument or channel. Also, intermediation, instrumentality: in phrase

b. Spiritualism, etc. A person who is supposed to be the organ of communications from departed spirits. Hence also applied to a clairvoyant or a person under hypnotic control.

• 1888 Bryce Amer. Commonw. III. 639 Attempts to pry by the help of `mediums' into the book of Fate.

a. nonce-use. A person of the middle class

• 1837 T. Hook Jack Brag ii, The tip-toppers are livelier than the mediums.

What do you think of when you hear the word “Media”?
CNN, FOXNews, MSNBC, New York Times, Reuters, Associated Press, Clear Channel The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera etc...

Media is the plural of “Medium” – an intermediate, a go-between--
A medium is a person capable of communicating with another realm, with the dead, with ancestors, the spirit world, or the Gods-
A medium, a shaman, a seer, a witchdoctor, a wiseman – these people, in many different cultures were charged with healing, with communicating with deities and ancestors, rituals and rites, the obvious analogy for our own time and place might be the clergy, but I reject this, the outsized and disfigured face of modern religion bares little relation to this idea of shamanism; more a combination of communicator, intercessor, advisor, doctor, pharmacist, psychologist, caring for the mind as well as the body, the soul as well as the mind, mapping the spaces between and overlapping, the realities of this world and of others, actualities and eventualities--This is beginning to be digressive but the fact of that matter is, today's MEDIA is no replacement for the MEDIUMS (and their cultural ancestors) of years gone by.

So what can the OED teach us about the multiform media we are forced to deal with today?
Media (medium) is a scientific word, used to describe a substance through with force acts, and through which light and sound are conveyed. A medium is an intercessor, a go-between, a halfway of sorts; a medium is an organ of communication, within one other, with those things outside of what we can perceive.

Now the many media we experience seem to be digital bridges, intersections of our own experience and another's, and in many senses this is true –but more and more we are no longer connecting with the vision or idea or gesture or comments or creations of other individuals, but with material that has been engineered, committee-ed, designed, and approved to induce a specified reaction or manipulate an inherent human sentiment with a stipulated end (the bottom line)—to induce a reaction: buy this thing, watch this thing, hear this thing, think this thought, think this thought, think this thought, think this thought, repetition is a key to their strategies, think this thought, buy this product, don’t question the authority of it, believe this, believe this, believe this, trust the rising Id-level intensity, let it blind you, forget what you know, now you know what we know to be true: consumption is the Real American Dream.

To realize fully what we are lead to believe is “media” in this country, we have
to step away from the word, and wrangle with the edifice
MAINSTREAM MEDIA, MEDIA BLITZ, MASS MEDIA, MEDIA MOGUL, MEDIA CONGLOMERATE,
MEDIA WHORE, MEDIA SHITSTORM, BLAMESTREAM MEDIA
what is your reaction to these phrases? Repulsion? (me too) I think we need to take MEDIA as well as medium back from those who seek to turn these words against us.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oed/oed-idx?q1=medium&type=Lookup
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oed/oed-idx?q1=media&type=Lookup

Telephone

telephone

we are playing telephone

with technology can you play

telephone without it?

Mr. Graham Bell doubts it

We had a plan: to take that childhood game called telephone--where one child begins by creating a phrase which is whispered from child to child around a circle until it gets back to the person who first uttered it and the phrase is uttered again, checked for validity with the person who initiated it, and normally quite different from the beginning words--and play that over a multi-media web, rather than whispering, to see how each technology shapes the idea over time.

One of us began by passing the initial few lines of this post to another in a note. The first person considered the pen the note was written with and the paper it was written on technology, though some might argue they are only the product of it. But this is where our project slowed. The recipient of the note wanted to mail the words to the next person. They never found the address and four days later decided simply to call instead. After that it took two more days for the final product of the project (the picture in the upper right-hand corner of this post) to be sent on.

Unlike on social media where comments on comments happen minutes after something is posted, we couldn't even pass an idea around our circle of three more than once in a week. One technology seemed so separate from the next. Even though we each posted on our facebooks and called our friends many times over the course of the week, this classroom assignment seemed distant from all that. Our phones at our hips and our profiles a few clicks away, we found it easy to have a conversation in the ways facebook and text-messaging set up for us, but failed to rise fully to the challenge of interacting all these different medias with an idea.

Since this is about communication, the last piece of our conversation couldn't help but focus on social media--using the placeholder images from facebook--the current pinnacle of media platforms by sheer traffic. They are symbols of generic-ness and anonymity as well as the fastest form of interaction technology has given us. They remind us of the compromise of personality for popularity, a small network of strongly connected friends for a large network of sparsely contacted acquaintances. New social media unifies all forms of human discourse, and fosters new and challenging forms of discussion, but might this cause our interpersonal dialogs to take on a homogenous form? When we tried to interact with each other, as well as various forms of technology in a dynamic way, the process seemed too slow and tedious.

The first step is admitting that we have a problem. While we might not be there yet, we have started to realize our potential failings in our increasingly technology-dependent world. We've failed to leverage the benefits of the diverse, multi-media tools at our fingertips, in doing so we came to terms with our over-use of single media communication. We check our Facebooks like Pavlov's dogs -- when a telephone ringtone is like the bell that they run to for nourishment. We feed ourselves with our Feeds.

Is a feed better than a conversation?

It is certainly faster.

How can we facilitate the use of multiple forms of technology to create an easily accessible, but diverse, mode of conversation? We need a platform that supports conversing almost as quickly as Facebook but challenges its posters to try new forms to communicate their ideas.

We aren't there yet.