II: Circulation and Control of Representations
Instructor: Dr. Brian Goldfarb
Required reading:
- D. N. Rodowick, "An Uncertain Utopia: Digital
Culture," Reading the
Figural, Durham:
Duke university Press, 2001, 203-234, 253-257.
- Grahame Weinbren, "The Digital Revolution
is a Revolution of Random Access" Telepolis (online journal)
http://www.heise.de/bin/tp/issue/dl-artikel.cgi?artikelnr=6113&rub_ordner=special&mode=html
- Alyson Lewis "Playing Around with Barbie:
Expanding Fair Use for Cultural Icons," http://www.kentlaw.edu/student_orgs/jip/volume1/barbie.htm
- Lucas Introna and Helen Nissenbaum, "Shaping the Web: Why the
Politics of Search Engines Matter" The Information Society
Vol. 16, No. 3 (2000), 169-186. http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS/articles/introna163.html
Questions:
- Rodowick
suggests that resemblance is being displaced by similitude, and that "the
distinction between linguistic and plastic representations, and along with
it the distinction between spatial and temporal arts, is loosing its relevance."
What evidence either supports or contradicts this thesis?
- Given
Weinbren's discussion of random access texts, can we still consider a work
narrative that yeilds control of time and sequence to the reader/viewer?
What is gained and what is lost with this reconceptualization of narrative?
- Lewis
argues for expansion of fair use in response to what she sees as the increasing
movement of symbolic and semiotic resources out of the public domain. She
sees private/commercial claims these same semiotic resources as problematic
in light of the fact that they are the very substance of public culture.
Given this state of affairs, is there reason to imagine a system for the
regulation of intellectual property that would assign some form of rights
to receivers (targets) of messages rather than simply creators?
- Introna
and Nissenbaum point to search engines as key technologies for structuring
access to information and ideas on the web, determining what is visible
and what is not. How might we imagine software, devices, or cultural practices
as alternatives to or extensions of existing search engines? Are there parallel
analysis that can be made with regard to browsers (newsgroups, email programs,
etc) , and the way they structure our experience of newtworks?
Recommended Readings