Ad Parodies

Images taken from punknews.org

The topic Culture Jamming reminded me of Nike's stint in using Minor Threat's album cover for a skateboarding advertising promotion (Nike's Major Threat Skate Tour) back in 2005. Does anyone know/remember this? Minor Threat was a hardcore punk band from the United States who projected the DIY subculture in their music. Based on my knowledge, the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) culture began as a punk and political movement decades ago which includes being anti multi-national corporations and mass productions etc. The band had been well-known for resisting against huge corporations such as Nike. Anyway, Nike used the band's iconic album cover without the band's permission which created a furore by band member Ian MacKaye. Nike apologized later on publicly saying that it was a 'poor judgement call'. You can read about it here.

Nike claimed that the band is iconic and used the album cover to attract skateboaders to the marketing campaign. Minor Threat may have been legendary amongst the punk community but how well do skateboarders nowdays actually know about the band in the first place? While some may argue that the main problem lies in Nike stealing the artwork without permission, the multi-billion dollar corporation had ultimately used it as a parody against the band. So the 'pop-culture marketers' had used the same strategy towards their own critics and made them taste their own medicine. Based on your previous judgements on culture jamming and ad parodies, is it now acceptable for the tables to be turned?

I thought it'd be interesting to bring this up for the tutorial discussion. Hope it's relevant enough. Have a good week!

Women's digital activism through gaming; The good, the bad, and the virtual

Hi there, I'm sorry for posting late...just realised last night that it was this week that I was supposed to carry out the discussion..below are some questions that I thought of as I read the 1st article in the readings for the week..

Question no 1

Are the ethical values and standards universally applicable in media, irrespective of time and place?
Every profession has its ethical guidelines and a profession without ethics cannot survive in a civilized society. Hence all the respected professions are guided by professional ethics. The professional ethics are guiding principles and a kind of self regulatory mechanism for keeping the profession updated bonded by ethical guidelines. Media is a profession guided by its own ethical guidelines. In most of the developed world press councils develop the guidelines of ethics and keep vigil eye on the professional conduct.

Media have a complex relation with ethical practice. Many of the critics have raised doubts over the electronic media and the doubts are not baseless. By the advent of electronic media the readers of print media raised their eyebrows and hoped a deterioration of ethical values. The good, the bad and the ugly opines the binary good bad a third term, ugly which destabilizes the opposition into a non-logical list. The meaning of these words in binary fashion represents different meanings. The author of the “The Good, the Bad and the virtual” Mr. Mark Poster suggest that the virtual meaning of these words may not fit into existing definitions of the good and bad, This means a situation where the issue of ethical standard or definition may be appropriate but may not be appropriate in the same degree in another situation or time.

Since the new trend of change of media has brought out virtual values by mediation the use of ethical norms may not universally apply at all places and time. The acts that are distanced information machines cannot be judged by the same one which is used for evaluating the face-to-face speeches. Do the standards deployed in real life serve us well in the virtual domains of cyberspace, film, radio, television, telephone and print in short, in the media? According to Mr. Poster there is specificity to ethics that limits its range of applicability to what is now, after the vast dissemination of media, called real life. Perhaps the virtual imposes a species of cultural life that is to use Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase, beyond good and evil. The problem then is not to introduce and determine a means to apply ethics to a recalcitrant sand strange domain of the virtual, but to invent new systems of valuation that adhere effectively to mediated life.

Another question arises just as the first is posed; if new ethical rules are required for mediated culture, perhaps the earlier system of ethics was itself flawed. Perhaps ethics as we have known it is put into question when the virtual complicates the real. Perhaps certain problems with the ethical emerge when one attempts to extend its reach to mediated acts. As long as media were contained top particular times and spaces, ethics was arguable not in question. To read a printed novel, newspaper, or treatie4s is a special act, easily delimited from real life and face0-to face relation by the very materiality of the printed page. It is simple to distinguish between talking to a person and reading a novel, even if the novel is more arresting that the conversant. The medium of the film is similarly bounded by its reception and its form: films are shown in specific places at specific times. They are determined in time and place. After the credits have rolled the audience leaves the theatre and encounters other people perhaps to discuss the film.

These familiar boundaries between relations among people and the media are now beginning to crumble. Walkman and radios permit a person to listen to music regardless of location.

