Response to RIP: A Remix Manifesto - Girl Talk Documentary

Prior to the Girl Talk documentary, we discussed, as a class, the concept of fair use and transformative use within intellectual property. I found it interesting that fair use is a subset of free speech that allows for reproduction of material under critical comment and parodies. My first impression of Girl Talk was that the music was not my style but I can understand why people want to hear all their favorite songs mixed together. As a musician, I feel that artists must have some protections in order to make a living, however, we can see that record labels are the middle man between artists and society, therefore destroying the artists pay.

I think that the documentary has a point, such in the case of Radiohead, that music should be controlled by the people who make it and there should be shorter copyright rights in order to push forth creativity and innovation. It’s very disheartening to think that bio-medical research innovation cannot push forth due to its own field’s copyright restrictions. In the case of music, film, and other types of art, we should be able to collaborate and explore new possibilities. We can see that the status quo right now is not solving for this matter and rather pushing people to work around the system or to accept unreasonable penalties.

It is true, “the past always tries to control the future.” Hell, the KKK wanted to control the future, Hitler wanted to control the future, Kim Jong-Un wants to control the future, and they all failed or are failing at it. There are innumerable instances of failed attempts to control by our government in our history. These are signs we need to change. Life plus seventy years for a copyright sounds more like a jail sentence than a government regulation for the betterment of artists; not surprisingly, that’s how it basically functions; it takes creativity and locks it up continuously in order to control the minds of society and does this by controlling their pockets. This abusive relationship with society and government needs to stop. I say, thank god for the people who have risked everything for these types of films because these messages are the only way to really check government and big corporation’s actions. 

A discussion of Interactivity and Web Design

As we study interactivity and how it relates to website design in our class I recommend checking out this supplementary article.
http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/05/20/new-web-trends-immersive-interaction-design/

This article explains what interactive elements do for a website and argues that they are helpful in the process of website design. The author suggests that interactive elements function to: accomplish a task, connect elements, make an adjustment, change a state, or allow a unique data interaction. The argument develops by stating that interactivity follows a process that begins with a "call-to-action from a user, rules for engagement as determined by the interface (what will happen and how), feedback from the user (did it work or not) and patterns or loops (does the action happen once or repeat on a schedule)." 

This relates to our class lectures of Internet Communication because it shows that media richness and interactivity work together to enhance a websites credibility, it's attitude, and it's information (Lu et al 43). In one of our class readings it deems that media richness is dependent on the ability to communicate with "face-to-face communication being the richest, threaded discussion being leanest. According to his argument, richer media contains more communication modes and social visual cues (e.g., gestures or immediate feedbacks) while less rich media have less cues or capacity to facilitate communication" (Lu et al 41).

Specifically, the article I have linked, connects to the idea of communication and the need for feedback on websites. Media richness and interactive elements serve the web audience so that they can participate in the website through those immediate visual cues of change. They serve to both recognize the audience and to aid the consumer in the service of the website. Websites now and in the future serve to accomplish more actions. For instance, back in 1995, one may only have been able to look up a website and see pictures and call a company for their service. Now you can live chat, make and monitor your account with them in real time, take 3-D tours, watch video of their services, etc.

This leads to my discussion of measuring interactivity. Our class article from Karimova states that interactivity cannot be measured because it is relative, defined in many ways, and hard to observe under said definitions. There is notion, however, in the article that states one way to measure interactivity is by a system of checks and balances. So what this means is that we can monitor a change on a website or a time when something is unbalanced and balanced in some process or cycle.

The speed at which this happens can be defined as interactivity or we can take the Bakhtinian point of view that says that everything is always "in a state of becoming, unbalanced...Therefore, the system is always in a state of interaction" (Karimova 299). So this dialogue or relation is the easiest way to measure interactivity but it may not be crucial for us to measure but rather to find more ways to promote audience and website relationships.