Hector Postigo

Three hundred miles above earth, a U.S. satellite tracks enemy movements. On the ground, a U.S. special forces soldier on a hill overlooking an enemy airfield uses his Viper unit to obtain coordinate information for enemy targets. That information is instantaneously beamed via satellite to a formation of stealthy, unmanned combat air

Digital storytelling is something that I would say is not easy to pin down. The idea that digital media can impart on a narrative’s flow something categorically different than pulp or film is reasonable, but the “how” of it will always be a matter of conjecture and debate. From my experience in video games research, I would say that digital storytelling is unique in that it’s interactive and evolving in situ. As I wrote that, I felt I was stating the obvious, but one thing that may not be obvious is the creative element of interactivity that emerges in video games as a form of storytelling. Admittedly, designers may choose a particular narrative arc to orient play, but they cannot direct play absolutely. When users engage the narrative as backdrop to play, then they can push the narrative arc in directions that were not necessarily intended by designers. In video game studies, we’ve called that process emergence.

A comparison of the initial recommendations in the WGIP ’ s Green Paper to the final recommendations in what came to be called the “ White Paper ” and ultimately the DMCA suggests some important outcomes from the policymaking processes for the DMCA. First, it shows the emergence of a number of visions of what the NII would become. During the comment period prior to the release of the White Paper, a number of citizens voiced concern over the possible excess of the proposed policy and suggested that the NII might be a place where copyright and intellectual property can be reimagined rather than reenforced. Second, such a review, specifically of the White Paper ’ s final policy recommendations and the DMCA ’ s most resisted provisions (the anticircumvention provisions), finds that, by and large, citizen concerns and imaginings were ignored. This lack of notice prompted initial resistance to the law and served as a sort of spark to the digital rights movement, giving early leaders a foi...

A history of iTunes, the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), and the DRM system that once operated on music sold through Apple illustrates the development of hacks to iTunes and its accessand copy-protection measures. With this history, we can see a progression of technological resistance that began with DeCSS and AEPBR (consumer products that became politicized) and continued with hacks for iTunes (which were designed with both a political and technologically functional purpose).

How we imagine our place within the structure of sociotechnical-human relationships—specifically, in domains of life affected by data-analytics and the probabilistic bets institutions and people in power make on the future of our credit worthiness, political leanings, shopping habits etc.—is our “algorithmic imagination.” The purpose of this panel is to explore the “algorithmic imagination” as it manifests in particular scholarly, historical, socio-cultural, and technical contexts. The panelists prioritize how social actors, situated in distinct settings, go about constructing an “algorithmic imagination” in conversation/opposition with how computational systems have “imagined” them; they will also reflect critically and self-reflexively on the implications of an algorithmic imagination, so conceived. Collectively, the panelists demure from monolithic understandings of the “algorithmic imagination” while also embracing algorithmic intersectionality. The primary contention of this pa...

That social media are changing our professional lives may appear obvious to many of us researching and working in the mass media. Because that observation is increasingly commonplace, it often goes accepted as a fait accompli whose apparent truth is a clear consequence of the inexorable march of progress. This sort of presentism when considering the current socio-technical moment is terribly myopic. Lucky for us, historians and communication scholars will dig into history, find how we got here, and see that we arrived here not by means of some deus ex machina, but often by our own choice. Valerie Belair-Gagnon’s Social Media at BBC News: The Re-Making of Crisis Reporting is a lively, detailed history and analysis of a profession and institution in flux. The story shows how the BBC and its professionals adapted their practices to the new information and distribution norms and technologies that reside outside of traditional mass media institutions. What is most compelling about that history and analysis is not what one might immediately think. Yes, it’s a good story about the BBC, a venerable news institution that since the London bombings on July 7, 2005 and during crises thereafter, found itself scrambling to make sense of information available on social media venues. User generated content (UGC) took on a whole new gravitas when that content served as primary documentation of crisis events. Still, the most compelling element is Belair-Gagnon’s nuanced critique and social analysis of professional practices and institutional norms. The book reveals moments of incommensurability in professional practices when journalists must confront and incorporate a medium outside the confines of journalism and its longstanding norms. One cannot help but conclude that a Kuhnian paradigm shift has been underway for journalism and crisis reporting (Kuhn, 1996). Belair-Gagnon makes a compelling argument for the BBC as a template

