Archive For The “media” Category

The “free” fracas: a quick round-up

By Xiaochang Li | July 1, 2009

[image from nicely85, licensed under creative commons] Back in March, I wrote a piece critiquing Anderson’s model of the “Freeconomy,” calling it a fallacy. My critique was not necessarily of the models he was proposing, but the way he was conflating things that had no cost with things that were “free.” I argued that rather [...]

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Audiences and Audienceship

By Xiaochang Li | May 13, 2009

So I’m guest lecturing later today at a class on Researching Media Audiences and it has me thinking about my initial, and admittedly lingering, resistance to considering myself as someone who does research on “audiences.” Part of it, I’m sure, comes from having emerged out of the “hard” humanities, where terms like social science and [...]

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IP or Censorship: Viacom issues take-down for racism protest

By Xiaochang Li | May 4, 2009

Recently, Viacom, in the process of of trying to “protect” their intellectual property not only managed to make copyright claims on original transformative work that is protected under fair use, they managed to censor political protest against racism in the process. (one of the revised shirt designs available at racebending.com) In one of their “routine [...]

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Skittles, Spreadability, and the question of social media authorship

By Xiaochang Li | March 2, 2009

This was later cross-posted to the Convergence Culture Consortium blog A funny thing happened on my way to check out the new Skittles homepage-as-social-media-experiment that’s been generating all sorts of attention over my twitter feed. I went to the homepage, and in my sleep deprived idiocy, entered today’s date in their terms of service agreement [...]

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