Online shopping is as customizable as social media, though the power lies less with the consumer. Through search algorithms, recommendations, and targeted ads, companies seek to give consumers more of the products they’re looking for.
iStock.com/CentralITAlliance
Key Idea: Digital mass media provide platforms to attract audiences who want to create their own media experiences to satisfy their needs for acquisition of information and products.
· Information
· Music
· Video
· Shopping
· Acquisition Issues
o Shopping Addiction
o Piracy
o The Economy
· Media Literacy with Acquisition Platforms
· Summary
· Further Reading
· Keeping Up to Date
· Exercises
Digital media platforms can do more than provide users with competitive and cooperative experiences; they can also provide users with acquisition experiences. For centuries, people have had to travel to real-world locations to satisfy their needs for acquisition. If people wanted physical products, they had to go to brick-and-mortar stores to shop. If they wanted information, they needed to either go to a library or bookstore or they needed to subscribe to a newspaper, magazine, or book club to have information delivered to them. Now with the rise of the digital media, people can go online to find a platform that will allow them to shop and acquire just about any kind of product imaginable.
In this chapter, I will focus your attention on four kinds of acquisition experiences: information, music, video, and shopping. Then I will show you the media literacy challenges that are special to these types of platforms.
INFORMATION
There are many information services available online. Some of these services provide information about the people and organizations that have created them. Businesses create websites to inform the public about their activities and products. Organizations have websites to tell users about their purposes and activities.
Some of these websites provide information they collect from other sources and make it available to users. For example, libraries have moved many of their services online so that users can access books, articles, and reports in electronic form.
Some websites provide search engines. These sites do not offer primary information directly to users; instead, search engines present users with suggested websites that searchers can use to find the primary information they are seeking. The most well-known—and most used—search engine is Google. When Google was launched in 1998, it began with about 10,000 search requests per day, and it is now processing more than that number of searches every second of every day for a total of about 5.6 billion queries per day. Google is the dominant search engine, accounting for over 92% of all searches done online. Each of these search queries typically travels an average of 1,500 miles through 1,000 computers and back to the user in less than 0.2 seconds (Mohsin, 2019).
Some informational websites are truly interactive; that is, they do more than simply provide information to users: They also allow users to contribute information that is then used by other searchers. The software technology that allows people to contribute to these interactive informational sites is called a wiki. A wiki is a website that allows any user to add material and to edit as well as delete what previous users have contributed. The term comes from the Hawaiian word wikiwiki, which means fast or speedy. In 1994, a computer programmer named Ward Cunningham developed an initial wiki server designed to be the simplest possible online database. He designed it to be democratic in the sense that all users would be equal in their ability to easily access any information as well as make their own contributions to a common information base.
The most well know wiki so far is Wikipedia, which is a free web-based encyclopedia that does not hire experts to write the content; instead, it depends on users to create all of its entries. It also allows everyone to edit content by adding and deleting information on any entry. Begun in 2001, Wikipedia’s greatest initial challenge was generating interest among the general public to create entries for the encyclopedia without being paid. It met this challenge, and by 2018, users had contributed over 27 billion words across 40 million entries. Wikipedia entries appear in 293 languages, with the English version being the largest at 3.5 billion words across its 6 million articles (“Size of Wikipedia,” 2020).
Wikipedia works well because of the belief that the collective knowledge of groups is superior to the knowledge of any one individual, even an expert. Thus, when more people across a variety of backgrounds contribute their knowledge, an entry grows in detail and becomes more comprehensive as an informational resource. This collective effort also provides a way to check entries for accuracy. When errors show up in entries, they usually receive rapid correction because there are so many minds involved. (For more on how the collective knowledge of groups is superior, see Sunstein, 2006.)
Some entries have been found to contain faulty information due to active manipulation by contributors. This is especially the case with entries dealing with political or religious topics. For example, in 2006, some users of Wikipedia noticed that unmet campaign promises of people serving in the U.S. Congress were being deleted from articles on those congresspeople. It was discovered that these deletions were coming from web addresses of congressional aides for those congresspeople. Also, it was found that the justice department was removing references to certain groups they felt were involved in terrorist activities and that supporters of the Church of Scientology were entering a pro-Scientology viewpoint while critics were removing favorable viewpoints and substituting a negative viewpoint. In all of these (and many more instances), the administrators of Wikipedia had to lock out those people from the editing function and prevent them from distorting the entries to serve their own purposes (Linthicum, 2009).
