Fan fiction and machinima were simultaneously introduced to me a few years ago through this video. As I briefly mentioned in class, this machinima video was actually created to bring some really horrible and poorly written Half Life fan fiction to life. It eventually became a popular Internet meme, Half-Life: Full Life Consequences.

But the best thing about this whole scenario was that all of the parties involved with this production loved the Half Life video games– so much so that they began creating their own content and distributing it online via FanFiction.net, HalfLife2.net, and Youtube. Within the same day of one user, SquirrelKing, submitting his writing, another user, blind51de, submitted a dramatic reading of the text. As this consumer-generated content floated around the Web, less than a year later, an additional user, Djy1991, merged the fan fiction and the dramatic reading (using a different narrator, Cannon590A) with game play. He created two videos, including the one mentioned above and Half-Life: Full Life Consequences: What Has Tobe Done. Half Life fans loved the fan films, and they requested SquirrelKing (the original author) to write a sequel. So what happened here was a chain of events all starting with the mass produced and mass played video game Half Life. These fans created fan fiction and fan film, and eventually, they gained fans as well; there are even spoofs of the fan-made videos.

This is a perfect example of people building on mainstream media. While Half Life is not in the public domain, users have taken the characters and animation from the game to produce their own versions of Half Life. Though this is definitely a violation of copyright, the video game industry seems to be one of the most lenient industries regarding this issue. They want gamers to be involved with and assume the roles of the characters. They believe it allows the gamers to shape their experiences with the game better. But how far is too far? I personally think when a brand is diluted because of fan fiction or fan film, that’s when it crosses the line (this would just be a matter of judgement). But other than that, I think it’s great for consumers to have deeps relationships with products that they love. That’s the fun in being a fan!

My Wikipedia Project will be about Forehead Advertising. This current stub article does not have much of a discussion going for it, but I think revamping it would draw some attention to it. It’s a unique topic, and there are a lot of news links out there about this. I’m very curious to find out the origin of this type of advertising, as the author of this article claims it was his idea; however, many other forehead advertisers appeared around the same time as him from what I’ve read.

Feedback is appreciated!

EDIT 10/8/12

I’ve managed to update my Wikipedia article twice since the assignment date. My first edit was a complete re-write of the existing material. I watched that for two weeks with no response. I just added more information, so I’m hoping I will see some additional edits by other users along with new ratings and responses on the talk page.

Based on all of the readings this week, it is safe to say that a new media ecosystem has emerged from the rise of the Internet. We have blogs, wikis, open-source software, and so much more that has created a dynamic shift in production and consumption. As we have already discussed, corporations are not the sole producers anymore; users can now be producers, too (“produsers“). What we currently see is what Shirky describes as “a mix of formal organizations, informal collectives, and individuals” within this new communications ecosystem.

Blogs are the oldest form of new new media,” according to the Levinson book. They are basically the face of this new media ecosystem. Large corporations with the means to publish used to be the only disseminators of print as a mass medium. Today, any literate person or persons can go online and create an individual or group blog. And there are blogs about everything (an inherit principle of blogs)! Check out the Technorati Blog Directory, which lists over 1.3 million blogs.

Then there are wikis and open-source software, which are very similar. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created through collaboration (production by a community, not an individual). Like wikis, open-source software is created through commons-based peer production (commons meaning no specific owner and peer production referring to decentralization, self-selection of individuals, and a lack of hierarchy). Pretty much anyone can participate in creating or modifying a Wikipedia article or open-source software. For example, I can go on Wikipedia right now and edit an article. Editing would range from low to high, where low would be correcting a typo and high would be developing a stub article or creating an entirely new article. If I really worked hard at adding and modifying articles, I might even eventually become an administrator with privileges beyond the casual user. But I wouldn’t be the only person making changes to articles in this respect. Others could come behind me and make edits as well. Together, our overall edits would hopefully create a neutral article, one that no longer needs additional edits. The same sort of process happens with open-source software. Open-source software is free, meaning that any one can modify it for use. Given that I had some programming knowledge, I could change the code within the software without having to get permission from the owner. But because I do not have that type of knowledge, I could participate in the modification by sending feedback to a creator of the software to let them know if there were any bugs.

