Category Archives: Entertainment

How recorded music might limit social action

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iPod headphones are ubiquitous on college campuses and many other places. What effect such devices and more broadly, recorded music, might have on modern society is explored in this essay that includes references to sociologists Sudhir Venkatesh and Pierre Bourdieu:

Two years ago, at the nadir of the financial crisis, the urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wondered aloud in the New York Times why no mass protests had arisen against what was clearly a criminal coup by the banks. Where were the pitchforks, the tar, the feathers? Where, more importantly, were the crowds? Venkatesh’s answer was the iPod: “In public spaces, serendipitous interaction is needed to create the ‘mob mentality.’ Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can’t join someone in a movement if you can’t hear the participants. Congrats Mr. Jobs for impeding social change.” Venkatesh’s suggestion was glib, tossed off—yet it was also a rare reminder, from the quasi-left, of how urban life has been changed by recording technologies.

Later in the essay, Bourdieu is presented as the anti-Adorno, the sociologist who argued that music doesn’t help prompt revolutionary action but rather is indicative (and helps reinforce) class differences:

In the mid-1960s, [Bourdieu] conducted a giant survey of French musical tastes, and what do you know? The haute bourgeoisie loved The Well-Tempered Clavier; the upwardly mobile got high on “jazzy” classics like “Rhapsody in Blue”; while the working class dug what the higher reaches thought of as schmaltzy trash, the “Blue Danube” waltz and Petula Clark. Bourdieu drew the conclusion that judgments of taste reinforce forms of social inequality, as individuals imagine themselves to possess superior or inferior spirit and perceptiveness, when really they just like what their class inheritance has taught them to. Distinction appeared in English in 1984, cresting the high tide of the culture wars about to hit the universities. Adorno had felt that advanced art-music was doing the work of revolution. Are you kidding, Herr Professor? might have been Bourdieu’s response. And thus was Adorno dethroned, all his passionate arguments about history as expressed in musical form recast as moves in the game of taste, while his dismissal of jazz became practically the most famous cultural mistake of the 20th century.

This is an interesting analysis. Sociologists of culture have been very interested in music in recent decades. One line of research has insights into “omnivore” behavior, those high-status people who claim to like all sorts of music. (See an example of this sort of analysis here.)

But this essay seems to tap into a larger debate about technologies beyond just recorded music: do computers, laptops, iPods, cell phones and smart phones, Facebook memberships, and other digital technologies serve to keep us separated from each other or do they enhance and deepen human relationships?

Head in the cloud

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Amazon launched its Cloud Player yesterday which, as Wired explains,

can stream your music library to any web browser or Android mobile device. Cloud Player also allows you to download files and create playlists through its web-based interface.

So Amazon lets you store your music on a remote hard drive and stream it to local devices?  Sounds pretty straightforward.  Of course, the record labels don’t think so.  From Ars Technica:

We wondered aloud how Amazon managed to strike such an impressive licensing deal with the record labels, given the fact that Apple seems to still be working out the details for its own digital locker service. It turns out that Amazon hasn’t struck a deal, and seems to be hoping that the record companies will be the ones to blink.

“[W]e do not need a license to store music in Cloud Drive,” Griffin added in an e-mail to Ars. “The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive or even iTunes.”

That’s certainly not what the music industry seems to think, though—at least in regards to Cloud Player. In an interview with Reuters, Sony Music spokesperson Liz Young said the company hoped for a license deal but that it was keeping its “legal options open.”

Amazon certainly has made a gutsy play here.  The major labels are currently embroiled in a lawsuit against MP3tunes for providing essentially the same service as Amazon.  According to an amici curiae brief (PDF) in that case, the primary legal issue turns on whether or not Internet streaming necessarily constitutes a “public performance” (which would violate copyright owners’ rights unless licensed).  There is a powerful argument that it does not:

MP3tunes does not transmit music to the general public, nor to all of its subscribers. A particular work in a particular locker will only be transmitted to a user who has placed it there—in other words, after he or she has averred to MP3tunes that she either legally owns the file and have uploaded it to her locker, or that she has legal authorization to access the file on the Web and has sideloaded it into her locker. The subset of MP3tunes users who have uploaded or sideloaded any one particular track (and thus have stated to MP3tunes that they are authorized to do so) still falls far short of the “public” required by the transmit clause.

