Youtube Video Compensation?

Youtube is an interesting platform as it promotes free media. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green said “Youtube is not in the video business-its business, rather, is the provision of a convenient and usable form for online video sharing (pg. 4).” The key component of this statement would be that of “sharing” as in no monetary exchange. But should people who post have some right to monetary compensation if they draw in a massive viewing audience? In any other media, the answer would be yes, but does the fact that it on the internet via Youtube make a difference?

In this clip from South Park, the boys are poised to have been the creators of the “What? What?” Youtube video sensation and try to collect monetary compensation for their following. They then are made to sit in a waiting room with an array of other Youtube video sensations who also want to collect money for their videos. The funny part is that they all refer to all the “theoretical” dollars that their videos are worth. The video itself is funny because the actual clips of these videos have been spliced into the scene. But it does raise the question, are these videos worth money?

All of these videos have brought in a vast amount of online views who have all been subjected to the ads that Youtube posts with each video and on each page, shouldn’t the original poster get a small percentage? If it where any other media, the answer as I said would be yes, but I think that things are different with Youtube videos due to several facts. First, they posted on a site that they know and have agreed to as a share site. Second, Youtube videos can be easily copied and edited into a different media which would cause a large copyright issue in the event of monetary compensation. Not to mention that the material that becomes a sensation may itself be tied to another established franchise such as the case with the Tron guy using the Tron franchise property. In short, I do not think that we will be seeing monetary compensation for Youtube videos anytime soon.

Blog 9: Do our Social Networking Sites Own Us?

According to James Potter, “Social networking web sites are designed to give all kinds of people the means to connect with others for all sorts of reasons (pg. 214).” Some use it to chat with friends, post pictures or comments, even share ideas and videos. But do the social networks own everything we post?

     In a video posted by MoneyTalksNews entitled Social Networking Sites Own You, they have found just that. By reading the user agreements of social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, They have found that almost all of the sites have some sort of ownership clause in their user agreement. LinkedIn had the worst by far, claiming any and all things posted on their site belonged to them despite whether or not an account has been deleted. Twitter on the other hand, took no ownership of anything posted on their site. While on the surface this may seem like a potential user may just have to be more selective of which site they use, in actuality things are worse than that. What makes things worse is the fact that any social networking site has the ability to change its user agreements anytime they want which means that they can take ownership at any time.

     Let’s think about this, people post all kinds of things on their respective social networking sites. We post pictures, conversations, videos, songs, everything important to us. Most of us also do not read the user agreements before we sign up, which means that we are practically giving away everything about ourselves that we post to the site we post it on. This makes me think; maybe these “free” sites are not as free as we are led to believe. I mean, at what price do we value ourselves?

Blog 8

The topic of today’s blog is that of branding. The company brand has nothing to do with the product, but rather the image or message a company wishes to convey about itself.

     Naomi Klein says in regard to companies and branding is that “What these companies produced primarily were not things, they said, but images of their brands. Their real work lay not in manufacturing but marketing (pg. 4).”  Many would confuse this in thinking that branding is little more than advertising, but this is not the case. On page five of Klein’s No Logo, she says “Advertising any given product is only one part of branding’s grand plan, as are sponsorship and logo licensing.” This clearly conveys that advertising is only a part of the branding picture and that there are many other factors that contribute to the overall company brand.

The people at Thunder Tech would agree with Klein. In their segment of Good Morning Marketers: Your Logo Is Not Your Brand, they talk about the various things that do contribute to a brand. They believe that just about everything a company does will contribute to the brand image. From naming of the company and products, to the services offered, affiliations, staff interactions with customers, even how the company interacts with the community; all of this conveys to the consumer a message about the company itself.

To analyze the idea of branding as the overall message or image, I will use The Home Depot as an example because of my personal dealings with the company both as a customer and employee. The advertisements present the idea of the do-it-yourselfer with the mantra “You can do it, we can help” which empowers the consumer with a sense of self reliance and ability. Next, the products themselves are of very high quality and most have a warranty; this, coupled with a very easy going return policy in the store, gives the consumer the peace of mind that if something is wrong with a product or it is the wrong product, The Home Depot will fix it. Then there are community-build programs which employees volunteer to help build playgrounds for the community using materials that are all donated by the company. These are just a few examples which all contribute to a helpful, trustworthy, and community-friendly image about The Home Depot.

Blog 7

For my seventh blog, I wish to discuss convergence within transmedia storytelling using synergy. According to Henry Jenkins, synergy is important to a given story through different media platforms to convey a complete story. On page 107 of his chapter Searching for the Origami Unicorn, he says “While the technological infrastructure is ready, the economic prospects sweet, and the audience primed, the media industries haven’t done a very good job of collaborating to produce compelling transmedia experiences.” This is very true to my favorite franchise: Resident Evil.

