Summer Sunblock Flow

My idea came to me when I sent out an email regarding if we had an ipod dock in our mastercraft boat. We didn't and whoever had to drive practice just had to bring a cd. I was like PERFECT! This was the perfect opportunity to make a good cd that people can enjoy.
I took my own feelings and emotions and experiences, bundled them together, and made the cd. My choices for O.A.R for many of the songs were because it is the most widely known band among skiers. Eve6-anytime was my first song because I watched a video on youtube http://youtube.com/watch?v=M6jSwociuOY. I thought of the emotions just driving the boat out to start skiing and this was the perfect song to get you pumped up. It is the most energenic song on the cd. I added some fillers due to the popularity of the songs among many people, in addition that I like the songs too. The structure at the end is supposed to resemble the sun setting and the music fading away into a slower genre. If you read the liner notes (poem) that I wrote, it is supposed to parallel the tracks if you listened to them throughout the day. Lets say at 6pm when it was still light out and you just put the boat in to go skiing. By 7:30 pm, the sun is setting and them mood is toned down. There is still excitement, but it tunes you into that it is about time to go in. This could also be applied to beginning in the morning and perhaps finishing the cd at night. My theme was overall relaxing music that you could jam out too. I think they call it surfer music. Anyways, to sum it all up, I concentrated on my audience that would be in the boat and put in a time component to make it more relevant. I left another copy in the boat for people to use. We will see the impact and if it is popular among people on our team.
It was very interesting creating a new means for 'writing.' I could definitly wrtie a whole story based on te tracklist I selected.

Muxtape, not Mixtape

http://muxtape.com/

This week I decided to keep my blog post extremely short. Here is a site, in addition to others, who offer a sort of mix tape sharing service. However, it does not let you download anything, but stream the music through your computer and then download it of course illegally. Its a pretty cool site if you are into a variety of music and like to explore outside your box.

On the bottom its supposed to say "In little Christians can still find joy drinking a giant vodka of Finland." The after that it says, "Tina Frey you tend not to hide anything you alcoholic."

The Cut Up Method: Brilliance in Innovation and Uncertainty

What it means to me. Particularly why it has been so prominent also has spurred my curiosity. For one, it breaks the linearity of the norms in which I write, or perhaps you could call them the boundaries that I operate in. It is simple and I think of it as an easier way to create something that is nonlinear. For example, try to create a piece with non linearity and new syntaxes. To accomplish this, one would need a very creative mind. Also the uncertainty is another aspect that is very intriguing to me also. Sentences that are based on no grammatical rules can be developed and sometimes, whole new ideas or phrases may develop that are perhaps within the context of the original phrase, or the new phrase develops a whole new idea within that context that the originator would have never thought of. Perhaps if done thousands of times, new phrases and ways of thinking would surface. Its almost like creativity meets simple innovation that would have not occurred without this cut up method. It seems to have a lot of potential to develop a whole new realm of creativity but has not gotten ‘track’ among academic scholars or the general population.

No synergy between Minimalism and DJ Spooky + 3 You Tube Videos

Minimalism is the based on stripping an item down to its bare elements for simplicity and to be ‘mono’. Its visualization evokes creativity and allows one to see beyond the clutter. When I look at it, I sometimes visualize it with clutter. However, I believe that Minimalism and DJ Spooky are not similar in their views of the world. Whereas minimalism bares an object to the most simplistic of forms, DJ Spooky is calling for the creation of a cluttered object such as music. To bring together constituents from this world around us is DJ Spooky’s style. Where they are similar is their view on making things easier to understand. We will not focus on this though. DJ Spooky believes in sampling from our environment to produces an item that is easier to understand by piecing together its constituents, where minimalism removes those constituents. He wants us to rethink how we write and create, opening new possibilities for innovation and creativity. Minimalism is a very creative aspect of art and is by no means simple to create. But the overall process of creating these two dissimilar pieces of work is at odds with each other. Here are two videos that contrast the work of DJ Spooky and Minimalism.




Or for architectural minimalist video copy and paste this link
http://youtube.com/watch?v=N36hy8At6wo

Persona- Latin for mask

Today's discussion was really interesting. Our different persona's we possess can be very distinctive to some people. For me on the other hand is very tough to discern between two different personalities I may possess. Anyways, connecting DJ Spooky's book and persona's, I wanted to bring up a point that I thought to be his idea in his book. He has 3 personalities or so, but what he argues in the book is stepping outside the boundaries that constrain us. Just from our discussion, it sounded like many people's alternate persona's where still constrained by the boundaries of our culture, adhering to the norms of our society; business, party, ect.. He argues for a different revolutionary thinking where we are not constrained by the norms of today. Deviation. In writing or music. He takes the normal boring conventional art and turns it into something remarkable. Now can this apply to personalities of one's self also? Or are these fixed in time, adhereing to our cultural norms of how to behave in certain situations and what not?