Wikipedia is now generating 500 million views per day (“Wikipedia Statistics,” 2020). Its success can be attributed to the large number of people who continue to participate by contributing, editing, and reading the entries.
MUSIC
People have been acquiring music through digital sharing networks since Napster became available in 1999. A computer hacker named Shawn Fanning created software called Napster as a file-sharing software program while he was a college student; within a year of its introduction, Napster had been downloaded by 70 million people. Napster used centralized file directories on the internet to connect users to music files on thousands of individual computers, thus enabling any user to download virtually any recorded music in existence. Early users of Napster used it to upload the music they owned so that it could be shared with people they knew. But as the use of Napster grew, people were using it to access a huge number of recordings and download it all for free.
In December of 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster on the grounds that this music-sharing service allowed piracy of copyrighted music. The RIAA eventually succeeded in shutting Napster down in July 2001. The musical recording industry quickly developed ways to allow people to download music from websites for a fee (e.g., Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal). The number of paid downloads quickly increased to a peak in 2012 of 3.8 musical recordings legally downloaded each day. Then there was a sharp decline that continues to this day, with only about one million recordings being downloaded each day (Statistica, 2020). The RIAA attributes this decline to an increase in piracy. The music industry estimates that about one-third of global music listeners download music illegally. The most popular form of illegal downloading is stream-ripping, which uses easily available software to record audio from sites such as YouTube (Snapes & Beaumont-Thomas, 2018). There are still many sites available for this service. Some of these sites are FMA, Noisetrade, Musopen, Jamendo, and SoundCloud.
Apple pioneered the digital music business with the iTunes store, where you could purchase MP3 files of songs or albums. Now, multiple streaming services compete for airtime and consumer dollars, mostly through subscriptions rather than direct music purchases.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
VIDEO
There are many sites where users can access and download videos. Some of these are interactive and allow users to upload videos. The most popular interactive video site is YouTube, which was created in February 2005 and opened to the public in November of that year. By July 2006, the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. By 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet consumed in 2000. By 2020, YouTube was reporting over 2 billion unique visitors per month, and those users were viewing more than 1 billion hours of video every day; also, users were uploading more than 500 hours of new video every minute (Iqbal, 2020).
SHOPPING
People have been shifting from buying products in brick-and-mortar stores to buying products online. Although this e-commerce is relatively new, it was generating $3.5 trillion in global sales by the end of 2019 and was expected to grow to over $6.5 trillion by 2023 (Clement, 2020b).
Two of the dominant platforms for e-commerce are Amazon and eBay. Amazon.com was created by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and went online the following year as a website for selling books. Over the years, it diversified by also selling video, software, electronics, apparel, furniture, toys, jewelry, and even food. The company further diversified by also producing electronic book readers called Kindles.
Amazon now offers about 600 million products for sale on its website and generates $280 billion in sales per year, which accounts for 45% of all e-commerce (Clement, 2020a). However, only about 12 million of those products are sold directly by Amazon; the rest are offered for sale by Amazon through its Marketplace feature, where Amazon acts as a broker for many other retailers.
Compare & Contrast Wikipedia and Amazon.com
Compare: Wikipedia and Amazon.com are the same in the following ways:
· Both are digital platforms that offer users a way to satisfy needs for online acquisitions.
· Both exist in cyberspace and can be accessed on one’s computer, tablet, smartphone, or any other device that can connect to the internet.
Contrast: Wikipedia and Amazon.com are different in the following ways:
· Wikipedia provides users with an easy way to acquire information whereas Amazon.com provides users with an easy way to acquire products.
· Wikipedia allows users to acquire information for free whereas Amazon.com charges users for the products they acquire while using the site.
In September of 1995, Pierre Omidyar started eBay as an online auction website in which anyone who wanted to sell household items could post pictures and descriptions of their items online and allow viewers to bid on those items. When sellers accepted a bid, they arranged for the sale of the item through eBay and then mailed the item to the buyer.
Within two years, eBay had accounted for more than one million items sold. By 2007, it had a quarter of a billion registered users worldwide with 100 million items on sale at any given time, ranging from items selling for a few dollars to a Gulfstream II business jet that sold for $4.9 million in 2001 (“The Basics of Selling on eBay,” 2007). By 2020, its number of users worldwide had increased to 182 million people across 190 countries. However, 70% of its traffic is from U. S. users, although only 28% of the people who list products for sale on eBay are in the U.S. (MarketWatch.com, 2018).