Of course, the simple fact that it has become necessary to make this legal argument illustrates just how broken copyright law is.  The statute is long, complicated, and muddled enough to lend at least some plausibility to virtually any argument imaginable.  Even an argument claiming that storing one’s own music on a private, password-protected server for convenience violates the letter (if not the spirit) of copyright law.

Stay tuned…

Updated 3/31/2011: Ars Technica has a follow-up piece today that quotes from their interview with MP3tunes’ CEO Michael Robertson (bio from his blog):

The word “streaming” and the word “download” are nowhere in copyright law.  It may be a very logical, common sense position, but all that matters is what the law says. Can you store your own music? Can you listen from anywhere? What if your wife or kids want to listen to it? All those things are completely unchartered [sic] territory.

Of course, as we routinely point out around here, “logic” and “common sense” have absolutely nothing to do with the current state of U.S. copyright law.

Mapping the field of science fiction and more

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I thoroughly enjoy maps and so was pleased to see this story about an ongoing “multidisciplinary physical and online art project” that includes a collection of maps:

Take “Places & Spaces: Mapping Science,” a multidisciplinary physical and online art project, running since 2005, that seeks to create a complete picture of “human activity and scientific progress on a global scale.” Curated by a group of librarians, information scientists, and geographers around the world, each exhibit features a handful of maps—an older word for infographic—along a theme. Previous years have exhibited maps designed to index information for policy makers, or for cartographers, or economic decision makers.

This year, the theme is the digital library.

One of the entries is a social network of the Bible. Another, “Seeing Standards,” is positively meta: It charts more than 100 widely used rule sets for collating data, and sorts them by strength, community, domain, function, and purpose…

One “Places & Spaces” map bucks the trend, imagining complexity in an entirely different way. The distinction? Ward Shelley’s “The History of Sci­ence Fiction” (full size version here) isn’t pulled from any server’s database. In fact, it’s charmingly analog.

Mr. Shelley is an artist and a teacher at Parsons the New School for Design. He has become known for what he calls “rhetorical drawings”—visual art pieces that draw on such traditionally linguistic markers as narrative and chronology to illustrate ideas.

This science fiction map is quite a work in itself in addition to the amount of information that it displays.  I like how it all comes back in the tentacles on the upper left to “fear” and “wonder.” And the “Stars Wars Effect” section in the bottom right corner is fun as well.

I wonder if someone has ever done something like this for sociology. If done well, it could be great.

The fair use dragon

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Justin Levine over at Against Monopoly points us to a controversy at the recent San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and reminds us that many content owners believe that fair use in U.S. copyright law is about as real as a mythical fire-breathing creature.

John Diaz of the San Francisco Chronicle explains:

"Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded," a compelling new documentary that critiques the portrayal of Asian women in U.S. visual media, has drawn protests from an unlikely quarter. It wasn’t from Hollywood, which was deservedly scoured for its depiction of Asian women in films from "Rush Hour 2" to "Sex and the City." It wasn’t from conservative commentators claiming political correctness run amok.

Instead, the objection to the documentary by Elaine Kim, a UC Berkeley professor of Asian American studies, emerged from six Asian American filmmakers just before its premiere last week at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Their complaint: that she used clips of their work without seeking their permission.

Never mind that fair use is written into the copyright statute and explicitly allows for “criticism” and “comment” and “scholarship.”  Never mind that Kim’s documentary seems to fall well within the guidelines laid out by the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use – and that four separate companies write errors-and-omissions insurance for filmmakers based on the Statement guidelines.

No, the owners of films being criticized by Kim want to get paid:

The documentary addresses images of Asian American women in film, and while that is a worthy subject for a documentary and we respect Ms. Kim’s skills, as filmmakers, we do not consider this "fair use." Every filmmaker knows that he or she has to ask permission before using any intellectual property not belonging to him/her.

