I went looking just now for references to two highly influential books about the media - Thompson, J. B. (1995) The Media and Modernity : A Social Theory of the Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.

For the former, Google Scholar found 442 references. For the latter it found 486 references.

I also tried looking up references to those books in four leading academic reference databases – the Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s normally-excellent Scopus, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences and Communication Abstracts (all four require academic subscriptions to access).

Whether searching for author name or title, the first two found very few records, almost all of them to do with academic papers these authors had written rather than the books in question. The IBSS at least found some reviews of the books in academic journals which was some help and Communication Abstracts contained a short summary of the Meyrowitz book but neither was much help in finding books referenced by other books either.

Admittedly, these databases are primarily aimed at indexing and cross-referencing papers, but for better or worse much of the scholarship in media studies is published in books (or book chapters).

It could be that I failed to use the right syntax to bring up the references I needed – Web of Knowledge’s can be a little tricky in places - and the Google Scholar citations don’t give you as much information (eg abstracts) once you have found them - doubtless many of them are of little utility - but considering the short length of time Google Scholar has been working I am impressed at the speed with which it is closing the distance to its competition.

Is there a trick I have missed?

David Brake

My colleague Jason Mittell at MIT wrote a very interesting post in the C3 newsletter that I will repost here:

If there is one issue where I feel the perspectives of academic researchers and educators greatly diverge with the interests and policies of the media industries (at least as publicly stated), it is copyright. The media industries have been aggressively framing their copyrights as owned property, demanding control over all uses and successfully lobbying for legislation to protect ownership rights over all others. Media scholars are typically both copyright holders and active users of copywritten materials, so we can (ideally) see the perspectives of both creators and users- - I certainly want to protect some rights to my writings, ensuring proper credit and (modest) compensation for using my work. But I am a dependent practitioner of fair use, the right to use copywritten material without permission for certain purposes such as criticism, parody, and education. Without fair use, I could not quote a book in my own research, show a clip from a television show in class, or assign students to make parodies of movie trailers, all practices that I see as integral parts of my role as a media scholar.

Traditionally, courts have protected such fair use rights over industry objections, but Congress managed to legislate around these rights in 1998 with the DMCA - this act mandated that users could not legally circumvent copy protections (like the DRM system on all commercial DVDs), even if the purpose was protected by fair use. As the film and television industries have switched to DVD as their only format, consumers were denied our fair use rights to make clips for educational use, backup discs in a personal collection, and create parody videos, escalating the hostility between media users and owners. As an educator, this restriction effectively says I can only teach material following the limits dictated by DVD technology. Thankfully, the U.S. Copyright Office last week issued a ruling allowing film & media faculty to override DVD protections to make in-class clips - a great allowance, but still one much more limited than fair use.

It has always struck me as exceedingly short-sighted for the industry to push for such clamping down of educational fair use, as media educators train the next generation of filmmakers, television programmers, advertising executives, and (most importantly) media consumers. Why would the industry want to restrict educational practices that primarily teach students how to consume and create the very products that they wish to sell? I see two potential explanations: the more distressing explanation is that the industry’s lawyers & owners believe that copywritten material is truly property that must be protected from all non-paying intruders, controlled at every turn, and consumers abilities to assert control of any potential uses is merely an inconvenience to be overcome via legislation, DRM, or litigious intimidation. The more generous explanation is that the industry recognizes that many uses promote consumer engagement, education, and investment, but that they see the danger of circumvention software as too powerful to allow it to be legitimized no matter the use. The industry actively argued against the request made on behalf of film professors to be able to clip DVDs, so clearly nobody is unaware of the potential benefits and legitimacy of such usage - but I’m not sure if it’s a case of paranoid protectionism or fear of a slippery slope.

Now I turn the question to you. We preach the power of active audiences and participatory culture, practices that depend on fair use and productive consumers. So how do you view fair use within business models? Do the strategies of lobbying and litigation pursued at the top of media industries represent more broadly held attitudes toward copyright, or is there dissent and diversity of opinions within the media industries that do not come to light in a public forum? Do you see strategies by which media educators can better make the case for the importance of fair use not only to our own efforts, but to fuel media consumption, audience engagement, and the education of future creators?

What’s your take?

I thought I would look up the stats on weblog production in the US to see whether they appear to justify the conventional wisdom that blogging continues to increase in popularity. Well it turns out that the picture according to Pew Internet’s longitudinal data don’t appear to back that point of view - in fact, the graph of American Internet users having ‘ever created a weblog or ‘blog’” appears to peak in Jan 05 at 10% and decline to between 7 and 9% since. In principle of course the number who have ever created a blog can only rise. But the survey has a precision of +-3% so almost all of the variation is within that range. The best we can therefore say is that in January 2005 between 7 and 13% of Americans had created a weblog and by April 2006 that number had likely not changed much (the range being between 5 and 11% at that point - though the question asked had slightly changed).

 David Brake