Thus we can say that certain standards and norms of ethic for media cannot be universal. They might become obsolete in different times and places but certain ethical values remain unchanged regardless of time and place.

Question No 2

Is there a likelihood of getting ethical values diluted in advancement and popularization of electronic media?

According to Mr Poster religion, the cultural dominant of the pre-modern era does not give ethics the pride of place it has in modern society. The present age understands the challenge the media presents for ethics and for spiritual life in general (Dreyfus 1999) He regards the pres as a danger to humanity because of the anonymity it introduces. For him, “the power of impersonality of the press is nothing less than a dreadful calamity”.

Mr Poster further mentions his fears by outlining some directions for the genealogy of morals in an age populated not only by humans but also by information machines, particularly Internet machines. People have begun to flock around Internet machines.

The incursion of information machines into daily life elicited considerable worry about ethics. On the internet itself there are many discussion groups working on the topic. Until the Web was created in 1993 the culture of computer scientists and the ethos of the university community dominated the morale tone of communication on the Internet. A vague ethic of the sharing of information characterized exchanges on the Net. In fact the architecture of networked computing promotes just such rapid decentralized information flows.

Civility was presumed and largely prevailed on the Net from 1969 to 1993. Users were for the most part convinced that a utopian communication device had been set in place that surpassed the moral tone of real life meetings as well as encounters in other media. Gradually the Net users increased. The population of Net users grew quickly from 20 million to 200 million by the end of the decade overwhelming the Net culture of the earlier period. In the new conditions of mass usage the netiquette could not keep up.

The problem of Net ethics attracted the attention of other media like print, news paper and magazines. In Net spamming and flaming became very common problems. The use of Net became a market driven medium. When the topic of ethics on the Net turns to its presentation in the broadcasting media the medium is so coarse that the message in this case ethics is difficult to discern.

By grabbing the Net use by private and global market the ethical issues have got a back seat and hence it is a high time to think that the ethical values have got dilution in the era of Net.

Question No 3

Is it feasible to maintain the transcendental ethical principles in media in contemporary society?

Given the complexity of the challenges and situation the author of “The Good, the Bad and the Virtual”, Mr. Mark Poster suggest that a transcendental ethical principle is not possible to maintain in the current conjuncture of mediated information society, its elaboration does not adequately constitute the conditions of ethics, does not illuminate the dynamics of good and bad in the various cultural contexts of cyberspace and broadcast and print media. Instead according to Nietzsche’s perspective where he has explored the good and the bad in the culture of virtual. The moral positions of the master and the slave, which Nietzsche analyzed so trenchantly, take as their communication context oral and print cultures. Moralities of good /bad and good/evil growing out of these contexts apply at best partially to information society.
Nietzsche advocated, paradoxically, an aesthetic process of moral creation. His “free spirit” of superman resembles nothing so much as an artist, a spiritual warrior, one who wrestles with her own limitations to move beyond them, to get to a place where new values are possible. The moral elite explores its own values, dissects them, reject them devalues them and purposefully seeks the pain of being lost, uncertain, without direction. She suggests an introspection of oneself wherein she struggles with herself, the free spirit experiments with “living dangerously”, risking her beliefs, deliberately placing herself amid the unfamiliar and the strange. This internal struggle of her own experiment is a formula for cultural innovation.

According to Nietzsche only after such a self reflective struggle an individual may arrive at a position to find new values, new ways of valuing that he/she thinks are less self-destr5uctive than both the noble and the democratic moral mechanisms.

Having undergone a rigorous process of self transformation, the free spirit is capable of expressing beautiful values, values that will attract others to join in their celebration of them.

Many philosophers and critics reject the Nietzsche’s theory in modern age. According to many of the critics Nietzsche’s utopia beyond good and evil may be impossible or wrongheaded or undesirable.
Many argue that Nietzsche’s theory of transformation does not really resemble with the theory and process of moral transformation; superman and the condition of moral judgment in the age of mediated information.

The internet enacts a massive deterritorialization of cultural values and by doing so doing links or reterritorializes the ethical and political issues. One innovation, then, of the Internet is a call for a new theory of the political as a collective determination of the good in a context in which the ethical, the individual determination of the good, receives somewhat less prominence than in the modern or print age.