Using a clip of our films for review or promotional purposes is standard; however, using it in a documentary to illustrate that filmmaker’s point of view is a creative choice by the documentarian and therefore not subject to fair use.…We feel that Ms. Kim should either license our film footage properly for use in her documentary or remove it before the documentary’s world premiere at the upcoming San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

The Chronicle reporter was shocked, though readers of this blog shouldn’t be (unfortunately):

For me, as a journalist and champion of free expression, the upshot seemed clear: You cannot give the targets of social commentary the ability to veto it. Does anyone think for a second that the copyright holders of "Rush Hour 2" [which includes a scene where Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan are presented with a buffet of scantily clad Asian women] would consent to allow scenes of that movie to appear in Kim’s documentary at any price?

Kim did end up screening the movie at the festival, but

Kim deleted the clip from "The People I’ve Slept With."

"We did not remove the clip because we were concerned it was not fair use," Kim emphasized in an e-mail. "We removed it because we do not have the time or resources to fight against a filmmaker that personally attacked us and was being unreasonable."

Given the brutal economic and personal realities of litigation, Kim probably made the “right” choice.  Even if she found lawyers to represent her for free, fighting this in court would probably consume a large portion of her personal time and energy for years.  I certainly don’t blame her for her apparently rational choice.

Nevertheless, let us be clear:  this is what happens when copyright law is written to give one side (i.e., copyright owners) sweepingly clear rights but the other side (i.e., fair users) only an amorphous defense.  You don’t get copyright as “an engine of free expression”, as the Supreme Court continues to think.  You get censorship by people who think that fair use is a fairy tale.

The origins of Oregon Trail

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While looking at a column that included some thoughts about the book American Grace, I stumbled across the story of how the computer game Oregon Trail became a sensation. Here is what happened in those early days:

Minnesota’s City Pages tells the story of the game’s early days, when it was an underground sensation, played only by Minnesota schoolkids through a teletype machine installed in a janitor’s closet.

The Oregon Trail — a computer game in which players go on a simulated wagon journey out West, making key decisions along the way (take the Donner Pass or go around?) — was invented by a group of nerdy, computer-programming public school teachers in 1971. It was originally conceived as a board game, but Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger (all Minnesotans) quickly realized its potential as a computer game, and spent two weeks programming it on a middle-school teletype terminal. Their students played the game without a screen, by taking turns pecking out commands on the console, which forwarded them on by telephone to a mainframe computer; the game’s prompts (“You have dysentery”) came out of a printer. In subsequent years, the game was accessed by kids statewide through the same method.

Everything changed in 1978, after a handwritten bid was submitted by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer, then just two years old. Apple IIs were installed in schools throughout Minnesota, and the game was rewritten in the form in which millions of students have encountered it since then. Over the past 40 years, 65 million copies have been sold, making The Oregon Trail the most widely played educational game of all time. Nowadays, you can play it on your iPhone for 99 cents.

The Oregon Trail wasn’t just one of the first computer games — it was, as City Pages’ Jessica Lussenhop points out, “one of the first simulation computer games.” In fact the emphasis, for its creators, was on simulation. Looking back, one of the most striking things about the game is its accuracy: The programmers pored over actual settlers’ journals to figure out exactly how often players should break their wagon wheels, get sick, or meet helpful Native Americans, and painstakingly integrated those probabilities into the game. The Oregon Trail made pioneer history more fun — but it also made it more accurate.

Another innovation brought to you by Apple.

In conversations with other people my age, many of whom grew up playing Oregon Trail at school or at home, there is both joy and nostalgia when anyone brings up this game. Looking back it, it isn’t terribly complicated, the graphics were limited, and I’m not sure how much we actually “learned.” Perhaps it was the fact that it was a video game that one was allowed to play at school (along with other beloved games like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?). However, I must ask: by playing this educational game and the others that followed, have students become more knowledgeable? Have these games contributed to rising educational achievement? (I think the answer to both of these is probably no or the impact is very limited.)