For a quick overview, Resident Evil is a story about a virus that was created by the Umbrella Corporation that created horrible monsters and ravenous zombies. Main characters were made to survive in situations where enemy numbers were high, ammunition was low, and the characters had to uncover the truth about the evil Umbrella Corporation. Although most of the video games and all of the movies have been touted as huge successes, there were many examples of how these two Medias as well as other Medias did not contribute to the overall storyline with much of the franchise becoming non-canon.

Starting with games themselves, there was not a great deal of corroboration for synergy within the games themselves, let alone each other. In this list of canon inconsistencies on the Resident Evil Wikipedia, there are discrepancies even within the games themselves. For example, in the first game there are two playable storylines based on which character was chosen. The stories themselves do not contribute to one another so both stories are considered non-canon. In the third game, the player makes decisions in the game that affect the story significantly, which renders it non-canon. Then there are spin-offs whose storylines do not agree with the main story of the main games.

If you think the games are bad, the movies and books are worse. The movies make no attempt to follow the storyline set in place by the original games; instead, they create their own storyline that is completely independent and use characters differently or creates entirely new characters. Same for the books, they are regarded as highly non-canon because they alter the storyline with events that are never mentioned in the main story and make connections between characters that resemble more fan fiction than actual franchise storytelling.

Although Resident Evil is one of my all time favorite stories, I would have to admit it is a poor transmedia convergence. I do believe it is still a great story and if there would have been better corroboration between the Medias to create a more complete story like in The Matrix; Resident Evil could have been an even better franchise with a lot stronger following.      

Blog 6

This blog is actually regarding last week’s blog topic of the news since I used the wrong subject matter last week. In chapter ten of James Potter’s Media Literacy, he talks about the news and how it is constructed. More importantly, he talks about the effects of fabrication in the news and its harmful effects.

On page 149, Potter states that “sometimes journalists are tempted to tell a good story and ignore facts that get in the way of telling that story.” But what about journalists that fabricate a good story, but still use accurate facts? What if a journalist fabricates a story that uses facts that are common sense?

In the story Multiple Stab Wounds May Be Harmful To Monkeys produced by The Onion News, they have done just that. Despite being an entirely fictional story for entertainment purposes only, the facts that they give are in fact accurate, although common sense. They give facts such as multiple stabbings affected the monkey’s health despite what instrument was used to stab; or the stabbings themselves were none the less damaging based on what the species of monkey or whether the monkey was young, old, or pregnant.

Many would laugh at this analysis saying that these are common sense facts that everyone knows and that it is because of these “no duh” facts, this story would not be newsworthy. But think about it, how many times has a so-called credible news group regurgitated facts that would be considered common knowledge? The difference would be that the onion is blatantly fictional and does not try to spin what they are broadcasting as anything else. The credible news sources on the other hand do present even common sense material in a way that makes them appear to have some sort of newsworthy claim. It reminds me of the last quote on page 138 in the introduction of the chapter regarding fabricated news, “Yes they do. But I can always tell when they are making something up. With the so-called real news shows, I am never sure what they are making up.”    

Blog 5

In chapter 11 of James Potter’s Media Literacy he discusses the content of the media. In pages 177-179, he focuses on violence in the media. He says that not only has violence in the media increased over the years, its frequency is portrayed in the media more often than it actually occurs in life. In an example about the television show COPS, he says that “FBI figures for murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault were 13.2% of all crimes, but in the television world, these four violent crimes accounted for 87.0% of all crimes.(pg. 179)” It sounds like Potter is saying that the audience wants more violence.

     However, according Dr. George Gerbner in ChallengingMedia’s The Killing Screens: Media & the Culture of Violence it is not the audience that is to blame; there are three simple reasons why violence has become so prevalent. First, since the main characters in the programs are usually men in the prime of health, the easiest story to write that suits them is one of conflict and violence. Second, violence is one of the easiest things to market in a global economy because it is understood without translation. Finally, because human beings can adapt to a given stimulus very quickly, they also become bored with a certain level of violence quickly and must be given a higher dose to remain entertained.

     Thinking about what Potter said about violence in contrast with what Gerbner said about violence, it seems to me that the audience is not all to blame. No, the corporations are trying to package something that will appeal to the broadest group of people they can reach and repeatedly advertising that given media until the audience believes that they really want violence to the point of needing it. It makes sense to me; there are a lot of high grossing programs that do not have very much violent content if any at all that do better than violent based programs. The question doesn’t seem to be how much violence should be in the media anymore, but rather, how much violence are you willing to watch?