Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy, and Cinema (Laikwan Pang)

Brenda Laurel design research

• Computers as Theatre (2nd Edition), Addison-Wesley Professional, (2013) ISBN 0321918622
• Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, MIT Press, (2004) ISBN 0-262-12263-4
• Utopian Entrepreneur, MIT Press (2001) ISBN 0-262-62153-3
• Computers as Theatre, Addison-Wesley (1991) ISBN 0-201-55060-1
• The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Addison-Wesley (1990) ISBN 0-201-51797-3

theoreis and practices of digitextuality

1"The Poetics of augmented space"
virtual space vs augmented space A typical VR system presents a user with a virtual space that has nothing to do with the immediate physical space of the usuer; in contrast, a typical AR system adds the information directly related to this immediate physical space. but we don't necessaily have to think of immersion into the virtual and augumentation of the physical as the opposites.

p76 if video and other types of surveillance technologies translate the physical space and its dwellers into data, cellspace technologies work in the opposite direction:delivering data to mobile-space dwellers. cellspace is physical space filled with data that can be retrieved by a user using a personal communication device.

James R Beniger, the control revolution : technological and economic origins of the information society Harvard 1986

Fred Dretske knowledge and the flow of information 1981

Peter Hall and Paschal Preston     The carrier wave: new information technology and the geography of innovation, 1849-2003

The fifth generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's computer challenge to the world (Edward A. Feigenbaum & Pamela McCorduck)

p63   Expert systems are a species of knowledge-based system.

4. Anatomy of an Expert System (p76)

Knowledge of two types: the facts of the domain, and heuristic knowledge
77-79  miners-knowledge engineers-- knowledge acquisition research  (the transfer of expertise from humans to symbolic date structures that constitute the knowledge representation in the machine)

84   The knowledge engineer is both a generalist and a specialist. … Yet the knowledge engineer's role in expert system is transitory one. Her job is so sensitive, critical and painstaking that nearly everybody agrees it must soon be automated unless AI is to be throttled by its own success.

editing suggestions

the information explosion could generate physiological unfitness of the body in just the same way as information deprivation could

a silicon chip the size of a fingernail could now store millions of characters

The question of whether

"Digital Cinema: Convergence or Contradiction?" Thomas Elsaesser

convergence  --- technological    economic  cultural

THE CINEMATIC VERSUS THE DIGTIAL
DIGTIAL-- FLAT

wirelessness

chapter 4 p61
contemporary wirelesses is framed by a large-scale communication shift to the medium of electromagnetic waves
Maxwellian physics
By 1900, many different relations of connection, transfer, proximity, and influence were imagined around electromagnetic or wireless waves
Sungook Hong (2001)  in his history of wireless invention
Isabelle Stengers
Electromagnetic oscillation is an event whose scope could be measured by multiplicity of its interpretations.

There are some common elements to problem, such as how to create a continuous signal(periodic waveform), how to propagate it effectively(antenna design), and how to pick up and amplify the signal at a distance.

In contrast to wired media, as the 2007 IEEE 802.11 standard states, wireless is "a medium that has neither absolute nor really observable boundaries"(IEEE 2007, 23)

p66   The sheer density of wireless transmissions creates fresh problems of regulation, interference, competition, and overload.

p.66   Air as Algorithmic Envelope
The air interface is a term for that part of a wireless or mobile telephone network that lies between the antennae of a device and a base station. It is an elusive interface,…
however, is synthesized by technical processes expressed in algorithms.


How to Make a World Hang Together: Noise
p70.  The juxtaposition of different components constructs a signal envelop or composite waveform that is open in certain ways and heavily closed in other ways. Information is coded in a sequence of steps, but these steps take account of each other. Information is encoded a number of times to allow different relations to be entwined with other.
p76 A waveform produced by FFT is "conscious of itself" to the extent that the date stream entering at the start of the process has been parceled in such as way as minimize the effects of their inevitable collisions with and alteration by other signals in a given setting. In the ways it spaces and times the signal, the algorithm imprints into the waveform a certain awareness of possible encounters as well as variations in direction and speed typical of urban life and mobilities. Any contemporary sense of media streaming or constantly-on communications in the city relies on such differential quotients and tendencies.

p78  The algorithm dating from 1967 (Viterbi) is widely used in telecommunications networks to maintain the sequence of information flows. It has become a fundamental element in commercial wireless, satellite, and space communications. Andrew Viterbi, a now retire telecommunications engineer, designed the algorithm and started a company (Qualcomm 2005) that designs and fabricates semiconductors based around the algorithm. In telecommunications applications, these chips enable satellite, cellular phone, and wireless networks to communicate despite high levels of electromagnetic noise.
If the FFT is like a courier company that resorts to bicycle couriers in downtown areas, the Viterbi algorithm is like the recipient of a deluge of partly addressed parcels trying to work out who they are meant for, and which was sent first.