Milan Kundera, in his classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being undertook a consideration of the ephemeral. So I use it as a springboard for a brief consideration of social media and what is fixed and what is passing about its meaning to us as a self-aware species. Paradoxically that application of the concept slips into a conceptual tesseract as we attempt to hold social media to mean yet another contrivance for fixing our life experiences and then realize that who we were yesterday is not necessarily who we are today nor who we will be tomorrow, nor how we will be remembered once we’re gone. To hold its meaning still is to enter a self-referential paradox where the meaning of the thing contradicts the nature of that which it represents and vice versa. All that to say that while it is impossible to confirm whether social media are simulation or simulacra, it is possible to orient their meaning, through how we use them and design them, toward our better natures. If we succeed, it wi...

This article uses the case of video game commentators and examples from research to highlight implications for conceptualizing the concept of “architectures of digital labor.” The concept draws attention not only to the social practices that position activities straddling labor/leisure into a commercial framework but also to the technological platforms that make that possible in a seemingly invisible fashion. The main analytical lens is that of “affordances.” It is used to map how technological features designed into YouTube create a set of probable uses/meanings/practices for users while serving YouTube’s business interests. The analysis is transferable to other social web platforms whose central business model focuses on user-generated content (UGC).

... The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making and unmaking of the New Left , Berkeley ... In this sense, role theory is not as deterministic as it may have been perceived. ... Blogs and wikis focus on different types of social relations between participants than do SNS. ...

In 2001, Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested for his role in designing the Advanced e-Book Processor, the software that cracked Adobe’s e-Book encryption. Using historical data and situating itself within social movement theory, this article focuses on the case of Sklyarov’s arrest to show how the digital rights movement, using online networks, mobilized activists and framed the event in a manner that led to ‘‘backfire’’ against government prosecutors and Adobe Systems Inc. The case illustrates positive outcomes for social movements when they use movement-specific online networks—networks that help rapidly define the meaning of issues and that have the potential to inform mass media outlets, and through them, broader publics.

Increasing evidence suggests that fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) are neurotrophic in GnRH neurons. However, the extent to which FGFs are involved in establishing a functional GnRH system in the whole organism has not been investigated. In this study, transgenic mice with the expression of a dominant-negative FGF receptor mutant (FGFRm) targeted to GnRH neurons were generated to examine the consequence of disrupted FGF signaling on the formation of the GnRH system. To first test the effectiveness of this strategy, GT1 cells, a GnRH neuronal cell line, were stably transfected with FGFRm. The transfected cells showed attenuated neurite outgrowth, diminished FGF-2 responsiveness in a cell survival assay, and blunted activation of the signaling pathway in response to FGF-2. Transgenic mice expressing FGFRm in a GnRH neuron-specific manner exhibited a 30% reduction in GnRH neuron number, but the anatomical distribution of GnRH neurons was unaltered. Although these mice were initially fe...

In 1995 AOL announced that it would be converting its pricing plan from an hourly rate that ranged from $3 to $6 an hour to a flat monthly rate of $15.95. The increase in member subscription was expected to be significant, and a wave of concern swept through the large remote-staff volunteer population, whose duties included monitoring electronic bulletin boards, hosting chat-rooms, enforcing the Terms of Service agreement (TOS), guiding AOL users through the online community, and even creating content using the AOL's own program, RAINMAN (Remote Automated Information Manager), the text scripting language and the publishing tool that allows remote staffers to update and change content on AOL. Chief among remote-staff volunteer's concerns was the initiative to convert many of the volunteer accounts from overhead accounts, which had access to tools and privileges that made remote-staff volunteers' duties on par with in-house employees, to unbilled or discounted accounts. In...

