I do think it is fair to have there be an issue about online music because, although I too participate in music downloading, I believe that it is unfair to the artist who has made their music to share with the world through album sales. I believe that many consumers are unaware that music is copyrighted, or that unauthorized copying is illegal. As most people in my experience suffer no ethical discrepancies about photocopying pages from reference books borrowed from the library, or song sheets for their church choir, or copyrighted materials to distribute to their school or college classes, all of which are just as illegal under copyright legislation as downloading pirate MP3s. Literally millions of people who would never dream of shoplifting a book, or a CD, seem to have no ethical worries about photocopying books and magazine articles, or most frequently, downloading music. I think one reason is that it is perceived as a victimless crime. I know that people in the music industry will strongly disagree, but if someone copies a song, the copyright-holder may or may not receive the money for the sale of the album if he or she had not realized if the item had in fact been purchased. Some people tell me, that music piracy is just plain wrong, period. I think that in this instance they may be confusing the distinction between “it’s against the law,” and “it’s wrong,” since the moral basis for determining that it is wrong is the legitimacy or otherwise of copyright legislation.

I personally use a program entitled Limewire, simply for every reason stated above, its fast and its free. Honestly, the only reason I would ever consider removing the program would be for fear of viruses and pornographic search results, which often appear in my search results window. Although I understand and know that piracy is wrong, there is nothing physically stopping this medium from being easily accessible to all consumers. I, too watch movies online, which I’m sure adds to the frustration of the corporations behind making each movie and each CD album a success. I contribute to the ringtone purchasing companies, as well as going to see movies, which I am interested in supporting. However, as a student, money is always an objective and why would anyone run from a free opportunity?

The media play a love hate relationship with all contenders, because they can be on your side one day, but with one false move, they can have entire empires watching in a negative light.  As a more recent example, Tiger Woods lost his entire sponsorship deal with Nike and with many others over the accounts of his affairs. A celebrity known for the sport of golf soon had his image torn apart by the media due to his poor life choices, thus exemplifying how he poorly represented himself. Therefore I believe that media has an extremely large impact on representation.

During a crisis, although the media claims to be biased, there can be distinct negative representations of beings whether it is for example, George W. Bush, or the entire country of Mexico. For the majority of the time President Bush was in office, he was ridiculed and seen as a terrible leader. The bad choices he made were enhanced, and any good choices he was to make were pushed to the back to make him seem like he was not doing anything to benefit the United States of America. As another example, the Swine Flu epidemic has affected many countries and the media has blatantly placed the blame on Mexico claiming that they have contracted the virus and shipped it through the borders with their travelers as well as immigrants. This sheds a negative representation of the people who live in Mexico, as well as anybody returning from a vacation in the country. The same situation can be led to the discrimination of the Arab community after the bombings of 9-11. Anyone with a turban or who was of Indian decent was severely discriminated against due to the assumptions of terrorism. The media plays a huge role in this because they advertise terrorists as being anyone with slightly darker skin, or of Arab decent.

This shows a huge lack of accurate representation in the actuality of the matters discussed, as discussed throughout the article “Resisting Peripheral Exports: Al Jazeera’s War Images on US Television.” In the article it discusses the use of significant clients of imperialism such as Australia, Canada, and Mexico, and already the Americans have closed off one of their major outlets, through the discrimination of Swine Flu. Furthermore exemplifying as to how the media has such a strong influence on what people think and see, that they have the ability to change what representation means to us, and how it has the ability to shape our societies.

There are all sorts of kinds of journalism. You’ve got internet journalism such as blogs and online newspapers, gossip journalism, with websites like Perez Hilton, there are reporters, commentators and a lot of amateur content with personal opinions of the masses. I think this is an age, because of the information overload, where there is probably more focus on commentators, analysts and opinions to try to make sense of the amount of information being steered in the direction of the masses. Journalism has changed from being a conscience means for information to a way for advertising and for commercialism. Unfortunately war sells and peace doesn’t. You try and sell a story of peace and all the public is interested in is the war over seas, and not the feel-good piece on dieting. That’s the problem. The media has drastically changed, thus causing a threat for the future of journalism. The increase of amateur content raises the hurdle of what can be constituted as a legitimate source of information. Can a consumer trust the journalist who has done the research or the average Joe-blow who happened to be at the right place at the right time with his camera phone?

Journalists bring the news to the people, because if a bomb happens to go off in Iraq, and nobody knows about it, than is it still considered terrorism? Is it only terrorism if the knowledge of incidents in particular is spread worldwide to the masses to await a negative reaction from the people in regards to the opposing country? This shows the ethical distinction of whether or not a situation is in fact blown out of proportion due to media coverage, or if it is just information brought to the attention of the consumers.

It’s also the responsibility of the audience and of the citizenry to start understanding the effects of terrorism; it’s also the move from professional to amateur. The inclusion of technologies like digital cameras and camera phones certainly have created their own circumstances around how professional journalists actually need to go about collecting their information, and doing their jobs properly. Professional to amateur content is probably one of the hardest circumstances the journalists of today are dealing with in order to make way for the future of journalism and information broadcasting in the years to come.

Although many videos on YouTube are simply there for a good laugh others contain political messages imprtant to the individual. There are also television sort of shows which take place on YouTube. People post a new segment of their show approximately once a week and are sometimes even sponsored. If someone did attempt to control the internet what would happen to them? Although society will never be controlled to the normal state it was considered as before the internet era, there is always the possibility of new restrictions being put in place to ensure stability throughout the web.