I still feel as if my freedoms were not taken away

In my project I tried to make an argument that perhaps creativity could not rather be doomed but could be going down the wrong path towards constraining our creativity (as shown by the image of hell). By going down the road towards heaven, I tried to symbolize that creativity could flourish in an environment that allows it due to the copyright laws. Heaven also indicated the more positive environment in which copyright laws were relaxed. However, I think many people had an idea that I was only saying that they were two extremes. I was just appealing to others views that copyright laws could be relaxed. Secondly, my other creation in which I had to secure the rights to reflected more on the war between the two sides (people that want their freedoms and the big corporations) and that creativity could be pulled into the black hole (that I tried to depict), thus controlling creativity. Lastly on my remix picture I switched the freedom to the file sharers depicting that rarely does anybody get caught with most activities. I would consider my freedom to file share and download as ‘free’ as would many other people. Have you gotten caught? 1/500,000 people get caught illegally infringing on copyright laws. Also I depicted the corporate side as 'regulate' because I ask what would you do if you were in that postition? If people stole your commercially copyrighted works? It turned out to be very interesting project in which creativity was allowed to flourish (illegally!! Haha); although, I don’t really see anything constraining on this type of activity. Did anybody feel as ‘free’ as they were before? Thus is the majority of the population actually regulated. If 1/500,000 copyright infringers were punished how are we regulated?

Click on it

Parallel of Economic and intellectual development and copyright laws

One reason I believe to be true is that copyright protection has paralleled with economic development and intelligence of more people. This is why copyright laws have developed to the state in which it is today. For example, Shakespeare created a piece that, as stated by Shaviro, could not have been produced during his time. Why? Because technology and intelligence of the masses were not in place to create a derivative of his piece or perhaps take his piece. That is why only original copyrighted material was protected. Yes, Sir Archduke blah blah blah could have done something to his work, but because of the limited number of people, Shakespeare or his colleagues and friends would have found out. There was increased transparency. Now during our time, things have become clouded as technology such as the internet has emerged and millions of people (relative to Shakespeare’s time) are comparatively much more educated than 400 or so years ago. It is not easy to keep in check all this activity that is going on in this world. Transparency into works is very clouded as we can take an example of someone illegally downloading music. Millions of people do this and we have no idea who these people may be. That is why copyright, I believe, has developed in a way that it is today.

My experience + Washington and Money

I have had a few instances in which my creativity was constrained because of the copyright law. One instance is when I led a sales team to develop a t-shirt for St. Patrick’s Day. I wanted to create Bucky within the context of the Irish theme. After submitting my work to a shirt designer, I received an email that I had to use an original picture of Bucky. Several days later, I informed the Dean who I was using to manufacture the t-shirts. I set up and prepared almost everything so the t-shirts would be distributed to everybody who ordered them before spring break. I was told that the Bucky copyright (trademark?) that the university held only allowed certain t-shirt manufacturers to create this logo on t-shirts. I was at least allowed to reproduce the Bucky b/c of the umbrella I had in being under a University sponsored club. However, the damage I would I have inflicted if I were to distort the image of Bucky would be detrimental to the logo. So after all the hassle my creativity and possible success of the sales run was inhibited. Recently I developed a website for a water ski team, and again my creativity was inhibited as I wanted to ‘poster’ the website with the MasterCraft logo’s, picture, and videos because the boat we used was manufactured by MasterCraft. However I was not allowed to do this after some research and left the website more plain and boring than I wanted it to be. Yes, these are related to trademarks too, but they fall under ‘intellectual property’. The first instance included commercial transformative work that is banned by copyright laws and trademark laws. The second instance was original commercial material that I was trying to utilize. In both experiences, I can totally understand the implications. Having thousands of transformed Buckys’ would dilute the logo. People would ask while watching a commercial or seeing a friends t-shirt, “Is that the original Bucky or a fake one?” Lessig says that copyright (as does trademark) scope has extended to far into the noncommercial uses. I believe this statement to be true. However it also limits free culture and impeded on my creativity to create something totally unique. Here free culture and creativity blends with copyright laws if you can imagine it in your head as a Venn diagram. Should my and others creativity be allowed to flourish or should copyright owners be allowed their uses over their material. Creativity should be allowed to develop and a copyright owner should have exclusive rights to original and transformative commercial work; a balance thus results. However, both extremes are irrational in developing and nurturing our culture in the right way. Now, if I can come up with this blog post from my own experiences, why can’t Washington not create a balance where they can create a culture where there is a vast public domain that includes noncommercial use and copyrights that are only limited to perhaps 40 years. One answer is lobbyists paying them. Do other people in Washington that keeps checks and balances on Congress not see this. Perhaps if there are no other explanations than money flowing into the pockets of politicians, then our whole system of democracy may travel to something farther away from the kind of government we had 50 years ago. (and yes it is a bad thing if a few large companies influence issues that hurts the general public) Things will have no checks and balances and it will spiral out of control. Does anybody have any rational explanations, other than money, to why politicians would extend copyright’s scope to noncommercial use and extending the copyright terms to over 90 years? If not we could be in trouble.

