Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication

The International Communication Association's Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication, which is posted at the American University's Center for Social Media site (as well as it's own), identifies four situations that represent the current consensus within the community of communication scholars about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials." The Center for Social Media is the place to go for fair use issues in education and media production. You can view videos on codes for best fair use practice in user-generated video, documentary film making, media literacy, and remix culture.

On the same front, just yesterday the Librarian of Congress announced the latest ruling on exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, expanding fair use practice to include encrypted copyrighted works. Teachers, students and filmmakers can now break encryption to quote limited portions of copyrighted works into their own work or teaching.

July CommQuote

I love this piece on solitude that William Deresiewicz wrote for the THE CHRONICLE REVIEW the winter before last. I tucked it away, figuring I would need a quote some leaner month when one didn't jump out at me. The article is great to revisit over a year later. It hasn't aged a bit. Or perhaps I should say, it's aged well. The piece is titled The End of Solitude.

"The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility...

...the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn't call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn't always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn't always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude."

--William Deresiewicz, THE CHRONICLE REVIEW (January 30, 2009)

MITWorld Panel on Disinformation

MIT just posted this event from the past spring. Other programs related to media can be found at the site.

Denialism: Media in the Age of Disinformation

April 27, 2010

A few hundred years after the Enlightenment, western civilization is rushing back to the Dark Ages. The causes are debatable, but, argue these science journalists, the public increasingly rejects the findings of science, from climate change to evolution, and is turning away from rationality and reason in general.

Speakers

Michael Specter

Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Chris Mooney

Blogger, Discover Magazine
2009-2010 Knight Journalism Fellow

Shannon Brownlee

Instructor, The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice
Senior Research Fellow, Economic Growth Program, New America Foundation

Shankar Vedantam

National Science Writer, The Washington Post