Oh you want to be an Elite Athlete? That’s cute

Online participatory culture is a way to formulate new ideas and bring together collective intelligence to create collaborative information. This allows for open participation for anyone where they can share ideas, but this isn’t all bright and happy, it can have a dark side. Online participatory culture can create a plethora of issues including direct racism, homophobia, cyber-bulling and even ‘trolling’ for gender based reasons.

This direct form of bullying can be seen through Laurie Penny, a columnist for the Guardian, New Statesman and Independent as she has experienced many forms of attacks, insults, threats and abuse, from anonymous online identities, all due to the fact that she is a woman. In the online world, especially for women who contribute to national debates, their opinions are not seen as important as a man, therefore they face the abuse from misogynist men.

This leads onto a point that this participatory culture touches on, which is the sexualisation of women and the crude comments they face, being sportswomen’s or women in a high achieving field. Sexploitation. This is the marketing, promotion and attempts of media coverage which focus’ attention of sexual attributes of female athletes in which they are judges primarily on their attractiveness, rather than their skills and qualities that define theme as elite athletes. This degrades women not only as individuals, but how they are viewed as athletes. In sports such as Beach Volleyball, body hugging outfits are worn intentionally to focus attention on their bodies rather than practical or performance enhancing reasons.

(1st image Sourced from: http://blog.drstankovich.com/beach-volleyball-bikinis-and-the-sexualization-of-sports/ 2nd Image: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/olympics/4460838/Benny-thrill-show.html)

The attitudes towards trolling are very degrading towards woman and are a scary indicator of the ways of people in society. The misogynist trolling for women from anonymous men is experienced on a day to day basis and even I see this just by connecting to social media as. All the memes and participatory generated content can really impact on confidence as if a woman stands up for her online she could be seen as ‘soft’. The gap between men and women must close so we can empower each other with no discrimination!

(Sourced From: http://weknowmemes.com/2012/05/she-scored-a-perfect-10/)

References

Australian Government: Australian Sports Commission, ‘Sexploitation’, AIS, Australia, Accessed 13/05/2014, http://www.ausport.gov.au/participating/women/resources/issues/sexploitation

AEvans, Karalee, 2011, ‘Men call me things: It’s not as romantic as it sounds’, 11 November, abc, Accessed 13/05/2014, http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3659712.html

Thorpe, Vanessa, Roggers, Richard, 2011, ‘Women Bloggers call for a stop to ‘hateful’ trolling by mysoginst men’, The Guardian, 6 November, Accessed 13/05/2014, http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3659712.html

Stankovich, Chris, 2012, Beach Volleyball, Bikinis, and the sexualization of sports’, 24 July, Accessed 13/05/2014, http://blog.drstankovich.com/beach-volleyball-bikinis-and-the-sexualization-of-sports/

 

Activism can be defined as not just an idea for organisation for change, but campaigns for policy changes at all levels of government (Howard P 2013). With ongoing trends of clicktivism, which is using social media to promote the cause, is this use of digital media really facilitating social change and activism? In the age of digital activism, organised public efforts can be seen as drawing individuals together through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The internet gives activism new levels of access for participation and efficacy but does this engagement really lead to effective activism?

It is very easy to simple sign up to a petition or ‘like’ a Facebook page to ‘contribute’ to a cause but with little involvement known as slactivism, isn’t really seen as contributing to a cause. This can be seen through the Facebook page of the “Save Darfur Coalition”, aiming to bring an end to the suffering in Darfur which had over 1,282,339 members or ‘protesters’ but each member’s financial contribution was an average of only 15 cents. This foundation posted videos and information as well but from the statics of the Facebook page, the members we’re that active.