Chapter 5 Acting wirelessly: From Antenna to Node Database
p122 although the equipment had been designed to cover distances of around 100 meters, people began attaching new antennae that increased the range of wireless networks.
p123 Elevation is what allows Wi-Fi signals to stretch great distances. One recurring trait of antenna builders is their pursuit of rooftops, upper stories of buildings, high towers, and long poles.

p127 "Labours of Location: Acting in the Pervasive Media Space"   Minna Tarkka

Boney M.

Sonney

Zeggae

titles

Heidegger's confrontation with Modernity       Michael Zimmerman
The question concerning technology     Heidegger
Problems in Materialism and Culture     Raymond Williams   "Advertising: The magic system"

Wireless imagination    

how television invented new media

Resolutions 3: global networks of video

Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The screen arts in the digital age edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (Amsterdam University Press, 1998)

Louis Lumiere-- the cinema's First Virtualist? Thomas Elsaesser  45-61

whether there were some deeper-- cultural, ideological, technological- - reasons for its emergence, or what was it that the so-called inventors thought they were inventing and was the cinema what the world had been expecting?

reading guiding questions

http://www.douban.com/note/341846174/

1. Write a very brief abstract (a few sentences), starting with, "In a nutshell, X argues that ...." Polish this; make it as complete AND as concise as possible.

2. Divide the essay into sections, identifying the important steps of the argument. Think about what size units feel right for this purpose. If the author has divided the essay into sections (subheadings, dividers of some sort), you almost certainly need to subdivide further and identify smaller units. On the other hand, it doesn't need to be paragraph by paragraph either.

3. Write a "functional" or "dynamic" outline using these divisions, that is, focus on what the author does in each section. ("The author raises the question . . . " "the author refutes . . . " "the author distinguishes between . . . "). Take care over the verbs: make them as precise and expressive as possible. Let's agree to ban generics like "says" or "states." Be sparing with "explains."

4. What is this essay's intended audience? Be specific: in most cases, the audience will be broadly academic. But within that? Is the essay addressed to specialists in a small field/ people already familiar with the texts and/or main issues, or does it seek to include literary scholars more broadly? Does it seek to include readers beyond literary studies? Beyond academia? How can you tell? Identify a few good examples of what you're describing.

5. How does the essay involve its readers? Does it directly address us? Take us along? Coopt us? Antagonize us? Puzzle us? Find good examples.

6. How does the essay deal with other scholars in the field? Does it quote a lot? Effectively? Does it provide an overview of previous scholarship? Does it insert itself into that broader field, or try to distinguish itself from it? Does it build on other people's work, or bounce off it? Does it use "strawmen" (i.e., weak arguments introduced solely for the purpose of being knocked over)? Is it collegial, antagonistic . . . ? Find good examples.

7. How would you describe the essay's voice? (You can even play games if you like: how do you picture the author? How does she look/what does she wear/age? Where does he sit as he writes? How do you imagine his or her speaking voice sounds? Now try to account for these impressions: where do they come from?) Is the author trying to establish a voice, or seeking to remain neutral?

8. Is the essay clearly argued? Does it mean to be "easy" to follow, or is it aiming to challenge and puzzle you? Are there places where you get lost? Why is that? Would you advise the author to fix that? How?

9. Look at the opening paragraph (or paragraphs—you decide what constitutes "the opening"). Divide it into functional steps, much as you did for the whole essay in 2. and 3. What does the author do to introduce the problem/question/issue we'll be looking at? How does the author motivate you to enter into the discussion with her? Does the author give a "thesis statement" or preview his or her conclusion? Entirely/partially? How? Do you like the opening paragraph(s)?