Night Ripper CREATES culture

Plunderphonics-- taking existing music and "ripping" them to create a whole new work
Blue Ocean Space- the act of entering a market that nobody else thought of with an idea, product, or service.

I see Girl Talk’s music as a representation of our culture and time period. Looking in retrospect, if somebody ripped and made a CD of the top 200 artists of the 1920’s or something, what would we think of it today. I would surely think of it as Brilliant!!! What if every generation did this? How representative of our culture would this be? And then we could rip and burn music from say the 1920’s and perhaps 2005 and make a brilliant CD that meshes the two time periods. Possibilities…..possibilities!!!

Lastly, I am finding it very hard to find Girl Talk’s album Night Ripper on Itunes or any other legitimate mp3 website. How about in the stores? Wal Mart? This must say something about their CD and the perception of big album companies. Although Girl Talk is fair use according to the law. DJ’s are a great example of, I would argue, a more serious version of ripping and contextualizing other’s music while performing at clubs and what not. Many artists and rappers change their music by creating alternate versions. He is essentially entering a transformative area of a market where no one else went before. Obviously there are many laws that thus do not apply to Girl Talk’s version of music and it will be interesting to see where the law goes to either inhibit or expand their creative genre.

Conglomerate

Additionally, it might be common knowledge if you think the information you're presenting is something your readers will already know, or something that a person could easily find in general reference sources. But when in doubt, cite; if the citation turns out to be unnecessary, your teacher or editor will tell you.

Dana Lynn Driscoll.

Previously, my definition of plagiarism was distorted. To begin, my understanding of plagiarism was too broad. My belief was that anything I knew was common knowledge; ignoring whether my audience knew the information. Thus quotes or paraphrases that I did not expect to be detected by Rowan and others were highlighted as plagiarism, as shown in my comment paper. Many topics included, “The Marshal Plan…..” (without quotes). It was knowledge that I had already known. I didn’t consider my audience and should have cited this as paraphrasing. However, I seem to want to have my knowledge and facts unquoted without citations because then it becomes obvious that someone would easily catch it. Additionally, my audience did not detect any of the plagiarism that I intended to hide from people. For instance, I quoted phrases from famous US presidents such as, “Ich bin ein Berliner” by Ronal Reagan. Obviously this is a quote by Kennedy; however, I thought that others would understand this is not quoted and recognize this as plagiarism; giving credit intentionally to the wrong person. This was not the case as it occurred many times throughout my paper and people just assumed that it was quoted and plagiarism was not applicable here. Perhaps, to constitute it as plagiarism, I could have cited these quotes with outlandish websites or books. Moreover, I inserted many well known phrases in the paper. One instance when I was writing my paper I integrated a phrase by OJ when he said, “The globe does not fit” (without quotes). To be very sly, I intentionally took his quote and used it in my paper. I would argue that this is plagiarism. I also put such famous quotes like “I have a dream” (without quotes) hoping others would catch it and mark it as plagiarized when I was just using it within the context of the sentence. I failed to consider my audience and thus devastated my chances as being the best plagiarizer.
For these reasons, I named my paper “Conglomerate”. I tried to present a different idea of plagiarism to throw people off in catching my mistakes. It worked. I did fail to forget that knowledge already known by me was perhaps not understood by my audience and it could be argued that giving credit to the wrong person is not plagiarism. Perhaps if I was presenting this to historians or international relations professors, many facts or ideas about the past that I used would not have to be quoted. As of right now, I have a much better understanding the common knowledge rules of plagiarism and have shied away from believing that attributing others work to other people is constituted as plagiarism. My understanding of what constitutes common knowledge is concrete. I now believe plagiarism only to be stealing somebody else’s idea and claiming it as your own. The writers of UW-Madison policies directly focused the definition of plagiarism on this only topic. However, am I correct in constituting plagiarism as attributing work towards others, and should common knowledge about history not needing citation even if it is not know by the reader? How would one judge the intelligence of our audience on a subject?

