Legal issues with Media

Since the internet became a popular meeting ground for fans of movies, music, and gaming, there has been an increase in copyright infringement cases. Most recently, the music labels have begun to take legal action against those who download and share music without some form of payment. Jenkins addresses actions like this that corporations in the film industry have taken. He mentions how Lucasfilm has created a website (www.lucasfilm.com/divisions/online/) that allows Lucasfilm to monitor the use of the characters of the Star Wars films in other fan made films. This website was created as a meeting place for fans to be creative with their interaction with the films; however, some of the fans believed that the site was not only for fan creativity, but for the company to control what the fans used in their sites or films. This control occurs most often with legal threats, but company controlled free fan websites are also a popular control of media use as this one is.
In today's media based culture, companies are needing to find ways to work with the fans of their product without breaking the boundaries that copyright laws create. Jenkins writes that Anthropologist Grant McCracken has stated that corporations will either have to allow further construction and representation of their creations or they will lose economically. "The new consumer will help create value or they will refuse it..."(158) Legal threats will not stop every fan, and all attempts to control the fan participation will eventually equal to no fan participation.
Jenkins is ultimately stating that allowing the consumers to participate in the fan culture with fewer restrictions on how they do it without infringing on copyright laws would be in the companies' best economical interests.

Text

Text to me can be anything that has a purpose. This could even spread out to music or vocal sounds and also images. Pictures or ads are texts. I like to think about how ads as texts are rhetorical. Ever since I had to create an ad for a class project, I have been interested in how ads can have rhetorical insights. Everything that goes into advertisements help to illustrate the meaning and purpose to the them. Color, actual written text, and the way words are ordered are all ways that this form of a "text" is rhetorical. The ALT reading on texts refers to the different aspects of argument in how texts are created. Just as a writer would look at their argument, style, and audience, so would someone working in Advertising.

(Comment with what you think text is.) :)

American Idolatry

I'd like to think that today's rhetors are often television shows that we as a culture watch everyday. American Idol could be considered a rhetor. As Jenkins mentions, American Idol has changed consumer behavior. The show's sponsors include Ford and Coca Cola. Both of these companies have had improved sales since the beginning of the first season. Families watch TV together more, and women in their thirties have something that isn't stressful to talk about over the phone. Although I only watched the first season of the show, it was the one season that I watched TV at all.
Critics could observe how each viewer of the show begins to change behaviorally. For instance, even after knowing who wins the show, devoted viewers will buy the CDs of the winners. If you had not seen the show, would you buy the CD of the winner unless you had heard more than two songs? I honestly do not remember any song that Clay Aiken ever sang. I did not watch that season. However, as the show gets more and more popular, the winners have a more widely known name. Carrie Underwood is more popular than many of the other winners of the show. A rhetorical critic may see her popularity as a reaction to American Idolatry. The bigger the show, the bigger amount of response from viewers, and the bigger the change in how people consume.

Jenkins and Media

Jenkins's definition of media is one that works for me. At first I was not sure I agreed with his idea about delivery systems and technologies coming and going and how media persist as layers, but then I reread the next paragraph on page 14 and got what he was saying. When he explained his definition using convergence, I understood what he meant by how media persisted in layers while the technology came and went. I really liked his use of examples of technology and how it shifted content as one technology superseded another.

The Rhetorical Situation

I find it interesting that in Bitzer's "The Rhetorical Situation" it seems to become so clear what the rhetorical situation is and how many situations can become rhetorical but not all do. What I understand from the reading is that almost any situation can become a rhetorical situation. At first, I just assumed that the rhetorical situation only occurred with grand speeches just as the Gettysburg Address. I believed that only a situation of great impact could be a rhetorical situation. However, Bitzer argues that it need not only be a situation of great impact, but rather any situation that calls for discourse and that the discourse changes what was previously thought. Basically, what I understand is that if a situation calls for some discourse action to be taken to change the situation, then that situation is a rhetorical situation. Obviously, this is not all that constitutes a rhetorical situation, but this blog is for me to try to understand exactly what Bitzer is trying to tell us.

When I read Vatz's myth article, I wasn't sure which one I believed to be correct, Vatz or Bitzer. Vatz makes a good argument when he mentions how situations are not found but created. He refers to the Cuban Missile Crisis and how this situation was brought about through rhetoric before it even became a situation. I would like to see what others say about both of these articles since each author makes excellent points.