It is also interesting to see this idea that Oregon Trail was one of the first simulation games. I have long been a player of a few of these games, most notably Simcity, starting with a 386 version on a monochrome screen.

The quality of music in a post-Napster world

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David K. Levine over at Against Monopoly pointed me to a recent paper (PDF) by economist Joel Waldfogel at the University of Minnesota titled “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music since Napster”.  As the title implies, Waldfogel investigates the effects of Napster (and its file-sharing progeny) on the music industry:

Economists generally agree that monopolies are bad. Governments grant some of the basic textbook examples of monopolies for intellectual property, in the form of patents and copyrights. Their bad effects – allowing prices above marginal costs and therefore restricting the supply of output – are thought to be justified by their incentive effects on production. But apart from introspection and anecdotes, we don’t really know much about the effects of remuneration incentives on production in the music industry.…Does the prospect of greater rewards bring forth more music? If so, then the past decade, when the ability for sellers to generate revenue from recorded music has fallen as much as half, should be a dry period for music. This is the question we address in this study. [emphasis added]

Noting that other studies have found undiminished musical output (in terms of volume) in the post-Napster world, Waldfogel attempts to measure musical quality using “a time-constant quality threshold based on critics’ retrospective lists of the best works of multi-year time periods”:

Using indices collectively covering the period since 1960, we document that the annual number of new albums passing various quality thresholds has remained roughly constant since Napster, is statistically indistinguishable from pre-Napster trends, and that album supply has not diverged from song supply since iTunes’ revival of the single format in 2003. We also document that the role of new artists in new recorded music products has not diminished since Napster. [emphasis added]

Waldfogel’s findings will unquestionably prove controversial in many circles.  And, to be sure, copyright policy may be based on considerations other that mere economic efficiency (e.g., John Locke’s labor theory or artists’ moral rights).  If Waldfogel’s findings are verified and generally accepted on their own terms, however, the economic policy implications seem clear:

It is easy to see that file sharing simply increases welfare. Producers lose, but their losses – when consumers steal things they used to pay for – are all transfers to consumers, who now enjoy greater surplus (the price they had formerly paid plus the former consumer surplus). In addition to the transfers from producers to consumers, file sharing also turns deadweight loss – circumstances in which consumers valued music above zero but below its price and therefore did not consume – into consumer surplus. In a purely static analysis, eliminating intellectual property rights benefits consumers more than it costs producers and is therefore beneficial for society.

Read his lips

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Perhaps realizing how much money Charlie Sheen’s endorsements are worth these days, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently decided to trumpet the fact that Mr. Sheen is also the proud recipient of U.S. patent #6,283,658:

Charlie Sheen’s patent for a “Chapstick Dispensing Apparatus.”  Patent No. 6,283,658 was granted on September 4, 2001 to inventors Carlos Irwin Estevez and Rodger D. Thomason and assigned to Masheen Inc. in Los Angeles.

You can smack your own lips over all 14 pages here.  Hat tip to Scott Walshon, friend and patent examiner, for pointing me to the link.

Quick Review: 21 by Adele

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Even though I listen to a good amount of music, it is still somewhat rare to find an album that really captures my attention. The latest new album to achieve this status is 21, is the recently-released album from British songstress Adele (Adkins). The album has been on the Billboard charts for three weeks since its release, peaked at #1 and now sits at #2 in the Billboard 200. A few thoughts about this album which I have been listening to non-stop for a week:

1. The overall theme of the album is heartbreak – but it sounds like a soulful, engaging sort of heartbreak, the kind you actually might want to hear about over and over again.

2. I particularly enjoy several of the songs. The two songs to open the album are quite good and will make good radio singles. But two songs in the second half of the album are also quite good: Track 7, Take It All, and Track 9, One and Only. Track 7 is just Adele and a piano. Track 9 adds some other instruments but still is just Adele and her feelings.

3.  The arrangements on these songs, similar to the first album, are set up to showcase Adele’s voice. Even when she deviates from the melody, it doesn’t sound like she is preening or showing off.