New Perspectives

Reflection

As I look back on my ghostwriting experience, I realized how ignorant I was in last week’s blog post. I assumed it was easy when I just began to write. However, I failed in listening to the wise words of Scot. What was easy, which made me assume this project would be simple, was my knowledge of Billy and how he would present an argument. I know his style and his approach to presenting an argument to people. It was easy to structure the sentences in a way that presented his mannerisms. What was hard? First of all, the aspects of his information made it difficult to represent properly because of my lack of experience in the field of ghostwriting. Some of his information was cited using Wikipedia. This puzzled me because I was unsure of whether to use this information when writing his speech. However, these were his ideas and I went along with it. Also, the beginning contained a piece about the Greek titans. This was knowledge that Billy already knew about thus he said he didn’t cite it because it was something he didn’t even have to look up; he just used it as an analogy. So, do I cite this information if I had no knowledge about this Greek myth? This is his speech and in writing a speech for him, I decided to not include a citation. Secondly, as I found out, the specifics were the most troubling to figure out. For one, the most compelling part was to decide how I can integrate my style of writing into the speech. In his past papers and speeches he has wrote, his grammatical style and compressed word bank limited his ability to produce a quality paper. In ghostwriting for Billy, I had to figure out how I was going to compose the paper in a way that represented Billy’s style, but also a quality paper that he could use. I then thought about any president’s speech and realized that a ghostwriter produced a quality speech whether or not that president could produce his own work in such a manner. In my job as a ghostwriter, I have to make Billy seem as prominent of a person as I can. Next was my decision to format his paper to into a more considerate paper. He explained to me about the argument he was presenting and I realized that he had a hard nosed argument. He had not considered any other point of view. To be effective and appeal to people that are opponents of stem cell research, one must consider other people’s points of view. So I decided to consider other’s points of view and relay questions back to the audience. Many questions came about. Is this part of a ghostwriter’s job or would peppering a paper with your style and changing the voice of the paper stepping outside of a ghostwriters bounds? In my final decision I decided to be effective, I had to integrate these pieces into his paper. To finish up, my perception of ghostwriting has changed a lot compared to my perception last week. Ghostwriters must make a wide array of decisions compared to a paper that one writes for himself. However, the time consuming part of researching and finding information is literally cut in half. Additionally, I have developed an idea on the wide array of writing styles and ideas of writing that are not apparent on the surface (For example reading two different books). I assumed and thought from just reading in general that many writers were somewhat similar in techniques and other aspects of writing; perhaps only their uses and variety of words differing. Now, I believe writing is almost as autonomous as DNA is from person to person.

The Ghostwriting Experience, supposed to not be underestimated?

In my ghostwriting experience, the only troubles I ran into were actually finding out who to ghostwrite. I began by picking my parents brains to figure out what and if they write at their jobs. They both turned out to be a dead end. I was relatively surprised that they both did not have to write very much. It was all based on form letters they wrote to other companies. I then asked around with no luck. Then I found out my roommate Billy Knox was writing a paper for a speech class. I didn't really want to write about somebody else's paper, but Billy's speech was perfect. I already know his style, his passions and goals, and mentality in striving to be a political figure. Thus, emulating his style of writing for this project was easy. I had to focus on his presentation and how he would want words to be projected onto his audience. He uses a combination of good Karma, presentation skills, and confident persuasion in his speeches. He strives to be in the ranks of President Bush and many past political figures such as Kennedy. He gave me his sources and general outline of his paper. I then got bits and pieces that he wanted to use as analogies. I understood his goal in writing this paper, but also had to change my writing style to accommodate his. I am not sure; however, if this is a common practice. Or should I just not worry about his writing style in creating his speech, but rather focus on his style of presentation?
In thinking back, I see ghostwriting as a bit more challenging than writing my own paper or speech, using my skills but also thinking about it from the perspective of Billy. In writing a speech about stem cells, I would probably frame it differently, focusing on the audience to consider these aspects rather than putting pressure on the audience to take my beliefs as does Billy. He has trouble seeing different perspectives from other people. However, I probably haven’t been experienced to the full realm of ghostwriting, the part that is very hard and challenging. I suspect ghostwriting for somebody that you have not known your whole life is very challenging and takes extensive work to get inside and understand the mind of that person. Have others also experienced this dilemma?