Due to the possibility of exchange of information online availability of communication there is possibility of very constructive and positive communication but there is an equal possibility of disruption of ethics, norms and standards. The establishment of ethical norms, for instance those of netiquette in cyberspace occurs in the process of forming new relations of force, giving shape to the emergent zone of cyberspace. Ethics and politics appear mutually imbricated in networked computing. Whereas ethical concerns in information age include topics of censorship and overload, as these challenge existing norms and attitudes, the more serious issues point to the possibility of a transvaluation of values and the political aspects of forming subjects in the domain of the virtual. Thus the possibility of getting ethical concerns, norms and standard deteriorated from one situation to another is very likely to get deteriorated and socially obsolete. Hence we can say that it is not feasible to maintain the transcendental ethical principles in media in contemporary society for reasons beyond our control.

A response to 'The Ethics of Porn on the Net'

I also change my mind all the time on whether or not I’m ‘okay’ with porn. I don’t think Kath Albury explored the problematics of porn in enough depth in her article. On one hand I think it’s important for female (and male) sexuality to be depicted in diverse ways, and if people want to choose to participate in or watch pornography they should be able to. However, a small part of me does agree with Andrea Dworkin’s argument that women who participate in porn are practising a form of prostitution.

Kath Albury talked about how internet porn has an ‘ethical sensibility’ because it allows people with more diverse or kinky sexual tastes to be represented and catered for. She mentions that some websites do have guidelines and rules, but the internet is so unregulated, obviously there would be a lot of unethical stuff going on. I remember a documentary I watched a while ago about men with fat fetishes overfeeding their partners in order to have more control over them In my opinion, I don’t see how a porn site with images of amputees or really hairy women is necessarily any more ethical than one with fake-breasted conventional porn women. Porn can be hilarious and harmless, but it also tends to promote and perpetuate some pretty distorted and unrealistic ideas about sex and the potential for exploitation is too great for me to be completely comfortable with it.

workshop4

Okay so a tad late, better late than never I guess.

I don't rmemeber if anyone else noted this, but in the Second Life sign up page, in the 'country' slide, it has 5 or so countries that are isolated from the rest - clearly 2nd life either has a lot of users in these countries, or is aiming at these people (USA, UK, Germany, Japan, South Korea). Yahoo in signing up already had Australia down as my country, though I wasn't using the Australian version. I guess they're already picking up my location through my IP address or something. Lavalife assumed that I was a female looking for casual dating between 25-34 or something.

I'm trying to think whether I'd call any of this racist/sexist. Was anyone in our tute offended by the assumptions any of the sign up pages made? I'm trying to think if I'd say any of the pages I saw were inherently racist.. I'd probably agree with what other people in the tute have been saying about the assumption being the user is white/middle class or above, etc etc. Has anyone thought about things the other way - there's millions of websites out there directed at specific groups that are not the norm? For example, VampireFreaks. On one hand, the obvious assumption is that to be using this website, you'll be into the goth/emo/alternative etc etc community/fashion/culture. That said, on the signup page, you're basically asked for age, name, gender (m/f). At least at that stage of the signup, there isn't anything about country etc.

Does this say the website is making more or less assumptions than say yahoo, and therefore is less racist/sexist? I don't really know. Where I was trying to go with this is that, given the openess of the internet, even if the premier websites (eg massive corporation stuff like microsoft passport, yahoo, etc) don't cater to everyone, I think there's probably a website out there serving that groups needs. Should they face scrutiny because they're assuming the user isn't part of the norm? I don't know. I kinda feel its good to have variety? But really i'm saying this to try put something fresh on this blog.

If this has been especially rambly, I have gotten the 'proper'/full cold thats doing the rounds, and is currently making me feel pretty average. Do i end every post talking about how crap i feel? i have a sneaking suspicion i might.. haha. oh well.

Racial Identity Online

In response to Therese's post, I think that race is less fixed in cyberspace. As can be seen in the critique of the website ICERED, people are a lot more confident and outspoken in cyberspace . The anonymity that can be found online means that people are less likely to fear retribution for their opinions, and they can also shield and reveal whatever parts of their identity they wish to (age, gender, race, etc) because most communication is done with text.

