Time To Say Goodbye – for now…

After a few months of trialling this new blogging thing, I have come to the end of my writing for now. I may or may not ever return to this page to continue its development, and it is unlikely I will start up a new blog on a different topic. Therefore, the truth is, this may be the last post I do ever write. This is not to suggest that the experience for me was not enjoyable. Indeed, it quite was. I just feel that there is no pressing need for me to at the moment air my views and creative ventures in the online world. Watching films for me is a fun thing to do, and to ponder on them after equally so, but writing about them on a blog continuously would become a little tedious I feel.

This blogging exercise has been part of a requirement for a Net Communications subject at Melbourne University. Therefore, as anyone who reads this site will see, there is a heavy focus on academic content regarding the act of blogging itself, and not many posts to do with my actual niche of interest, films.

In all, the blogging process was straightforward. WordPress was a very manageable and easy to understand platform from where to launch my site. The default themes structure the page for you and the widgets are specific enough to give your blog that professional and understandable look. However, herein lies a problem I found with this exercise. The whole thing felt too rigid at times – I didn’t always feel I had the liberty or the access to design the colour, font, and overall layout of my page. This is a little different to, say, Myspace, which I as I can remember allowed for their pages to be set out in practically any fashion possible. I know that for blogging purposes the pages need to be quite minimalist in design so that they’re both readable and striking, but a few more options for background design and font style in WordPress would have made the creation of the page perhaps more interesting and liberating for mine.

With respect to the act of writing itself, I discovered that I had to find a balance between a formal, clear and modern style that was not always easy to achieve. Blogging prose by nature should be reasonably conversational; but, the academic content we often had to write about as part of this assessment meant that I had to express myself in a more academic way in order to convey the point I was trying to make. Indeed, discussing critical web design and or niche analysis, and drawing on various academic opinions, generally necessitates a type of considered writing tone. Therefore in the end I found that trying to be relaxed but formal at the same time was a little awkward and perhaps my writing came off a tiny contrived as a consequence.

I have tried to post on this page as consistently as possible, and as hence the dates of my postings span from April to June. Still, I haven’t ever dived into writing on my blog with any massive excitement; it has been with an inkling of reluctance, rather, knowing that the posts that are ultimately relevant to this course are the academic ones that pertain to the guidelines we were given in the beginning. That is why I haven’t really found blogging to be cathartic or relieving. In the future, if I do ever resume this type of expression on the web, I’ll probably take it up with more enthusiasm because I will be writing on a thing I want to when I want to in a freer manner. This assessment seemed contrived, fake and pushy sometimes.

Having said this, though, this was the best subject I was apart of this semester. The tutes were relaxed and interesting, and we went through the content each week in a way which was relatable; that is to say, we used real life, recent examples of things to demonstrate concepts. The case in point of the Star Wars Kid was pretty funny, and it was a novel way of demonstrating the importance of privacy and reputation in this new, connected digital world, epitomised by Web 2.0.

I think if their was a greater focus in the assessment on our own posts, it would make the subject a little more enthusing for the entire dozen or so weeks. But, I guess it would only make our blogs more to the tune of our own interests and not really pertinent to the coursework, which is admittedly not the genuine purpose here. So it was probably inevitable that the content we had to write on would be restricted; however, I still maintain that my blog doesn’t really look like a film blog at all, but rather a forced University-driven one.

No doubt, this subject has alerted me to different avenues of reading. I have mainly been into getting swept away in novels and newspapers over time, but over the course of this semester I have been alerted by David to different areas of the web, especially blogs, that can provide entertaining reads also. Technorati is a terrific way to peruse through different blogs to find a niche that satisfies your needs depending on your mood.

All in all, I am happy with how everything on my blog has turned out. There are imperfections: my writing tone is inconsistent, my layout is plain, but I have tried to catch and understand all the content thrown out in lectures and tutes and reflect that effort in my assessment tasks. Hopefully I do ok, I have tried in this task, but despite all that, I have honestly learned a good deal about the Web anyway and that’s sufficient, I guess, in consideration of everything.

