Week7- Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

What is mass amateurization?

Mass amateurization means the process whereby the two parts between experts and amateurs (a person does a thing because of his/her pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons) is dissolving and creating a new category of professional amateurs. It means that shift away from professionalization. For example, people change to writing to the internet rather than writing to the print media as internet creates a space or platform that encourages people to write out loud.

Compare with traditional publishing and weblogs

	Traditional publishing	Weblogs
Intrinsic value	Publish anything in print, more work & high cost. Large market share taken by big companies.	Platform for unlimited reproduction and distribution of written word, low and fixed cost
Extrinsic value	Need to convince a professionally skeptical system to take risk on print publishing due to the reason high cost on large scale printing.	Effortless as people can write out loud without asking for help and permission.

In mass amateurization, everyone can become professionalization as there is not constraint for them. People can take photo and share their photo through internet (weblogs, Facebook) although there are not professional in the particular field. People can share their ideas or mind in the written form through weblogs to tell the worlds what are they thinking about without any restrict compare to the print publishing. In print publishing, the publisher will edit the things that you write and publish to the public but the writing is not valuable to the author as that is not the original work that he or she wants to share about.

However, there are still limitations for weblogs posting or publishing the original works as it will become worthiness because weblogs doesn’t pay for the work but print publishing does. Like Shirky said in the article:

‘Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free like weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost nothing.’

However, recently, weblogs start to pay some rewards to encourage peoples to write more. The most famous or higher rated post will be given some incentive to encourages the webloggers to post more as webblogers will always be the de facto farm team ( people who written in practice or actuality, but not officially established). Those incentives will get from the advertisements which advertise in the particular weblog, personal sponsors or getting donations from Amazaon and Paypal tip jars.  

As conclusion, each types of publishing have it good and bad, like weblogs will be less credible compare to print publishing as mostly weblogs were written by the amateur and the print publishing is written by the professional who are more reliable by the public as professional are the expert in their field. This will become the limitation of weblogs but the one things that amateur can win professional is the creativity as amateur can publish whatever they one without restriction and they can written loudly whatever they think or the ideas in their mind. 

Week 6- The Culture Logic of Media Convergence

This week, we learn about media convergence.

What is media convergence?

Text + photos + audio + video + graphics = multimedia.

Convergence means the context of media. It refers to the technology driven unification of different media channels. In addition to convergence at the distribution level there are areas in which the same content can be re-packaged across medial for example; computer games and films use the same content in different ways. According to Henry Jenkins, media convergence is more than simply technological shift. Convergence refers to an evolution process of technology like nowadays cell phones are not simple telecommunications devices that use for contact peoples. They allow us to play games, download information from the internet and receive and send photographs even text messages.

Media can influence a person through changing their perception.  Peoples believe what they see in their own eyes. There are few theories that mean media can influence people behaviour such as cultivation theory, magic bullet theory and also hypodermic needle theory. When peoples spend long-time period in a particular television programs like sexual, violence or horror, peoples’ behaviour tend to change because they will imitate and learn what the see and hear on the media. Due to this reason, gate keeping theory shown as a role that filtering the content that ‘they’ think will influences the social behaviour.  ‘They’ refers to different media controllers from different countries. However, according to the journal, it said that: ‘convergence is a risk for creative industries because it requires media companies to rethink old assumptions about what it means to consume media- assumptions that shape both programming and marketing decision.’ This decision narrows the range of the creative peoples from limit them to come out with new creative ideas in creative fields.   

Nowadays, people learn not only from TV, radio or print media. Internet had an important role of shaping public’s perception. Through internet, people can know the truth from the debates. So, in my opinion, the media should not filtering so much as people can know from the internet and they will feel they had been cheated by the society as consumer doesn’t like to be cheat. Media convergences affect us positively as well as negatively. Therefore, people should know how to use it for our benefits and not letting them bring negative impact to our lives. 

Week 5 In Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin & Levine

This week talks about intellectual monopoly and intellectual property. How Watt related to intellectual monopoly?

Before this, let have a reviews for Watt’s first,

James Watt (1698-1782), at nineteen he was sent to Glasgow for learning the trade of a mathematical-instrument maker and he returned to Scotland in 1757 and established his own instrument- making business. Watt soon developed a reputation as a high quality engineer. In 1763, Watt was sent a Newcomen steam engine to repair. This made him start his go into more studies on discovered the ways to make engine more efficient and he finally success produce a steam engine that help him earned money and clear his debts. His stream engine was very popular on the century as the engine was four times more powerful than the original engine which design by Thomas Newcomen.

So, answer to the question: “How Watt related to intellectual monopoly?”

The steam engine that developed by Watt was too powerful that it can help to promote economic development. So, many people started to do further studies on the machine as Watt was the only one who sell the steam machine. To prevent anybody else from making a steam-engine like the one he had developed, in 1755 years, Watt had been granted a patent from Parliament. For the next twenty-five years, they had a virtual monopoly over the production on steam-engines.

Nowadays,

There are still intellectual monopolies which happen on Microsoft and Apple. Apple increasing using patents in an aggressive fashion just like Microsoft. As recently people use jail breaking to unlocking the application which needs to pay in Apple. Although jail breaking of Apple devices was legalized, Apple intends to patent its mechanism which allows it to detect a jail broken iPhone, iPad or iPod and restore it to factory settings.

To know more details, you can refer to this link:

http://techrights.org/2010/08/24/datel-settling-apple-spyware-swpat/

As in the book “Against Intellectual Monopoly”, it reaches the conclusions that are at variance with both sides. There are good and bad for intellectual monopoly.

In the intellectual property:

It divided in to 3 broad types that recognized in the legal systems:

1.       Patents

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the Patent and Trademark Office.

2.       Copyrights

Provide protection for authors “original works of authorship”, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished.

3.      Trademarks

It serves to identify the goods, services, and ideas.  Trademark rights used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services. It also uses to protect a title, slogan, and other short word phrase too.

As conclusion, I feel that all the intellectual property is the law that uses to protect the author original work and advice people to create and explore for new ideas. It can to produce more creative works to the industry. However, in the consumer sight, it will become not reasonable due to the intellectual property law. Some of the “black heart”  businessman will increase the price for the original work as no other people can produce the same things and consumer need to buy in higher rate. So, there are pros and cons for the intellectual property and it will be a long journey for arguing on the existence of intellectual property.