There are a lot of products on eBay; it now lists 1.3 billion products, which computes to seven products for each user of the site. While most people think of eBay sellers as people who try to sell products that they have used and no longer want, 80% of the products listed on the site are brand new (Lin, 2020).
ACQUISITION ISSUES
The heavy use of digital platforms for the acquisition of products and information raise some serious issues for media literacy. Three of the more serious problems are shopping addiction, piracy, and effects on the economy.
Shopping Addiction
People can become addicted to shopping. This disorder goes by many names including oniomania, compulsive shopping, compulsive buying behavior, compulsive buying, compulsive consumption, pathological buying, and shopaholism. Shopping addiction is defined as a compulsive buying disorder in which suffers have lost control over their ability to prevent themselves from shopping and buying products—especially those products they do not need.
Shopaholics experience a rush of excitement and euphoria from the act of purchasing an item rather than from owning the item. Thus, compulsive shopping almost always involves purchasing because window-shopping doesn’t produce the same euphoric effect. After they complete a purchase, compulsive shoppers feel guilt and remorse, which may, in turn, trigger more shopping as a coping mechanism. They continue to buy impulsively to the point that their closets are often full of unopened items, and they may develop hoarding tendencies as time passes.
Forget getting in the car and schlepping to the mall to fulfil your shopping addiction. With online shopping, purchase after purchase can be made with a simple click or a tap, making it easy to lose track of how much you’re spending.
iStock.com/seb_ra
People with a shopping addiction usually shop alone, even if their friends share their love of shopping. For them, it’s a private pleasure, and they may feel embarrassed about their shopping behaviors. Stressors, loneliness, low self-esteem, and negative emotions often trigger their shopping behavior because they use shopping as a coping mechanism to numb emotional pain.
The characteristics of shopaholics make them especially vulnerable to online retailers. For example, shopaholics prefer anonymous buying without social interaction because of the anxiety and shame they feel about their shopping. They like the instant gratification of click-and-buy shopping. They find the variety and 24-hour availability of online shopping exciting. And they respond excessively to the cues that online shopping sites use to make people feel excited to click and buy (Hull, 2020). Researchers have found three factors that make online shopping addictive.
Research has found that people who shop and buy online are at an increased risk for a higher severity of shopping addiction. The speed and convenience of online shopping feeds the addiction part of the brain. Shopping online provides the opportunity to make purchases unobserved and secretly. People with this disorder may feel shame or regret about their spending habits and experience social anxiety, so they avoid crowded stores or social interaction. Online shopping satisfies the desire for variety, since you can purchase from multiple retailers during a single spending spree. Online stores are always open so people can shop around the clock, making it more difficult to control cravings. Additionally, the convenience of one-click shopping makes it easier to spend money; studies show that people spend more when using credit instead of cash. This is because paying for things with cold hard cash is a more painful experience than using a credit card. How much a purchase is directly linked to the payment is known as a concept called coupling. For example, if I go to a coffee shop and use cash, the act of paying and the act of consuming my beverage are directly coupled. I know exactly how much I have to give up for my coffee when I pay with cash; however, when I use a credit card, there’s a break in time between when I have my drink and when I actually have to pay for it. The lack of coupling when paying with credit is similar to using the download button when purchasing a song or using tokens at a casino—it can expand the distance between you and your money (Correa, 2020).
Worldwide, shopping addiction has been found to affect about 5% of the population. However, the rates of shopping addiction are higher in more-affluent countries such as the U.S., where it is estimated that 18% of the population is suffering from shopping addiction (Correa, 2020).
Piracy
The piracy of media messages is a highly volatile issue that reveals a debate between two kinds of people in terms of how they regard media messages. One kind of person regards media messages as commercial products, which is the traditional view. The other kind of person regards media messages as amorphous entities that make up the flow of information. These two viewpoints clash, which creates problems about determining what a creative unit is and what ownership means.
On one side of this debate are the traditionalists who regard media messages as commercial products created by artists (rock stars, movie producers, novelists, and the like); those messages are then packaged and marketed by media businesses. These creators and marketers establish traditional ownership rights to these messages and charge consumers a fee for access. They want to be paid for their talent and efforts, so they protect their ownership rights and regard anyone who accesses their messages without paying as a pirate.