10. Look at the ending: how does the author leave things? Is there a summation? A looking ahead to further questions? Some kind of special effect? Is it effective?

11. Note any other observations that didn't come under any of these questions.

Mao China

Maurice Meisner

Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). ISBN 0299084205.

The Deng Xiaoping Era : An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1st, 1996). ISBN 0809078155.

Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait. (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity, 2007). ISBN 9780745631066.

Sigrid Schmalzer

The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China

book titles unread

Sentient City

post-scarcity anarchism

Voyage on the North Sea

Reality of the Mass Media

The Technopolitics of Cold War: Toward a Transregional perspective

钱学森系统科学思想研究

"Missile Science, Population science: The origin of China's one-Child policy"
susan Greenhalgh    China Quarterly 2005

The advertising research handbook
Young, charles E.

China's techno-warriors

Television as digital media

mainframe experimentalism

曙光号全解密： 神舟号之前的载人飞船计划始末 梁东元 著 当代中国出版社 2010

digital cultures and the politics of emotion: feeling, affect and technological change

p3 Adi Kuntsman  on Ahmed  The cultural politics of Emotion (2004)

"Combining insights from psychoanalysis and Marxism, she notes that 'emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation'."


Tagg, P. "Subjectivity and Soundscape, motorbikes and music," in A. Bennet, B. Shank and J. Toynbee (eds),   The Popular Music Studies Reader

Mbembe, A. (2003)  "necropolitics,"  Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.

p 23  Patricia Clough

In her discussion of what she calls "aesthetic capitalism," Christine Harold (2009) points to a shift in the functioning of brand from its being about representation to the aura of the circulating sign to designing objects that themselves can stir affect, promising a transformative experience in the object's use rather than in the mere possession of it. Modelling a user's future manipulation of it, the commodity is designed to sensually transmit a "creative juice" that will be transformative for its user, bringing a not-yet lived future into the present. Thus, the aura and the value of the commodity now its transmission of affect, where affect refers not to emotion but to a bodily capacity, a bodily readiness, a trigger to action, including the action of feeling an emotion. While emotions are commensurate with a subject, affect is a pre-individual and therefore a non-conscious, a-subjective potentiality. Affect is a vector of unqualified intensity seeking future actualization; it is a vehicle from one dimension of time to another. It is for its capacity to bring the future into the present that affective branding becomes useful in the graphic framing of unending war and humanitarian response to it.

Harold, C. (2009) "on Target: Aura, Affect, and the Rhetoric of 'design democracy'",  public culture, no.21


This is because affective branding actually works not by giving one future possibilities but by pre-empting the future. For Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman the pre-emptive logic of branding is a "mnemonic control" that aims to remodel long-term memory through an occupation of or the "parasiting" on the dynamics of affective potentiality in the neuro-physiological plasticity of the body-brain. Mnemonic control is something like "a distribution of memory implants", which provides one with the bodily or affective memory of an actually experience which one actually has not had, nonetheless, giving a base for the future rise of affect, the repetition of an anticipatory response. Thus, the power of mnemonic control is in this turn to affect as life's non-lived or not-yet lived potential. Mnemonic control brings life back to a non-lived potential in order to modulate affect's emerging effects.

Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman    2011    "Mnemonic control" in Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death,    edited by Patricia Clough and Craig Willse


p.53-54
Athina Karatzogianni
In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader,  Gregg and Seigworth identify no fewer than six approaches in relation to the emergence of affect theory, summarized briefly here according to my own understanding of their categorization: phenomenologies of embodiment and investigation into the body's capacities for extensions; the hybridization of human with non-human in bio-informatics and bio-engineering; work found in feminist studies, the Italian autonomism, and philosophically inflected culture studies; in psychoanalytic inquiries focusing on desire; political work undertaken focusing on people crushed under the thumb of normativizing power, by queer, feminist, subaltern and disability activists; and work aiming to move beyond the linguistic and representational.

editing suggestions

1.  throw money AT advertising

2. built-in commercials

3.  Sometimes it mingles with the voices on radio or TV, as if it arrives through the airwaves

4.  a fad for

5. Does this mean that he approves of the defamiliarizing effect of substituting balloons for eggs?

6.To attract the attention of an audience from within a sea of information, an advertisement must break away fromwith conventional ways of thinking.
 