Born To Be Wild

It has been now four days since the passing of renegade film icon Dennis Hopper due to complications with prostate cancer. A leading figure of American counter-culture and rebellion in the 60s, Hopper was an erratic and wild individual.

Recent media coverage of his death has been decidedly focused on his somewhat notorious and impersonal nature. The Sydney Morning Herald included prominently at the beginning of their article on May 30 the following: “He married five times and led a dramatic life right to the end. In January 2010, Hopper filed to end his 14-year marriage to Victoria Hopper, who stated in court filings that the actor was seeking to cut her out of her inheritance, a claim Hopper denied. ‘Much of Hollywood,’ wrote critic-historian David Thompson, ‘found hopper a pain in the neck.’”

Similarly, the ABC broke the news of his death on May 31st with mention in unabashed fashion of the way his “prodigious drug abuse, temper tantrums, propensity for domestic violence and poor choice of movie roles often made him a Hollywood pariah.”

This has been the trend. Strong allusions to the drug-addled, violent, unstable aspects to Hopper’s life.

However, this patently lop-sided nature of reporting and coverage is missing the point and redundantly illuminating dark details of his life in a time where most, if not all, should be remembering and honouring the talented writer and director’s artistic and political contributions.

Hopper’s wild and indelible reputation was cultivated through his early film creations and the anti-establishment ideologies that filtered through them. His legacy should rest on this side of his rebellious nature, not on the largely irrelevant hidden personal side. To focus on the latter is a distorted understanding of this man’s character and influence.

Easy Rider, perhaps Hopper’s greatest accomplishment as director and actor, and arguably one of the most important films of the last century, is a great depiction of rebellious freedom and indifference. Starring with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, Hopper gelled with all while on screen to highlight the lost idealism of the 60s and the crash of the free-living, communal lifestyle with the established, defined and scheduled culture of America. As Anne Hornaday puts it in the Washington Post, “With it’s portrait of counter-culture heroes raising their middle fingers to the uptight middle-class hypocrisies, Easy Rider became the cinematic symbol of the 1960s, a celluloid anthem to freedom, macho bravado and anti-establishment rebellion.”

This is not to say that Hopper’s film making and his personal troubles were mutually exclusive. Indeed, his drug use heavily influenced a lot of his film creations. However, reference to his violent ways and his many marriages is completely unnecessary in honouring the man.

Hopper was born to be wild. He died working and living in the same vein of action he represented in his early days. But in remembering him, we need to hone in on what made him such a wildly big and influential figure, and not what was behind the scenes and irrelevant.

Hi54HighFidelity

Brilliant.

Creative Commons – what the hell is it?

With the expansive reach of the Internet and the increase in popularity of blogging and media expression, personal opinion and work is becoming an enveloping and ever more accessible part of our culture. People around the world now have the ability to publicise their views and ideas online.

The advent of wide and very reachable dissemination of public thought was part of the reason for changes to copyright law in the 1970s. At this time, as Marc Garcelon explains in An Information Commons? Creative Commons and Public Access to Cultural Creations, there was a ”shift towards an ‘intellectual property’ conception of copyright law in America.” In 1998, there was a clear legal move to broaden copyright law and restrict access to creative works. Essentially, copyright protection was extended for a further twenty years in the US, thereby preventing works entering the public domain for a long, and perhaps unjustified, length of time.

This tension between creative accessibility and copyright law has been an important, though admittedly stifled, debate. At the core of it is a distinction between “the need for a democratic citizenry to have access to cultural creations and the need to provide a limited monopoly to creators of artistic work as an incentive to create.”

In light of the tidal swing in favour on intellectual property, the Creative Commons Project aims to be a nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration among copyright users. Indeed, the site, as Garcelon further asserts, devises “a novel strategy  giving current copyright holders the option of making creative work available for copying and distribution by granting various exceptions to the rights they hold under copyright.”