Another issue in terms of these new control measures it that they don’t prevent kids from putting up videos. There are many youn kids who make videos of themselves dancing around, or acting something out and their parents may never know. The reason this can be concerning is others are able to comment on videos which can lead to cyber bullying. Once something is on the interntet it is there for good, and often parents of young children put videos of them on the web such as the popular video Charlie bit my finger. Is it appropriate to put even an innocent video of a young child on the internet? they have no control over it and when they are older the chances are it will soon be there. Although they are usually adorable and hilarious are they appropriate?

Personally, I think it is a hilarious way of informing the public of current issues that may or may not be affecting their country and its political decisions. For those who refuse to watch the news, they can still get their content through other forms of media, whether it be online video content, or a comedy skit show on television.

Average Video Length: 2 minutes 46.17 seconds

Time it would take to view all of the material on YouTube (as of March 17th 2008): 412.3 years

Average Age of Uploader: 26.57
(note that this is not the average age of anybody who has ever uploaded a video, but the average age of active uploading)

Unambiguously User-Generated (amateur): 80.3%

Professional: 14.7%

Commercial Content Uploaded as percentage of Total Uploads: 4.7%

Vlogs Uploaded as percentage of Total Uploads: 4.7%

Percentage of videos that are probably in violation of copyright: 12%

Uploads by Country: 
(Note: these statistics assume that upload traffic is consistent throughout a 24 hour period. For example the majority of YouTube videos are from the USA between 8pm – midnight CDT. If overall upload traffic is higher at this time than the early morning hours when USA percentage is low, then the USA may account for a higher percentage of total uploads. The reverse might also be true.)
USA: 34.5%

UK: 6.9%

Philippines: 3.9%

Turkey: 3.4%

Spain: 3.4%

Canada: 3.0%

Brazil: 3.0%

Germany: 2.6%

France: 2.6%

Mexico: 2.6%

These facts may shock you, when we went over this in a conference preparing for filming and writing the doc we noticed that Canada produced only 3% of content on YouTube!
This is from Kansas State University in 2008, here we are 2 years later. Has this changed? Are Canadians more involved in YouTube than perhaps some European nations?

Another interesting thing to note: approximately 12% of content on YouTube is violating copywrite laws. More shocking how does this compare to the total Video count on YouTube? Parodies constantly reference licensed content, are they safe? Here it’s explained how many hits Google (who owns YouTube) gets for video per month.

Recent Comscore data says Google/YouTube streams just under 7 billion videos per month in the U.S., up from around 5 billion/month late last year. That’s about 225 million streams a day, which still puts them well above all the next major competitors (MySpace, Hulu, Yahoo, Viacom, Microsoft, etc.). Nielsen says Google/YouTube streams 5.5 billion videos/month in the U.S.

So 7 billion videos per month at 12% improperly licensed content, that’s nearly 840, 000, 000 videos A MONTH being viewed by people not properly licensed.

That was just sum food for thought!

The internet is a sophisticated but easy to use technology. This makes it easier for content to be pushed online than through any other medium. If an amateur wanted to make public a video of his/her own on TV it would be nearly impossible to do so. There are a lot of bureaucratic, and legal steps to just get some air-time on a local network. Plus there are certain regulations that have to be met for a show or a clip to be able to be shown on TV.

I assure you, with the amount of profanity, that this remix would have never played on MuchMusic or MTV as part of their daily music videos. For that matter, not even a local TV station would have taken it into consideration. So as sophisticated as the Internet may be, the content might not be that sophisticated. But it sure is damn good.

UPDATE: I was just doing a bit more reading on the parody and found that TIME Magazine…TIME Magazine!!! found it hilarious. That says something about this kind of content.

The whole concept of having parents using the same sites as their children raises several points, some good..and some not so good. First of all, we’ve now reached an age in which technology reigns supreme over all age groups. Never before has everyone been so digitally connected no matter their race, creed or colour. Facebook seems to transcend the age barrier that has for so long created a division between young and old.

But does this fact have certain repercussions for some Facebook users? I’ve already mentioned the horrors of having parents on Facebook watching your every move, but they aren’t the only red flags that must be watched out for these days. With almost everyone nowadays aware of the benefits of Facebook; teachers, coworkers and even people’s bosses are present on the site, with access to your photos and status updates. There have been countless stories of people getting the axe from their jobs over frustrated status updates about their bosses’ not so pleasant attitude. If fact, some employers have been known to scout out the pictures of potential employees on Facebook as method in deciding wether they would make a good employee or not. Definitely makes you want to think twice about who you add as friends.

And now a little video to drive the point home:

After going trying in anyway possible to receive compensation for his loss he finally decided to get their attention in his own way. The song has received over seven million views but still he received no reaction or compensation. So he made another movie based more on the employee service he received and the poor handling of his guitar. This video also received a large number of views prompting United to address the man and offer some compensation. The videos however had gained so much popularity and success for him that he refused the money offered by United and is currently working on a third video.

YouTube allowed him to express his anger towards United and get his message out there to others who can relate to his story. It gained massive support and ultimately helped him get United’s attention and achieve his goal. He was one man up against a large company and won thanks to the massive support form across the country and around the world. It also boosted his career. As a musicians it can be difficult to make yourself known. He has made a name for himself and boosted his career to a point where he would rather make more videos than collect on compensation. So maybe United breaking his guitar was a blessing in disguise.