The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Kathi Weeks) Duke University Press, 2011

p.2    two reasons for the inattention to work within political theory
         1) the privatization of work
             work and family (the institute of private property secures the privacy of employment relation alongside the marriage relations)     private and public division
          p.4 As a result of work's subordination to property rights, its reification, and its individualization, thinking about work as a social system –— even with its arguably more tenuous private status— strangely becomes as difficult as it is for many to conceive marriage and the family in structural terms.
          2) the decline of work-based activism in US

P5  buying and selling of that very "peculiar" commodity labor power
      presents two free, self-interested individuals, each an owner of property and both equal under the law, who enter into an exchange of equivalents.

p.8  Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation. That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract; indeed, working is part of what is supposed to transform subjects into the independent individuals of the liberal imaginary, and for that reason, is treated as a basic obligation of citizenship.

p. 11 agains the normativity and moralization of work

p 12-13 critique past feminisms for its tendencies toward the mystification and moralization of work
13.  "Feminists, I suggest, should focus on the demands not simply or exclusively for more work and better work, but also for less work; we should focus not only on revaluing feminized forms of unwaged labor but also challenge the sanctification of such work that can accompany or be enabled by these efforts."

16- 20   work and class
   1) work   allows broader reacher
   p17. the politics of and against work has the potential to expand the terrain of class struggle to include actors well beyond that classic figure of traditional class politics, the industrial proletariat.

p. 60 ( historicizing postindustrial work ethic)
The postindustrial work ethic, with its new emphasis on work as an avenue for personal development and meaning, was at least a response to the rebellions in the 1960s and early 1970s against the disciplinary subjectivity of the Fordist period and the problem of worker alienation that they helped to publicize. The human-resources movement that had come into its own by the 1980s attempted to change work processes in ways that would address, in profitable terms, the problem of  work quality posed by activists. Thus the shift from the industrial ethic's focus on work as a path to social mobility to the postindustrial emphasis on work as a practice of self-realization is part and parcel of the confrontation of competing versions of the ethic and the struggles over the organization and meaning of work that they signified and facilitated.

Post-fordism and work ethics
p70 Whereas Fordism demanded from its core workers a lifetime of compliance with work discipline, post-Fordism also demands of many of its workers flexibility, adaptability, and continual reinvention.

Cremin, Colin. 2010. "Never employable Enough: The (im)possibility of satisfying the boss's desire."  Organization 17 (2): 131-49.

Managing post-fordist independence: being professional
a complex art of cultural fashioning and emotional engineering typical of many managerial regimes today
p. 72 the discourse of professionalism today enjoys a wide application, serving as a disciplinary mechanism to manage the affects and attitudes of a service-based workforce that is less amenable to direct supervision.

professionalization  style and dress
p74 the professional look, and the time and resources necessary to achieve it, tie us not only economically and socially but also aesthetically and affectively to work

Chapter 2 marxism, productivism and the refusal of work
The lack of critique of the value of work inside marxist traditions
1) socialist modernization  (originated in the context of revolutionary moments in europe )
(Lenin)
p.86 an ideal of social and economic progress grounded in the continuing development of science and industry

an insufflaient critique of capital
p.84 This tribute to proletarian labor and to the progressive development of productive forces replicates the fundamental attributes of capitalist society… here we find an endorsement of economic growth, industrial progress, and the work ethic similar to the one that can be found in bourgeois political economy, with its naturalization and celebration of the process of economic modernization.

{for my purpose, perhaps it is exactly this socialist modernization made it so easy to transform into capitalist mode of modernization in the 1980s}

2)  Socialist humanism  (gained popularity in the 1960s   coincided with the rise of the new left)
Fromm
p86 labor is understood as an individual creative capacity, a human essence, fro which we are now estranged and to which we should be restored.
p. 89 individual is the unit of analysis    "the critique of alienation becomes attached to a prior claim about the nature of the human subject"
"As Baudrillard describes it, this model of the human founded in a transhistorical capacity for labor mimics the standardization and generalization of work that was established under the conditions of industrialization. To put it in other terms, the abstraction from the concrete and particular that allows one to grasp labor quantitatively is what also allows one to conceive the commensurability of its qualitative instances as the expression of an essential humanity."

p90. Negri    expresses no interest in the problematic of alienation as a discourse of interiority