In practice, Creative Commons allows for the transfer of different media through the creation of a set of  licenses that have inherent in them certain legal concessions and protections. These licenses, to varying degrees, augment the malleability and usability of the sounds, writings and images people may create. By consequence, these freely accessible licenses emerged as a “counterpoint to open-ended copyright pushed by commercially successful creators and large media corporations.” (An Information Commons?)

This very positive, considering that as Garcen points out, “rapidly oligopolistic” control over media is to such a disconcerting extent that “only six major conglomerates in America dominated roughly 90 percent in the following media markets: broadcast telvision, cable television, radio, music CDs, movies…”

Overall, the Creative Commons ideal seems generally positive. It is designed to give more people access to artistic creations. And yet it still enables the creator to decide the extent to how and in what manner their work is shared – in this process, there is a balance that benefits both the creator and the commons. Therefore in principle, the new copyright licensing system is opposed to neo liberal capitalist and property-centred concepts and rather believes in the need for a citizenry to be informed via free, uninhibited public discourse.

There are however some criticisms of the Creative Commons project. Some question whether the licenses are truly beneficial for artists. For example, Sharee Broussard in The Copyleft Movement: Creative Commons Licensing, argues that the licenses lean toward a ‘remix’ culture that fails to account for the fiscal needs of artistic creators, be them musicians, visual artists or writers. However, I feel that the risk that this entails outweighs the alternative avenue of pursuit, which would involve a stifling of expression and building upon of ideas created by one individual or a group. Anyway, with strict copyright laws, large media corporations, as discussed above, have an unjustifiable control over creative enterprises and they will merely fund what they see as profitable not creatively inspiring.

On account of my view, I have decided to use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 License. Basically, this means that people are free to share, copy and distribute my work, and remix and adapt it, so long as they attribute my original work, and so long as they distribute any adaptations under a similar license. This is important for me in that any remixes and so forth will have to reflect the origins of the initial creation, which instils integrity into the artistic process but also allows freedom in expression.

Limits to Blogging?

Geert Lovink once made the pointed observation that: “Blogs create communities of like-minded people. Debates happen within homogeneous webclouds…Most bloggers would admit that it is not their aim to foster public debate. If you disagree with a fellow blogger, it is even unwise to write a comment. Instead, it is much safer to post the remark on your own blog. “I blogged you”. The chance that someone will respond to it is almost zero. Herein is the limit of blogging…”

In order to consider his views, it is best to first speak generally about the nature of blogging in this modern era.

By nature of the design of wordpress, it is clear that blogging is a phenomenon which is meant to be a very communal and interactive thing. There are opportunities to comment at the end of each post made, and one is able to connect to other blogs and sites via easily-made links in the dashboard.

Ideally, the blogosphere would operate as a vastly interconnected, stimulative domain where educated and concerned public discourse would be fostered. However, practically, the reality is quite different. This is because anyone is able to create a blog as there is no filtering system. Over time, it seems this occurrence has lessened the sort of seriousness of blogging to an extent. A good deal of blogs are made that are either very restrictive in content and appeal, or ridiculously stupid.

This is a result of the long tail. Though the long tail enables great diversity online, as there is an infinite amount of shelf space, it also means that many blogs and sites are not read. It is just not feasible to read, acknowledge, or link to all blogs in existence, as the number of them increases at a rapid rate. Along with this, people who create blogs do not always have in their mind the intention to create public debate, but may prefer to create idle areas of written space online for no palpable communal benefit. And even when commenting occurs, it is more than likely that the debate that ensues will be between like-minded individuals, those people who are searching and reading blogs that cater to their own interests. This inevitability is at the crux of Lovink’s point: “debates occur in homogenous webclouds.”

However, a positive element to blogging is that a lot of bloggers are not inhibited by media corporations and the latter’s concern with profit-making. Writing is free of those constraints and therefore is more likely to be content-driven and personal based. It are these qualities that help create better and more beneficial debate. In this respect, citizen journalism online is terrifically balanced and involved. As explained in Terry Flew’s Citizen Journalism, online media can aid in creating public interest and heightening varied contribution to debate. For instance, the South Korean site OhMyNews, “accesses only 20 per cent of the content for its online site from its employed staff, with the balance coming from the estimated 50,000 South Koreans who post news stories on to the site.” (Citizen Journalism).