ABSTRACT The Digital Rights Movement is an effort by activists and advocacy organizations to expand consumer rights in media content use. A central argument for legitimating those rights pivots on a view of culture as a participatory endeavour. This article focuses on the Movement's use of the discourse of culture and digital technology describing (1) how the Movement positions culture as necessarily participatory; (2) the role of mediating technologies in achieving a culture that is participatory; and (3) the connection of those visions to a discourse of free speech in the form of what is termed here, remix speech. The article suggests that adopting this view of culture and media consumption can result in a politics of participatory culture, where the political economic arrangements of the cultural industries and consumers are realigned.

This article undertakes an analysis of strategic framing strategies in the Digital Rights Movement by the movement's central Social Movement Organization (SMO), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Through analysis of a series of interviews with key members of the EFF and analysis of the EFF's ‘Endangered Gizmos’ campaign in response to the MGM vs Grokster case, this article shows how

This article is concerned with the role that fan-programmers (generally known as “modders”) play in the success of the PC digital game industry. The fan culture for digital games is deeply embedded in shared practices and experiences among fan communities, and their active consumption contributes economically and culturally to broader society. Using a survey of the most commercially successful PC games in the first-person shooter category from 2002 until 2004, this article answers a series of questions concerning fan-programmer produced content: (a) What is the value of the fan produced game add-ons in terms of labor costs? (b) What motivates fans to make add-ons for their favorite games? and (c) How does the fan-programmer phenomenon in PC gaming fit into broader trends in the high-tech economy?

This article investigates an instance in convergence culture: the conflicts and compromises between modders (fans of a video game who actually make changes to the game) and their supporters, and the owners of the copyrighted works they appropriate. I suggest that current copyright ownership in cultural products interferes with the way creative industries can benefit from convergence; that modders (and fans generally) develop a specific rationale and set of norms rooted in Jenkins' concept of a `moral economy' (Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2006) to justify their appropriations; and that mutually beneficial relationships can be teased out of the apparently contradictory positions of modders and copyright owners. This article focuses on two case studies that illustrate the ways modders reuse cultural products and incorporate them into their video game modifications to achieve a sense of creative ownership and meaning over their entertainment ex...

Milan Kundera, in his classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being undertook a consideration of the ephemeral. So I use it as a springboard for a brief consideration of social media and what is fixed and what is passing about its meaning to us as a self-aware species. Paradoxically that application of the concept slips into a conceptual tesseract as we attempt to hold social media to mean yet another contrivance for fixing our life experiences and then realize that who we were yesterday is not necessarily who we are today nor who we will be tomorrow, nor how we will be remembered once we’re gone. To hold its meaning still is to enter a self-referential paradox where the meaning of the thing contradicts the nature of that which it represents and vice versa. All that to say that while it is impossible to confirm whether social media are simulation or simulacra, it is possible to orient their meaning, through how we use them and design them, toward our better natures. If we succeed, it will fix not individuals but our common humanity, which may be the one thing about us that has never been ephemeral.

This article undertakes an analysis of strategic framing strategies in the Digital Rights Movement by the movement’s central Social Movement Organization (SMO), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Through analysis of a series of interviews with key members of the EFF and analysis of the EFF’s ‘Endangered Gizmos’ campaign in response to the MGM vs Grokster case, this article shows how the organization strategically frames consumers as users’ and fair use in user-centered fashion. In so doing the EFF develops a legitimizing rationale for expanding consumer privileges in copyrighted works. The analysis shows that the user-centered notion of fair use articulates with broader historical and emerging trends in media consumption/use and thus finds accepting audiences both within the movement and outside of it.

The Digital Rights Movement is an effort by activists and advocacy organizations to expand consumer rights in media content use. A central argument for legitimating those rights pivots on a view of culture as a participatory endeavour. This article focuses on the Movement’s use of the discourse of culture and digital technology describing (1) how the Movement positions culture as necessarily participatory; (2) the role of mediating technologies in achieving a culture that is participatory; and (3) the connection of those visions to a discourse of free speech in the form of what is termed here, remix speech. The article suggests that adopting this view of culture and media consumption can result in a politics of participatory culture, where the political economic arrangements of the cultural industries and consumers
are realigned.

