Writers Strike

[zocheret]

I was watching CNN last night to get primary returns, and information about the Writers Strike being over cropped up. What caught my attention was the mention by one of the WGA members said that the strike proved that the new media was here to stay and that writers had a stake in it. The fact that the whole strike was about new media really hadn'

Comments

Ownership and New Media

[ammamc]

That is very interesting. Ong talks about how print established a sense of ownership and privacy compared to society's former reliability on sharing knowledge and memorization via oral communication. With print, the author could publish a text and mass-produce it the exact same way each time, creating a great barrier between the creator and the audience who had little "reader choice" in the narrative represented. However, new media has truly changed this. New media creates text and entities which can not be physically possessed--we are almost going back to the days of true orality (well, not really, of course!) but we are using the same principles when it comes to sharing information so easily and readily and not truly having an idea of what belongs to whom.

[digital_liz]

When I was in high school, one of my teachers swore that one day, there wouldn't be televisions or movie theaters anymore, that everything would be hooked up to the Internet and if we wanted to watch something, we could stream it instantly from our computer/tv/movie boxes. At the time, I wasn't so sure if this was possible, but it seems like he wasn't so far off the mark.

We can already stream DVD movies right to our PCs with Netflix. You can get whole episodes of TV shows from iTunes. It's only a matter of time before we can watch movies that are still in the theaters right in our own home legally. And that's really quite a scary thought.

[zocheret]

It's only a matter of time before we can watch movies that are still in the theaters right in our own home legally. And that's really quite a scary thought.

Why is that scary? Look at it from the position of people with disabilities. If you suffer from social anxiety, going to a movie theatre to sit with a group of people in the dark to watch a film can be an excruciating exercise. My father's back is so bad, he hasn't been able to go see a film in theatres since the early 90s. Being able to watch a film in your own home when it comes out, legally and legitimately, would be a real treat for people who interact with the world differently. I think the way we're moving, towards a more immediate and intimate experience of media, is a boon for people who are otherwise socially marginalised. And finally, the production companies and guilds are recognising the shift in media and how it needs to be understood not as a side to traditional media, but the new frontier.