Ghostwriting practices. Who Should?

I would like to comment today on current presidents and their use or disuse of ghostwriting tactics. Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream was not a ghostwritten book but rather a book written by Obama himself. Hillary Clinton (Hill-dog) was written by ghostwriters, who received about 6 % of her total profits and royalties. How about ghostwritten speeches? Do presidents write their own speeches? What category would these forms of authorship fall in? Are they effective or should presidents write their own speeches? Personally, high effective leaders in any profession value their time. Taking time to write a book or their speech would dramatically decrease their effectiveness, unless they have time. Thus, I argue that these types of people, with their ghostwriting authors, should not be criticized for their practices. Many examples include Bush, John Maxwell, Donald Trump and many other high effective leaders. My grandpa wrote a book I Can See Clearly Now, but he wasn’t expecting it to be on the best sellers list, so he included the author of his book in bigger letters than his name. However, economics would say for many famous people that putting their name without the ghostwriter would dramatically increase their sales. I was relatively oblivious to how widespread these practices were until now. For example now I know that the Britney Spears mom’s book about parenting probably was not written by her. So who should be criticized for their ghostwriting practices and who shouldn’t (or maybe not allowed).

Community?

After reading Smart Mobs, I realized I was relatively uneducated about how powerful networking and communities are in today’s world. Community is the word I want to focus on. Communities are found in business with many business models that are popping up today. Communities of professionals to network and talk to eachother. I can send my resume to a community of professionals to get an internship. I find communities that receive texts and other miscellaneous stuff. But what I argue is that our notion of communities are changing. As people we congregate at concerts, conferences, and organizations as a community of people with related interests. We as humans have an innate need to do this. We constantly are aggregating into groups. If humans were to individualize, it would go against what we are all about. I think that in today’s world, with advancing technology and allowing people across the world to interact with eachother, we are just reforming how we perceive our notions of communities. I see it as change, whether positive or negative I am not sure. So far, this new idea of community is creeping up behind our backs.

The Hierarchy of the Author

The Hierarchy of the Author (or “writer”)

In the essay “Modern Authors” Rebecca Moore Howard discusses the binary educated society. One class that is highly intellectual and create works of originality. Another class makes up the “low literature”. She refers to these people as the one’s that write in magazines, newspapers, and other sources. They are called the “Great Unwashed”. The mass education that occurred resulted in, according to Howard, just people plagiarizing other works. As I write I am plagiarizing in some form because I my language and choice of words seems to be related to the text. Am I just apart of the “Great Unwashed” and who are these intellectual people from what Howard refers to are apart of the literary canon? I contest that many “cheap novels” from the “Great Unwashed” are very beneficial to all of society, that in turn will have benefit and little cost. On the other hand, if the “Great Unwashed” were never educated, where would equality begin? Many people today seem to preach equality of all sorts. Why not literature? This perspective seems to be one of the literary canon (authors who are original), complaining that their sales of originality are greatly outpaced by magazines, cheap novels, and newspapers. Yes some of this literature (i.e. Star magazine) can be relatively pointless to mankind. However, one example I give is Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad which illustrates the mind process and ability to become rich. Maybe another term is financially free from the 8-5 job. After reading this book, I have greatly increased my assets and am retiring my mom because of this book. To criticize the “Greatly Unwashed” for plagiarizing and not being original is I believe wrong. Robert got his ideas from someone else, who got the ideas from the book from someone else and eventually the originator. If this sequence of knowledge wasn’t passed down and plagiarized in his book, millions of people would not have been helped by his book (or maybe just thousands, I don’t know). I would argue that “the Great Unwashed” can and sometimes do contribute to society in much better ways than do the literary works of the highly intellectual. However, maybe I missed the point and did not see these “cheap novels” Howard talks about is not really the books that I am referring to. Or maybe I am missing the point of plagiarism. I don’t know. Can anyone attest to this argument about “the Greatly Unwashed” and maybe perhaps this is an outcry and criticism towards us? And who is “the Greatly Unwashed”? Is it us? Then who is the highly intellectuals that are original in their works? Am I an idiot and don’t see the point of her essay and totally went in the wrong direction?