(Sourced from: http://www.change.org/organizations/savedarfur)

Social networks definitely give an awareness of issues as convergence of technologies and platforms has allowed for easy communication and access to information, but they do not make people engage in social change. In 2012, an organisation called the ‘invisible children’s inc’ released a video about the child soldiering in Uganda. In the first 4 days the video was watched by more than 70 million people as the culture of clictivism does allow for a widespread of content on different platforms, but how many of these individuals actually contributed to the cause? There are people who engage in participatory politics to help make a difference in the world, but I even remember sharing it on Facebook along with the majority of my friends but that’s where I stopped. I helped spread the message but to actually contribute to global activism further action and global movements must be taken.

(Sourced from: http://www.memecenter.com/fun/368179/1-like-and-someone-in-africa-gets-water-facebook-only)

References

Adams, Tim 2010, ‘Twitter and Facebook cannot change the real world’, The Guardian, 3 October, viewed 7 May 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/03/malcolm-gladwell-twitter-doesnt-work

De Jogn, Shaw, Stammers, 2005, ‘Global Activism, Global Media’, Pluto Press, London, viewed 7 May 2014, http://soniapedrosebastiao.weebly.com/uploads/2/0/3/9/20393123/20112012_gcc_e-book_global_activism_global_media.pdf

Howard, Phillip, 2013, ‘The real impact of virtual activism’, Tow center for digital journalism, December 16, viewed 7 May 2014, http://towcenter.org/blog/the-real-impact-of-virtual-activism/

Jenkins, Henry, 2012, ‘The New political commons: Options politiques”, November, viewed 7 May 2014, http://archive.irpp.org/po/archive/nov12/jenkins.pdf

 

The Best Song Ever. A Tribute to Baba O’Riley?

Ever listen to a song and think, Have I heard this before? Chances are that the song is just a combination and remix of previous works that can be described as remix culture as.  Remix culture can be defined as the act of rearranging, combining, editorializing, and adding originals to create something entirely new (Matt Jessell 2013), and epically in the age we live in, there is a vast range of this.

(Skip through the cheesy scenes and bad acting, about 2 minutes in)

Music is a part of our culture that we consume but, generally, some of this music wasn’t based off original pieces. Take One Directions ‘Best song ever’ (2013) and The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley” (1971) and listen to both their introductions, basically identical. Pete Townshend, a member of The Who appeared to be flattered with this and he believes One Direction can shape contemporary pop. This can be seen as continuing the ‘unfinished artifacts’ and continuing the process of Produsage where the songs can be shaped and altered to develop upon evolutionary paths (Bruns 2010).

There is also mash up’s of the two songs, giving the audience open participation to submit their remix’s. This could be seen as a joint effort of Produsage (Bruns 2010) as a team works together on the common property of the song to make alterations to form a remix.

The remix of the song doesn’t stop there. Best Song ever was also seen to be a remix of Tenacious D’s ‘Tribute’ as the song is based around similar concepts with lines such as “We knew every line now I can’t remember,” compared to Tenacious D’s  “Couldn’t remember The Greatest Song in the World, no, no. This is a tribute.”

Audiences are consuming different forms of content of multiple platforms so really, there is few original pieces of content that they view. Remix’s are even seen as equal to process of creation and is a widely accepted phenomenon

References

Bruns, Alex 2010, ‘Distributed Creativity: File Sharing and Produsage, Accessed 2/05/2014 http://snurb.info/files/2010/Distributed%20Creativity%20-%20Filesharing%20and%20Produsage.pdf

Jessell, Matt 2013, ‘Remix culture: Rethinking What We Call Original Content’, Accessed 2/05/2014 http://marketingland.com/remix-culture-rethinking-what-we-call-original-content-41791

Reed, Ryan 2013, ‘Pete Townshend responds to furious One Direction Fans’, Rolling Stones Music,  Accessed 2/05/2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pete-townshend-responds-to-furious-one-direction-fans-20130816

Webber, Lindsey 2013, Watch One Direction Cross-Dress, Drive teenage girls insane in ‘Best Song Ever’, Vulture,  Accessed 2/05/2014 http://www.vulture.com/2013/07/one-direction-cross-dresses-in-best-song-ever.html