Skip to main content

Stop! Put down the remote!





Henry Jenkins has written Treating Viewers as Criminals, an excellent article over at MIT Technology Review. Apparently some exec at Turner Broadcasting has decided we're all thieves. Our theft? Well, when you tune in to a particular network show, according to this exec you agree to a "contract" that requires you to watch the commercials. Failing to watch the commercials, either by leaving or using the features of your VCR or other digital recording device, is a violation of contract and, therefore, a theft of services.



Nice logic, which Jenkins addresses thus:



Name-calling is the last resort of once powerful institutions that are finding themselves losing control in the face of rapid media change. Never mind that the same media giants are often the manufactures of the new media technologies we are using to skip their commercials or that some of the advertisements they want us to watch are marketing us features which allow us to skip advertisements. Never mind that we now have many more media options and we need the networks frankly far less than the networks need us.



I don't know about you but I want to renegotiate my contract! ...
There's more, so please click over and read.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not the Hero We Deserve, But the Hero We Need

The Dark Knight is the best film I’ve seen in years. Not just the best “superhero” film, but the best film of any type. It’s not perfect, not quite a masterpiece, but it’s flaws are, to me, tiny and overwhelmed by the time the film ends. While relatively bloodless, it is consistently brutal, not just in what it depicts but in the themes that drive it. TDK is a film for adults, please leave the kids at home. Let’s deal with those “flaws” first, the largest being the character Rachel Dawes . In Batman Begins , I blamed Katie Holmes . Her acting was weak, to say the least, which is regrettable in that who she is and what she says and does are important to the film. Critics agreed and either for that or other reasons, Katie was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal , who is a better actress. Yet here she’s weak, real weak. Maybe it’s the character, not the actress, which is frustrating because Rachel is a pivotal character. The film,...
1 comment
Read more

DVD: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Awful. The film is an environmentalist wacko wet dream. No one else could like this thing. I’m trying to think of something positive and all I can come up with is how positively awful it is. The original The Day the Earth Stood Still is a science fiction masterpiece. In it, Klaatu comes to Earth with a simple message: Do what you want among yourselves and on your planet. But if you attempt to export your violent way to the stars, Gort and his friends will hit you with so many lefts you’ll beg for a right. (Gort being the cosmic version of Chuck Norris, you see.) The ultimate warning was that we needed to change our violent ways if we expected to be accepted among the stars. In this remake, the aliens are environmental busy-bodies who have bought into the entire notion that we puny little humans are capable of destroying the planet. Therefore, we must be eliminated so that the planet, for God knows what reason, can try again. To count the ways in which this film makes no sense ...
1 comment
Read more

I (Briefly) Try a Mac

 I Bought a Mac. My first computer was an Atari 800, fully loaded with 48k of RAM. And I mean the original, beige model, not its low-slung, fancy successor. My friend went for an Apple IIe, which cost a relative fortune. Eventually, I’d step up to an Atari 1040ST, while he’d get a IIgs. And even more eventually, we both ended up with IBM PC compatibles. MSDOS was my friend, Unix an ally. It was with great reluctance that I transition from a command-line interface (CLI) to a Graphic User Interface (GUI), always on a PC platform and never a Mac. I never bought into the hype and never experienced all the horrid things that allegedly befell anyone using a PC. For me, they just worked. Yet here I am, these many decades later, typing this on a brand-new MacBook Air M4. How things change... Initially, there was little regret but a mounting list of frustrations. Adjusting to the keyboard isn’t too hard, it’s just a matter of experimentation. Learning how to scale the display wasn’t awful, ...
Post a Comment
Read more