Semiotic Democracy
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Semiotic Democracy
Semiotic democracy is a phrase first coined by John Fiske, a media studies professor, in his seminal media studies book ''Television Culture'' (1987).John Fiske, ''Television Culture'' (Routledge, 1987). Fiske defined the term as the "delegation of the production of meanings and pleasures to elevision'sviewers." Fiske discussed how rather than being passive couch potatoes that absorbed information in an unmediated way, viewers actually gave their own meanings to the shows they watched that often differed substantially from the meaning intended by the show's producer. Subsequently, this term was appropriated by the technical and legal community in the context of any re-working of cultural imagery by someone who is not the original author. Examples include fan fiction and slash fiction. Legal scholars are concerned that just as technology eases the process of cheaply making and distributing derivative works imbued with new cultural meanings available to wide public, copyright and ...
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John Fiske (media Studies)
John Fiske (September 12, 1939 – July 12, 2021) was a media scholar and cultural theorist who taught around the world. His primary areas of intellectual interest included cultural studies, critical analysis of popular culture, media semiotics, and television studies. He was the author of eight academic books, including ''Power Plays, Power Works'' (1993), ''Understanding Popular Culture'' (1989), ''Reading the Popular'' (1989), and the influential ''Television Culture'' (1987). Fiske was also a media critic, examining how cultural meaning has been created in American society, and how debates over issues such as race have been handled in different media. Careers Born in Bristol, England, Fiske was educated in United Kingdom, Britain. He received a BA (Honors) and MA in English Literature from Cambridge University, where he studied under the renowned leftist literary and cultural critic and activist Raymond Williams, who influenced Fiske's intellectual thinking throughout his lif ...
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Media Studies
Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media Studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass communication, communication, communication sciences, and communication studies. Researchers may also develop and employ theories and methods from disciplines including cultural studies, rhetoric (including digital rhetoric), philosophy, literary theory, psychology, political science, political economy, economics, sociology, anthropology, social theory, art history and criticism, film theory, and information theory. Origin Former priest and American educator, John Culkin, was one of the earliest advocates for the implementation of media studies curriculum in schools. He believed students ought to be capable of scrutinizing mass media, and valued the application of modern communication technique ...
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Professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors are usually experts in their field and teachers of the highest rank. In most systems of List of academic ranks, academic ranks, "professor" as an unqualified title refers only to the most senior academic position, sometimes informally known as "full professor". In some countries and institutions, the word "professor" is also used in titles of lower ranks such as associate professor and assistant professor; this is particularly the case in the United States, where the unqualified word is also used colloquially to refer to associate and assistant professors as well. This usage would be considered incorrect among other academic communities. However, the otherwise unqualified title "Professor" designated with a capital let ...
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Cultural Imagery
The imaginary (or social imaginary) is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole. It is common to the members of a particular social group and the corresponding society. The concept of the imaginary has attracted attention in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media studies. Definitions The roots of the modern concept of the imaginary can be traced back to Jean-Paul Sartre's 1940 book ''The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination'' in which Sartre discusses his concept of the imagination and the nature of human consciousness. Subsequent thinkers have extended Sartre's ideas into the realms of philosophy and sociology. For John Thompson, the social imaginary is "the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life". For Manfred Steger and Paul Ja ...
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Fan Fiction
Fan fiction or fanfiction (also abbreviated to fan fic, fanfic, fic or FF) is fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from the original creator(s) as a basis for their writing. Fan fiction ranges from a couple of sentences to an entire novel, and fans can retain the creator's characters and settings and/or add their own. It is a form of fan labor. Fan fiction can be based on any fictional (and occasional non-fictional) subject. Common bases for fan fiction include novels, movies, musical groups, cartoons, anime, manga, and video games. Fan fiction is rarely commissioned or authorized by the original work's creator or publisher and is rarely professionally published. It may infringe on the original author's copyright, depending on the jurisdiction and on legal questions such as whether or not it qualifies as "fair use ...
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Slash Fiction
Slash fiction (also known as "m/m slash") is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex.Bacon-Smith, Camille. "Spock Among the Women." New York Times Sunday Book Review, November 16, 1986. While the term "slash" originally referred only to stories in which male characters are involved in an explicit sexual relationship as a primary plot element, it is now also used to refer to any fan story containing a romantic pairing between same-sex characters. Many fans distinguish slash with female characters as a separate genre, commonly referred to as femslash (also known as "f/f slash" or "femmeslash"). These fan-written stories are not accepted canon, and the characters are usually not engaged in such relationships in their respective fictional universes. History It is commonly believed that slash fan fiction originated during the late 1970s, within the ''Star Trek: The Original Series'' fan fiction fandom, sta ...
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Copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States. Some jurisdictions require "fixing" copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders. These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution. Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered "territorial righ ...
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Terry Fisher
William "Terry" W. Fisher III is the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His primary research and teaching areas are intellectual property law and legal history. In his book ''Promises to Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment'' (Stanford University Press 2004), Fisher proposes replacing much of copyright and digital rights management with a government-administered reward system. Under such a scheme, movies and songs would be legal to download. Authors and artists would receive compensation from the government based on how often their works were read, watched, or listened to. The system would be funded by taxes. Fisher is one of the founders of Noank Media, a private enterprise similar in many ways to the proposal of Promises to Keep. Noank licenses and distributes digital content by collecting blanket-license revenues from internet service provider, in ...
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Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School (Harvard Law or HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Each class in the three-year JD program has approximately 560 students, among the largest of the top 150 ranked law schools in the United States. The first-year class is broken into seven sections of approximately 80 students, who take most first-year classes together. Aside from the JD program, Harvard also awards both LLM and SJD degrees. Harvard's uniquely large class size and prestige have led the law school to graduate a great many distinguished alumni in the judiciary, government, and the business world. According to Harvard Law's 2020 ABA-required disclosures, 99% of 2019 graduates passed the bar exam. The school's graduates accounted for more than one-quarter of all Supreme Court clerks between 2000 and 2010, more than any other law schoo ...
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Détournement
A détournement (), meaning "rerouting, hijacking" in French, is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and later adapted by the Situationist International (SI),''Report on the Construction of Situations'' (1957) that was defined in the SI's inaugural 1958 journal as " e integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, ''détournement'' within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres." It has been defined elsewhere as "turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself"—as when slogans and logos are turned against their advertisers or the political status quo. Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tact ...
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Textual Poachers
''Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture'' is a nonfiction book of academic scholarship written in 1992 by television and media studies scholar Henry Jenkins. ''Textual Poachers'' explores fan culture and examines fans' social and cultural impacts. Jenkins builds from a definition of "poaching" originally introduced by Michel de Certeau in his book '' The Practice of Everyday Life,'' where de Certeau differentiates between individuals who are "consumers" and others who are "poachers," depending on how they use resources put out by producers. Jenkins uses this idea to introduce his own term "textual poachers," which he uses to describe how some fans go through texts like favorite television shows and engage with the parts that they are interested in, unlike audiences who watch the show more passively and move on to the next thing. Specifically, fans use what they've "poached" to become producers themselves, creating new cultural materials in a variety of analyti ...
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