So from all of this, it is easy to see how this new media/communications ecosystem is at work. It is more collaborative and participatory because tools have been democratized. This will be a force that continues to change and shape our culture and society.

The first thing I read from Convergence Culture was the book cover’s quote that states: “Henry Jenkins is the 21st century McLuhan.”

For those of you who might not know the name right off of the bat, Marshall McLuhan was the man that coined the famous phrase “the medium is the message.” This media/ communications theory focuses on studying the medium (i.e. television) rather than the media contents (i.e. television program) it contains.

He stated, “Each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message.”

This was highly controversial at the time, as earlier media theories focused solely on media contents.

But in relation to the comparison between Jenkins and McLuhan, I believe the statement was made mostly in regards to McLuhan’s concept of “the global village” and Jenkins’s concept of the “convergence culture.”

McLuhan stated, “…since the inception of the telegraph and radio, the globe has contracted, spatially, into a single large village. Tribalism is our only resource since the electro-magnetic discovery. Moving from print to electronic media we have given up an eye for an ear.”

Today’s media world is more complicated than McLuhan could have ever predicted, but Jenkins begins to provide some insight by expanding on McLuhan’s ideas.

In the introduction of his book, he says that convergence culture has three parts which include media convergence (flow of content across media, cooperation between many media industries, and a migratory audience), participatory culture (consumers are now particpants and are expected to interact), and collective intelligence (every person knows something, but not everything; together these pieces of information create an alternate source of media power). Basically, Jenkins has taken McLuhan’s idea of a global village and has broken it down in more relevant, modern constructs as they have developed.

I find it very interesting that even as far back as the 50s and 60s when huge corporations were the only owners of media, these ideas of the globalization of media and an active audience were already on the radar and could be seen as determining factors in the future media landscape.

Below are a couple of links to YouTube videos featuring McLuhan and Jenkins that I think you all might find interesting. See for yourself how their concepts relate.

Marshall McLuhan about Global Village

Henry Jenkins

What do you all think?

My boyfriend and I stream movies and television shows from Netflix on a daily basis. When we first began using the service more than a year ago, we mostly watched hit movies that ranged anywhere from the 1980s Terminator to last year’s Captain America. But as our Netflix use has progressed, we have moved very much beyond the hits of the last few decades. We have watched The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, a failing American television series that features David Cross from Arrested Development; Peep Show, a British television series that was fairly popular in the early 2000s but never aired in the U.S.; My Kingdom, a recently-released Chinese opera warrior movie; The High Cost of Living, a dark Canadian drama featuring Zach Braff from Scrubs; and a lot of other niche features that probably didn’t appear in many American theatres or on many U.S. television channels. While I can’t say that we don’t watch the hits anymore (last night was Braveheart, which I had never seen before), our consumption of them is much less now than non-hits or niche productions.

But we had help along the way thanks to Netflix’s filter– an algorithm that provides recommendations based on movies or television shows a consumer has previously watched and/or rated. Basically, Netflix makes suggestions by first listing relevant categories and then by listing relevant movies or television shows within those categories. For example, after I watched The High Cost of Living, Netflix created an entire category for me based on similar movies, most of which featured or were directed by Zach Braff. The same thing happened after watching all of the seasons of Peep Show. The category contained a list of quirky comedies from across the globe. But, of course, Netflix has pretty standard categories, too, such as new releases or newly added. While I personally believe that the Netflix search and suggestions could be better, I still use them more often than not to explore the abundance of movies and television shows that exists. IMDB and RottenTomatoes are a big help, too (that is if Netflix has the movie or television show you want to watch instantly).

And this is just one example of the long tail. It’s such an obvious yet unfamiliar concept, one that I feel is worth exploring in the world’s current state.

What do you all think. Is the concept of the long tail obvious in your daily lives? Do you all think that the long tail is worth exploring?