Also, the way that the not-for-profit e-journal, On Line Opinion, really ignited its public identity through enabling comments to be made on its page is another example of diverse people contributing their ideas and opinion to the very general and unspecific portal of news. The journal states that its first “really big change” was when they put a forum into place. It was initially designed to allow readers to comment on articles, however, it soon evolved into a “bulletin board where any-one can start a thread…in a sense they’re doing a blog post that readers can comment on.” (Interview with Graham Young, Editor of On Line Opinion, National Forum). In allowing people to start their own thread, the site is fostering public debate, encouraging divergent opinion and welcoming the initiation of breaking news among people of different backgrounds. The chances of people responding to comments is therefore relatively high.

However, the way this site is structured also brings up another point of contention. On Line Opinion states that it “fresh threads are subject to moderation.” The concept of moderating what is written as comments on blogs and the like seems a little wrong for mine. For unhindered, democratic debate, everyone needs to have the ability to express their opinions, however undemocratic their views may seem. This adds colour and equality to debate, and ensures all opinions are considered valid and worthwhile. Therefore, it would be my approach to not moderate the comments on this site, Following Films. It becomes a little contentious if racist, personal, or hate-filled opinions are voiced, but I guess in the end the old notion of respecting everyone’s right to a say overrides the need to moderate politically incorrect statements for the sake of clean debate. Otherwise, argument would then turn into a largely one-sided affair with a person (moderator) pushing and leading opinion in a certain direction. Of course, reputation may be at stake in allowing unimpeded commenting, and there are valid concerns for this, particularly in this era of Web 2.0 (as seen in cases like Heather Armstrong being fired because of Dooce.com), but in the long run reputation cannot take precedence over open debate. Daniel Solove says it best: “Too much control (over reputation) will also stifle free speech, as it will prevent others from speaking about us.” (Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet).

Ultimately, Lovink’s observations are valid. There are limits to blogging: debate often occurs within a “homogenous cloud,” as people will read just what they want to; and, a good deal of blogs are never really acknowledged. However, the structure of blogs themselves helps to foster debate, and the long tail can widen the scope and diversity of such discourse, and so blogging can still pose as a great medium to inform and cultivate public opinion.

Blogging – Design and Distinction

It is undeniable that the design one selects for a blog or site is important for a number of reasons. The presentation of a blog serves not just as an aesthetically pleasing side-effect to the page itself, but it also helps balance the written and image work that’s shown, and can heighten its overall marketing appeal. It is, therefore, pertinent to ask the question, as Alan Liu does, “What is the formal design of information cool?”

The old adage that less is more is quite relevant to web presentation. Obviously, the purpose of a blog, in its most simple sense, is to experiment in communication. Therefore, the design of a site should not be so overwhelming or glittery as to detract the viewer’s attention from the central written or visual opinion of the piece.  But the presentation should exude a certain warmth and appeal that keeps browsers interested and concerned.

This ideal of effective simplicity is known as the Minimalist Impulse, and has the been the guiding light in terms of fashioning this page. As this is a site dedicated to miscellaneous film news, the overall layout has to have a particular colour and eccentricity to it, as film analysis is a varied and infinite type of exercise underpinned by love, hate, sadness and glee, yet the page needs to be simple enough to manouevre through with relative ease. So, the header selected here depicts a scene from the widely popular Dazed and Confused and the background is differently grey, but the page doesn’t have cluttered or disorganised writing and or imagery as can be seen in the page below, which was functioning as a politically informative site.

Disorganised, screaming with random colour. Distracting.