I believe that abolition of race in cyberspace would have negative affects in regards to “real life” interaction between different races. Prejudices would still exist in face to face interaction, because the initial issue of racial assumptions would not have been dealt with. Of course, abolition would assist in the lessening of prejudice online on the surface but not the assumptions that individuals attach to the idea of race. This applies to issues such as sexism and homophobia as well (as can be seen in the discriminatory thread posted on ICERED entitled "Homosexual on ICERED"; which, as well as being homophobic, depicts the incorrect assumption that homosexuality is a "feature" of western countries and no where else) .

Stereotypes regarding women, men, homosexuals and different races have been present in media forms in the past, such as movies and television but can also be generated by cultural and religious beliefs. It’d be foolish to assume that there’s a “quick fix” for the problem of prejudice, but abolition would appear to be more problematic with regards to real life. If race were to be obscured, no presumably warped views would be changed. People would bring their own values to cyberspace and (as indicated in “Menu-Driven Identities: Making Race Happen Online”) it is often presumed that white is the “default race” of the internet.

Integration would also have its set backs; what about those people who are unwilling to interact with people of different races, sexualities, etc? This unwillingness could provide a barrier, stopping potential interactions between races. However, it does appear more favourable than abolition as it attempts to eradicate the problem rather than just ignore it. Eventual integration appears to be the best option in challenging and eradicating prejudice. If people are able to remove initial assumptions, they will be able to accept different races, sexualities, etc.

A (very) belated workshop 4 response

Like many of you, I have had a Hotmail account for some years, but I went back to the Windows Live sign-up page to refresh my memory of the process. Most of the things I noticed were already brought up by Emily in her post - assumption of a Western middle-class background, for example, but I did notice that the default "Country/Region" box was set to United States, and the section for "account information" included State, Zip code and Time Zone - the states were American states, and the time zones were American time zones, as well as the fact that the "zip code" is a USA method. So, the site assumes that, as an Internet user and a subscriber to Windows Live, you are probably American with a middle-class and probably Western background. Also that you are either male or female, or identify as such. The site claims that these details can be used to reactivate your account should you forget your password...to me it seems slightly more intrusive than necessary, but I'm guessing most new users will fill out the required sections on the form without a second thought.

Yahoo! was slightly different, in that it detected that I was accessing the sign-up page from Australia and offered me the option to switch to the Australian version of Yahoo! to set up my account - the email address of which would end differently to one set up on the default US version. This could conceivably be an incentive for some Australian users to stick with the US version to avoid problems when giving others their new email address.
I switched to the Australian version, where the secret questions assumed that you were: in a stable relationship, grew up knowing your father, had been privileged enough to own a car, bike or pet, went to at least two schools, and that your high school had had a "mascot" - more of an American tradition, but still included in the Australian version...
The Marketing Preferences box was automatically ticked to be sent ads for special offers and the like, but this I think was more of a marketing ploy.

On to Second Life, where, yes, your gender was male or female, and you were also by default a young person with a slim physique. Possibly customisation options are available later in the game? Though both Caucasian and dark-skinned races were represented, it was difficult to tell whether avatars with Asian characteristics were represented in Second Life or not. There were options for avatars with dark hair and slightly darker skin tone, but their facial characteristics didn't seem any different to those of the Caucasian avatars. There was also nothing for Arabic, Indian, Polynesian, American Indian, Australian Aboriginal, Hispanic, or a myriad of other "races" - though this could be excused by the fact that it is the sign-up page, and giving the user a limited set of options to start with encourages them to customise more once they enter the game.
Your first name was your choice, but your last name had to be selected from a list of available last names - probably to prevent avatars with the same first and last names, as well as reducing the incidence of "joke" names. The names ran the gamut of foreign backgrounds, but strangely there were very few Asian-sounding last names. Whether this was due to them all being used or because of a bias against identifiably Asian avatars is unclear.
Like the last two sites, Second Life also assumes a privileged background, with questions such as "What city were you born in?", "What street did you grow up on?" and "What is your favourite vacation spot?" Since users will be spending money on the site this is quite possibly a fair assumption - someone with enough spare cash to spend it on Second Life has a high probability of being at least middle-class.

