Listing entries tagged with USC

Lawrence Lessig on "writing"   12.11.2004, 6:17 PM

Closing the USC conference "Scholarship in the Digital Age," Lessig spoke on "free culture" and the current legal/cultural crisis that in the next few years will define the constraints on creative production for decades to come. Due to obsessive fixation by a handful of powerful media industries on the issue of piracy, the massive potential of networked digital culture that has briefly flowered in the past decade could be destroyed by draconian laws and code controls embedded in new technologies. In Lessig's words: "never in our past have fewer exercised more legal control."

Lessig elegantly picked up one of the conference's many threads, multimedia literacy, referring to the bundle of new forms of cultural and scholarly production – remixing, reusing, networking peer-to-peer, working across multiple media – as simply "writing." This is an important step to take in thinking about these new modes of production, and is actually a matter of considerable urgency, considering the legal changes currently underway. The ultimate question to ask is (and this is how Lessig concluded his talk): are we producing a legal culture in which writing is not allowed?

Posted by ben vershbow at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education , Remix , USC , conference , copyleft , copyright , free_culture , free_thought , intellectual_property , lessig , p2p , writing

more from USC conference: useful dichotomies for reconsidering scholarship in the digital era   12.11.2004, 11:48 AM

from Tara McPherson:

- content/context
- practice/theory (practice as research in action)
- process/product (embrace productive failure)
- open/closed (what does versioning mean?)
- dialogue/argument (new ways of marshaling evidence; what does it mean when argument shifts into dialogue?)
- pedagogy/scholarship/service (tenure system is archaic; most non-traditional modes of scholarly inquiry are considered nothing more than community service)
- many/single (how do we rethink collaboration?)
- tools/theories (blurring that boundary)

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Gender and Critical Studies; Chair, Division of Critical Studies, School of Cinema-Television, USC; and editor of the forthcoming Vectors, an electronic peer-reviewed journal.

Posted by ben vershbow at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , USC , academia , collaboration , conference , conferences_and_excursions , pedagogy , scholarship , theory_vs_practice , university , versioning

Live from "Scholarship in the Digital Age" Conference at USC: The New Story   12.10.2004, 2:53 PM

Scholarship in the Digital Age
This morning’s presentations got me thinking more about the narrative of the future—the multilayered, accreted story style that John Seely Brown referred to. How is that story going to be told and received? Will the novel become the dinosaur of alphabetic literacy?

Is the new book going to be a game, conversation, multi-layered, multi-authored, highly mutable and never-ending story? Assuming that the story is a conceptual device the culture uses to deconstruct reality, to make meaning, and to create, in some cases, a kind of anthem to rally around, what happens when our traditional narrative structures are replaced? If the single author, plot-driven novel is not the form of the future, then what do you get when you ask a million gamer/authors to shape an epic on the fly? What happens to our perception of reality if our stories are unstable, mutable, and open source?

Posted by Kim White at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Games , USC , book , books , conference , conferences_and_excursions , john_seely_brown , linearity , literacy , narrative , open_source , plot , story