4. Speaking of the songs, I read a review (or a couple) that mentioned how a lot of the songs sounds alike. I can kind of see the point: once you get past the first two songs, the rest mine similar lyrical ground and primarily feature Adele. This is not an album that has a lot of twists or turns with multiple styles of music or words. My thoughts on this are that the album doesn’t deviate from what Adele does well. To get something different, we’ll have to wait until the next album.

5. One thing I like about the the whole album is that it is unified and does seem to fit the title, a reference to Adele’s age when much of this was put together. This is exactly the age in which you would expect to hear about these upfront and raw emotions. I hope Adele can continue this age-related trend on future albums; this would give us a sort of lifecourse approach. While I think many musicians do this (check out how the themes and styles change as musical artists age and are no longer the young stars they once were), Adele’s first two albums have been more explicit about this. So can the next album, presumably something like 23 or 24,  examine the quarter-life crisis?

(According to Metacritic.com, this album gets “generally favorable reviews” with a composite score of 76 out of 100 based on the thoughts of 29 critics.)

(A side note: I believe the next music album I will review is Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. While I have heard a lot about this band in recent years, I bought this album, the first one I have purchased, on the same day I bought the Adele album. There are two reasons I want to listen to and review this particular album: the band gets good reviews and the subject matter, suburban life, is right up my alley. As far as I know, there are not too many rock albums that explicitly address the suburbs.)

Two Italian film directors describe Roman suburbs

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Two Italian film directors discussed their new film Et In Terra Pax, which is set in a “Roman council estate” in the Roman suburbs.  Here is how they described these Italian suburbs:

?MB: I was thinking a lot about a story set in the Roman suburbs…

MB: We live in part of Rome both close to the centre and the suburbs, which was useful to observe without being involved. We like Roman suburbs, and we think that in suburbs you can breathe the real Rome. The centre is great but it’s for tourists, rich people or to spend Saturday nights. Real live [sic] is somewhere else…

Can you talk about the idea of the housing complex being like a prison?

DC: A lot of suburbs in Rome are characterized by this kind of view: big grey buildings, a kind of ghetto filled with people. A city can’t grow in this way because the risk is that people can be excluded from the rest of Rome. We consider the building we chose like another character, a metaphor for loneliness. It looks like a prison but it’s full of life and ready to explode (in a good or bad way) at whatever time.

Et In Terra Pax is not an international audience’s image of Italian life. Was it important to show this side of life?

DC: Sure, we think it’s very important to show the dark side our country, not only for international audiences but also for the Italians too.

Compared to the typical American portrayal of suburbs, the land of single-family homes, lawns, and kids running around, this is a different image: large apartment buildings built away from the vibrant city center and illustrating the “dark side” of Italian life.

This discussion hints at how some European suburbs differ from their American counterparts. While most Americans see suburbs as the refuge of the wealthy, some European suburbs are where the low-income apartment buildings are built. The center of the European city is the place to be, not the outskirts of a metropolitan region as in the American case.

I am also intrigued by the idea that the apartment building is treated “like a character.” Elsewhere, they say the building they filmed in was about 1 kilometer in length, housed about 14,000 people, and features “strange, fascinating and disturbing architecture.”

New ABC pilot: Suburgatory

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Here is a short description of Suburgatory, a new comedy pilot for ABC:

Suburgatory has been dubbed a satirical look at life in the suburbs that centers on a New York City woman who moves to a cookie-cutter community only to realize that life there is much more frightening.

Hasn’t this “satirical look at life in the suburbs” been done a number of times before? From The Stepford Wives (review of the original and the remake) to Desperate Housewives, this seems like well-traveled territory. What will set this show apart and how frightening can the suburbs get? This could be just another piece in the suburban genre.

The premise of the show seems to go against what most Americans have sought in suburbia. For many, the city is the frightening place and the suburbs represent safety, good schools, and more space. This is not to say that the suburbs don’t have their problems; they certainly do. But to go so far as to say that life is “more frightening” in the suburbs seems strange.

And if the suburbs are a place like purgatory, where exactly would a show like this (and other stories like it) say heaven and hell are located?