To establish their ownership rights, traditionalists rely on copyright. When message creators copyright their work (a song, movie, book, etc.), they register a copy of their message with the Library of Congress, thus establishing their ownership of that creation. Owners can then sell their messages outright (to publishers) or rent access to their messages to consumers. In this way, creators can benefit financially from their creative labor and this allows them to support themselves while they continue to create messages in the future. If people who do not own the rights to a copyrighted message sell that message and benefit financially, they are committing an act of piracy. Or if people access the work of creators without paying them an access fee, this is piracy as well.
Under this traditionalist view, media piracy takes three forms: bootlegging, counterfeiting, and sharing copyrighted messages without paying for access. Bootlegging is the unauthorized recording of a live delivery of a message (such as recording songs during a concert or recording a movie in a theater) and the subsequent distribution of that recording. Counterfeiting refers to the duplication a copyrighted message (along with its packaging) and selling it as the authorized product. Sharing messages typically takes place when individuals who pay for a copy of a media product make their copy available to others for free. In all three cases, the creators of the message are having their creative products disseminated without their permission and without being compensated.
On the other side of this debate are people who regard media messages as amorphous bits in the flow of information that should be available for everyone to share. They argue that as images, sounds, stories, and other types of messages flow across the internet, those individual messages all become mashed together in a continually changing amalgam that is the common culture we all share. Because messages are in a constant state of change as people interact with them and pass them on to others, the idea of a single creator is passé.
As an alternative to copyright, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation created the idea of copyleft in 1985. Copyleft was originally developed to set out rules for sharing computer programs that were in contrast to the rules for using copyrighted programs. People who wanted access to a copylefted program were granted full access to its code so they could make any revisions they wanted and share their revised program with other users. All people who revise a copyleft program are required to allow future users to have access to their computer code and make their own improvements (Sunstein, 2006). Thus, each step in the dissemination and alteration of an application is open so that follow-on users have the same opportunity to alter the code to improve it, which expands the application’s utility.
With the digitization of messages and the rise of the internet to widely disseminate messages of all kinds in all kinds of ways, the idea of a creation has changed. Eric Raymond uses the metaphors of cathedrals and bazaars to illustrate this change (Sunstein, 2006). According to Raymond, the cathedral approach relied on an expert who had a clear vision for the computer program and designed its architecture to exhibit that vision as elegantly as possible. In contrast, there is also the bazaar, where lots of individuals with many different agendas and approaches work independently as they design bits and pieces of a computer program to fulfill their own special purposes. The bazaar process is what open source software allows, and it has been surprisingly successful in creating a wide variety of applications. Raymond explains that computer hackers exist in a “gift culture,” where social status is determined not by what they control but by what they give away. By making the products of their creativity freely available to others, hackers become well-known and admired by others.
These ideas of copyleft and open-source messages have been expanded beyond computer programs to include any media message. For example, Wikipedia is an open-access encyclopedia that allows all users to add entries as well as edit already existing entries by adding, subtracting, and correcting details. No one person owns their entry and no entry’s contributors have ownership rights or are paid for their work.
Who owns content on the internet? With posting, sharing, reposting, and searching, the copyright question can become confusing, but copyright laws still apply.
iStock.com/JLGutierrez
With copyright, the original message is static; that is, once the message is created and copyrighted, its creator owns the rights to that message and sells access to users in return for a royalty fee. With copyleft, the creation keeps evolving as each subsequent creator tinkers with it. No one person or business owns the creation; instead, the creation is shared openly with everyone and no fees are exchanged.
The idea of ownership is getting more ambiguous with the digitization of messages and the free exchange made possible through computers and the internet. Think about social networking sites (SNSs): If you have a Facebook page and post your selfies, those pictures belong to you. But they also belong to Facebook once you post them on your site—you have granted ownership rights to Facebook when you agreed to its policies in creating your account. Facebook can sell those images to advertisers and to other people who can resell them. So while you own your selfies, there are many other people who also own them once you have posted them on a SNS.
For many people, the idea of copyright is out of date. Some members of the public and some businesses believe in the sharing of information in a creative commons, where ownership is not limited to any one individual or company. These people believe that copyrights are barriers to widespread creativity, so they prefer copylefts, which allow openness and common ownership.