Ultimately, design is about context. As Olia Lialina notes in A Vernacular Web 2, changes in appearance of pages on the web are just inevitablities of the Internet becoming “entwined with our daily lives.” Myspace, the popular social site for teens, for instance, has a glittery and flashy look which ”resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year” (danah boyd) and so appeals to fast-consuming youth. However, the design on pages such as Facebook, which is a more teen to adult-oriented site, has a simpler look based on “professionalism” and an “upper class” aesthetic.  Google’s homepage is so very accessbile and clear, and therefore ever so popular.

There is a good yet short article, Web Pages That Suck, that gives visual examples of awfully designed web pages, and argues that we as Internet users can learn a great deal from the amateur mistakes that were made in the 90s. Some of the retro blunders made were: an overuse of flash “splash pages” that used glinting and revolving logos, which made it hard for viewers to focus; background images that clashed with the colour of the font and so blotted out words; animated gifs swinging across the pages and splitting attention; and, scrolling text that achieved the “perfect combination of too fast to read comfortably and to slow to read quickly.” (Joel Walsh, 90s Web Design: A Nostalgic Look Back).

In consideration of this, the layout I selected for this page is called the Chaotic Soul Theme, created by Bryan Veloso. It is described as a “dark 2 column theme” with features including a “black background, custom header, fixed-width, right-sidebar, sticky post, rtl-language support, (and it being) translation ready.” This design, available readily on WordPress, is structured according to columns and a right sidebar yet is still malleable enough for myself to change colour, header, and image.

In terms of the order of posts, my aim was to expose the viewer to all the written entries made on the blog, with the most recent being the most commanding and dominant (in larger font size) at the top, and to also break them into navigable categories according to written content.

In addition, another key feature to design is font. Leo Merz, in his ‘Comic Resistance’ piece found in the Digital Folklore Reader , expresses the importance of the implications of using different fonts. He notes that, upon seeing that the labels for landmark 1980s UR techno machines (found in a museum for techno music history) were written with Comic Sans MS: “the application of this casual type (was) neither appropriate for the carefully crafted identity of UR, nor (did) it match the aesthetics of the machines themselves.” Obviously, fonts have a clear influence on a person’s immediate aesthetic opinion of a site, and so an inoffensive and fluid type is desirable, like the one inherit within this theme.

Ultimately, the design approach I took was relatively straightforward and condensed. The main point of importance within the blog lies in the written work, and so the appearance of this site was desired to be “modern” in the sense that it would be “basically organising and communicating messages – to establish the nature of a product or idea, to set the appropriate stage on which to present its virtues, and to announce and publicise such information in the most effective way.” (Graphic Style: From Victorian to Post-Modern)

Though this site is not an examplar of intense creativity or an ultra-cool modern presentation, there has been thought put into its structure and colour so that it gives off a semblance of what Alan Liu refers to as “friendliness and accessiblity.” (The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information).

Niche Blogging In the Era of the ‘Long Tail’

LONG TAIL:

The concept of the long tail is a modern phenomenon. It regards the idea that our online culture is moving away from a focus on mainstream products to a large number of niches or targeted interests in the tail. The advent of a developed online culture, branded as a dynamic and interactive Web 2.0, and the subsequent effect of an “infinite shelf-space” (The Long Tail in a Nutshell), has allowed an endless number of goods and services to be available and sought out online.

BLOGGING:

An important consequence of the expansion of the long tail has been niche blogging. Low-cost digital authoring tools, and networks that have lessened the threshold for publishing and disseminating culture, have enabled a great deal of members of the community to participate in blogging in a wide variety of areas.

Blogging is now a popular practice. Initially conceived as a mechanism for “experimenting with the public diary format” (Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse), it is now a multi-faceted trend which allows for personal rants, a counter-voice to the dominant news industry, and a public network where social bases can consolidate their affiliations through link lists, blog chalking, RSS feeds and the like. Indeed, the blogosphere is a dynamic ocean of personal input.

Thus the infinite blogosphere, aided by low digital distribution costs as alluded to above, has somewhat altered the new media landscape. Henry Jenkins, for instance, contends in his piece Convergence Culture: Where Old Media and New Media Collide that new media technologies, including blogging, have “expanded the range of available delivery channels, and enabled consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.”