Lastly, Lavalife. As suggested on the workshop sheet, the default search assumes you are a single, straight female, seeking a 25-34 year old male for casual dating - a reflection of the most common type of Lavalife user. It is interesting that, even on a dating site for people unable to otherwise find romantic relationships, the only genders available for selection are male and female - the site does not appear to cater for transgender, polygender, transvestites or others, though you do have the option of searching for the same gender as yourself.

In conclusion, most of the sites seemed as if they were catering to what they perceived to be the demographic most likely to use their services. It seemed to me to be more of a tool to maximise efficiency and make the site more user-friendly to the majority of users, thus attracting more traffic. The "menu-driven identities" seen in these high-traffic sites are thus less a product of Western society's ingrained expectations of the "normal" Internet user, and more a result of marketing strategy - making the sites easier to use for the type of user most likely to access them, increasing traffic and therefore increasing profit for the site's owners.

Tutorial Presentation: The Ethics of Porn on the Net

I'm getting in early with my tutorial presentation. I've tacked on a few discussion questions at the end- more to come when I think of them.

The Ethics of Porn on the Net

It's a Woman's Prerogative to Change Her Mind, and I have changed my mind so many times when it comes to my stance on pornography; I’ve loathed it, loved it, and been everywhere in between. However, I was distinctly uncomfortable with some of Kath Albury’s arguments.

She structured her essay by first giving a poor summery of the Judeo-Christian view of the problematic aspects of pornography, then presented a slightly better take on the problems of pornography, from a Marxists view. Albury then puts forward the following question: “if pornography is immoral, does that make it unethical?” Her answer was at first a definite NO, however, she later qualifies this by saying ‘the answer depends on what definition of ‘ethics’ on chooses’.

Albury spends a large portion of her essay discussing amateur porn (I couldn’t help but think of Paris Hilton). But it got me thinking, there is such a big difference between making home videos (which I think is perfectly fine, and fun!) and putting those home videos up on the web. Albury cited that perhaps up to 70% of online porn is produced or modelled by non-professionals. I wonder how much of this percentage has been leaked/put on the net without the consent of all contributing parties.

Overall, Kath Albury gave me a lot to think about. I agree that amateur are a completely different kettle of fish when compared to commercial porn, but the issue confuses me. I find the idea that regular people want to pretend to be strippers/porn starts, i.e. people who are paid to imitate sexual arousal (I’d bet everything I own that at least 80% of the ‘supposed female orgasms you see in commercial porn are faked) problematic. Albury, on the other hand, views it as ‘’an ‘everyday experiment’, a form of new sexuality that is both a part of, and separate from, mundane domesticity”. Albury’s work, published in 2002, has become a little outdated, as she claimed that people viewed the attraction to women over 40 as ‘unusual’ and ‘kinky’, however, in this day and age, with a little help from popular culture (think American Pie), MILF has become normalised and mainstream.

Albury claims that “this proliferation of [unusual, deviant and kinky] sexual imagery is a perfect example of Internet porn’s ethical sensibility”. This is where I seriously differ from Albury. From my limited experience of internet porn, it seems to be full of (mostly) strangers having sex. Sure, some of them are from different ethnicities, some are larger/taller/hairier/more dwarf like than others, but the formula is the same; they all love rooting strangers (ok, and sometimes their teacher or boss). I find this the most problematic part of pornography. It rarely explores any of the mental, emotional, spiritual or psychological aspects of sex and instead presents a very simplistic, purely physical view of sexual desire.

Other questions to consider:

· Do you agree with Andrea Dworkin, that women who participate in porn are practicing prostitution?

· If porn is immoral, does that mean its unethical?

· Are ethical systems medium-specific? Should they be?

· If one of your close friends/ family members told you they had decided to become a porn star, would you be supportive of them? Would it make a difference to you if they were entering the commercial or amateur industry?

· Given that a digital culture is interconnecting via a global World Wide Web, is a global system of ethics required? How do the existing legal boundaries of nations complicate such a goal?

· Does digitisation challenge the ethical underpinnings of a capitalist culture? Do we need a new ethics of consumption in the era of mass and ‘illegal’ peer-to-peer movie downloading?

· Check out these statistics on pornography. Do they concern you? Shock you? Or are they exactly as you expected?