This article interrogates the notion of Web 2.0, understanding it through three related conceptual lenses: (1) as a set of social relations, (2) as a mode of production, and (3) as a set of values. These conceptual framings help in understanding the discursive, technological, and social forces that are at play in Web 2.0 architectures. Based on research during a two-year period, the second part of this article applies these lenses to the case of the Human Rights Portal, a Web portal designed to leverage the participatory knowledge production ethos of Web 2.0 for human rights organizations. This section discusses the design process and the ways in which the discourse of Web 2.0 as parsed through the three lenses described informed this process.

This article continues previous work that analysed the case of
America Online (AOL) volunteers from critical perspectives of immaterial and
free labor, and incorporates newly acquired documents and interviews by the
United States Department of Labor (DOL) with volunteers. Specifically, this
article puts forth the AOL volunteers’ case as an instance of co-production that eventually met its demise when organizational changes resulted in the rise of a labor consciousness among some volunteers that made the ongoing relationship impossible. This article shows the types of co-productive labor that took place during the height of the AOL/volunteer relationship and the structures put in
place to help AOL harness the power of a free distributed workforce. The research posits that the success of the co-productive relationship was a function of a balance between a numbers of elements: (1) the perceived reasonable compensation on the part of volunteers, (2) social factors and attitudes towards work such as a sense of community, creativity, and (3) a sense of accomplishment.

This article investigates an instance in convergence culture: the conflicts and compromises
between modders (fans of a video game who actually make changes to the game) and their
supporters, and the owners of the copyrighted works they appropriate. I suggest that current copyright
ownership in cultural products interfere with the way creative industries can benefit from
convergence; that modders (and fans generally) develop a specific rationale and set of norms rooted
in Jenkins’ concept of a ‘moral economy’ (Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New
Media Collide, 2006) to justify their appropriations; and that mutually beneficial relationships can
be teased out of the apparently contradictory positions of modders and copyright owners. This
article focuses on two case studies that illustrate the ways modders reuse cultural products and
incorporate them into their video game modifications to achieve a sense of creative ownership and
meaning over their entertainment experience.

What makes digital storytelling different than other received forms of storytelling? Digital storytelling is something that I would say is not easy to pin down. The idea that digital media can impart on a narrative's flow something categorically different than pulp or film is reasonable, but the " how " of it will always be a matter of conjecture and debate. From my experience in video games research, I would say that digital storytelling is unique in that it's interactive and evolving in situ. As I wrote that, I felt I was stating the obvious, but one thing that may not be obvious is the creative element of interactivity that emerges in video games as a form of storytelling. Admittedly, designers may choose a particular narrative arc to orient play, but they cannot direct play absolutely. When users engage the narrative as backdrop to play, then they can push the narrative arc in directions that were not necessarily intended by designers. In video game studies, we've called that process emergence. I can imagine that there has to be a level of anxiety among digital storytellers when they've chosen video games as their format. It would be like F. Scott Fitzgerald publishing The Great Gatsby as a choose-your-own-adventure novel. If you recall, Choose Your Own Adventure books gave readers the option to choose—at different parts during the narrative—different outcomes. The choices were fixed and limited by the number of words that the publisher had allowed for and how much pulp the author and publisher were willing to use to afford the user—in this case, the reader—a given number of options. Choosing one's own adventure in video games, however, is not limited by the number of words or pulp available, but rather by the computational complexity of the software and hardware platforms that run the game. In some cases, while choices are always computationally limited and predictable, they appear to the user (and, truthfully, to some designers) as infinite. Video game narratives that can tell a story so indeterminately that interactivity ultimately defines a story's arc and outcomes are referred to as sandboxes. Sometimes it's not whether you win or lose that tells the story, but it's literally how you play the game.