However, media theorist Geert Lovink cautions against one reducing blogs to their “problematic relationship with the media,” because they, rather, he argues, “appeal to a wide register of emotions and affects as (they) mobilize and legitimize the personal.” (Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse)

This effect of appealing to people’s varied sentiments and opinions is unequivocal evidence of the operation of traditional blogging in the long tail, where tens of millions of blogs both cater for obscure and specific ideas and theories and allow people with common views to communicate and share. (Elaborate on benefits of blogging in long tail).

By consequence, it is easy to see how the dual effect of unhindered Internet space and immeasurable local niches of interest can allow the long tail to flourish and “break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks-and-mortar retail.” (The Long Tail in a Nutshell)

Following Films dwells in this long tail. It follows to some extent the recent trends of film blogs, which are mainly concerned with analysing and interpreting variant aspects to old and recent films in diverse ways. This blog is quite loose in its intention – it seeks to report on mainly but not exclusively older films, and give a hopefully fresh and youth-based perspective on them, and to also publicise recent film news, reviews and opinion articles. This niche, relating to film news, is quite prevalent in the online world, and has naturally developed into something a little more specific than this blog here demonstrates.

For example, Film School Rejects is an immensely popular film blog, occupying a strong presence in the film-based niche. Established in 2006, the site is run by a team of editorial staff, headed by Neil Miller, and aided by contributing writers who add to the colour and diversity of the views expressed. Thus there is no apparently dominant authorial voice.

Though priding itself on being a portal of the most “up-to-date movie news and reviews,” it also publishes articles that are of a more jocular nature, described by the site itself as stories that fall “through the cracks.”

By nature of observing the content that the blog displays, it is clear that its target audience is pretty wide and unspecific. The graphic display of its audience tracking indicates that its viewer number reaches around 300,000 people a month. This is a solid and impressive statistic. By writing standard film reviews, the site provides online blog material relevant to all film watchers. However, it does feature a section entitled ‘Hot off the Press’ which, in a similar vein to stories that “fall through the cracks,” is a funny and obscure analysis of recent film-centred news. This quite alternative section to the blog obviously widens the reach of its appeal in the film-based niche. It enhances variety and allure, and therefore, by consequence, is less specific in its target market. The frequency of posts is quite startling: the ‘Hot Off the Press’ section publishes at least 4 to 5 posts a day.

Advertising envelops the pages of the site. With adverts ranging from links concerning Aussie Home Loans to Weight Loss programs, the fact that a wide and not specifically youth-centred audience is targeted is reinforced.

Similarly, advertising is a key facet for raising revenue on the film blog site, /Film. It shows ads from Google, as well as more mainstream ones like those for Stella Artois and the Australian Government’s ‘principal business resource,’ business.gov.au, and these are the blog’s primary source of income.  

/Film aims to be personable and opinionated. It states: “People don’t need another movie news site with 20 writers in this long-tailed world. So by year two, we had downsized the staff to a select group of four or five people. /Film Editor Peter Sciretta became the main source of news and opinion to give the blog it’s much needed structure. The idea was/is that /Film would be a blog with a personal point of view on the cutting edge of breaking news. Soon after, our community began to grow.”

This blog has more of a central voice in comparison to Film School Rejects. The structure is more accessible, and the blogs are generally shorter and more concise. It has a more communal sense to it too, with the results of encouraging participation of the wider public evident along the border with various people’s comments on film-based issues.

Following Films does not have the readership or the variety of content of these said blogs. I function as the sole writer and artistic decorator of this pool of posts, and this fact does inevitably narrow the colour and number of the written works that are made. Indeed, this site is independent and expresses the viewpoints of myself with respect to factual film news and developments and film reviews.

So it is clear that the long tail of niche blogging allows for these critical, infinite views and opinions to be dispensed, and though this blog is quite restricted in vibrancy and content, it nevertheless delivers these views and thus forms part of the wider network of blogging in this modern, networked culture.