Industry groups are working hard to figure out how to deal with the problem of piracy, which has been a growing problem over the past two decades. These industries have had some success with influencing legislation, pressuring law enforcement to arrest violators, taking pirates to civil court, and developing technology to limit piracy. They have also been rethinking the ways they market their messages. Despite all these efforts, piracy continues to be a problem because of the difficulty in determining what a creative unit is. Let’s see how you make out on this challenge by doing Exercise 14.2.
Look at the pattern of your answers, then think about the following questions: If you were a lawmaker, how would you word a law that would clarify for law enforcement personnel what a creative unit was? As new platforms become available to sample bits and pieces from various media messages and mash them together to serve each user’s needs better, this problem will become even more challenging to solve. If someone takes several short film clips from Hollywood movies and YouTube videos and edits them together with home movie scenes, is that piracy? Or if someone takes a copyrighted song, changes the lyrics and adds some additional instruments using Garage Band, is that piracy?
Now complete Exercise 14.3. Where did you draw the line on ownership rights of musical recordings? Think about the implications suggested by where you drew that line by assuming that regulators would draw the line in the same place. Would that give creators of media messages enough incentive to continue creating messages? If you think that all messages should be free to consumers, how would creators of those messages be paid? If they are not paid, would they continue to create those messages? This asks you to think about what the limits of sharing should be. As a consumer, your motivation is to have open access to all messages and to have that access made free. However, if all people could get all messages for free, what would the motivation be for creators?
The issue of piracy has recently become very important as large media conglomerates fail to meet their revenue projections and reason that large numbers of people are copying the products they are trying to sell, particularly music and films. This issue will continue to grow in importance as the conflict deepens: Media businesses try to preserve the old idea of copyright while many individuals interact with the media using the newer idea of copyleft, where sharing and open creativity are stronger values.
As you develop your own informed opinion on the issue of piracy, try to avoid getting stuck in one perspective. Instead, think about balancing the needs of creators and consumers at the same time.
The Economy
As people shift their shopping behaviors away from brick-and-mortar stores and toward websites, they are forcing changes in the economy. Brick-and-mortar stores find it hard to compete with all their overhead and their limited selection of merchandise, so many of these stores are closing and the people who worked there are losing their jobs. But jobs open up in other places, such as call centers for website merchants as well as jobs at delivery companies.
Another economic change is less visible now but is likely to have major implications as we move into the future. When people spend their resources in virtual worlds, those resources get translated into currencies that are new and not well understood. For example, if people work in a virtual world such as Second Life or a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and are paid for those efforts with goods and services there, it forces us to reexamine what it means to work and to get paid. This shift also transfers resources from the real world to virtual worlds and has the effect of reducing the vitality of the real-world economies. Thus, the gross domestic product (GDP) of real-world economies shrink while the cyberworld GDP grows. It appears that this is already happening.
This shift also has generated new forms of money. Cyberworkers typically are not paid in real-world currencies but instead are paid in currencies that exist only in particular cyberworlds. This creates the need for new currency exchanges. For example, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency (form of money) that was invented in 2008 and is already used worldwide. Internet companies (such as Facebook, eBay, and Yahoo) accept it as well as real-world companies (such as AT&T, Fidelity, and Western Union). It is used in 100 countries, and in the U.S., over 200,000 companies accept it (Money Morning, 2013). Virtual currency is also attracting the attention of banks such as JP Morgan Chase, which filed for a U.S patent in 2013 to develop a payment system utilizing “Virtual Cash.”
The growth of e-commerce and new currencies has existing real-world governments struggling to adapt. In the United States, the Federal Reserve regulates the flow of U.S. dollars as a way of controlling the economy—slowing down inflation and preventing a depression. However, the Federal Reserve has no power to regulate the flow of Bitcoin or other virtual world currencies, so it loses power as these currencies increase in use.
When resources move back and forth between cyberworlds and the real world, it raises questions about taxation. The Internal Revenue Service, which collects federal taxes on income earned in the United States, is struggling to figure out how to tax income that Americans earn in virtual worlds. If someone works in a cyberworld producing virtual products but then sells those virtual products in the real world, should that income be taxed? If so, what country should do the taxing? Or what if people work in a cyberworld and barter those virtual resources for real-world products—should they be taxed as income? If so, how can we assess the value of those products in cyberworlds?
MEDIA LITERACY WITH ACQUISITION PLATFORMS
As you continue to rely on interactive media platforms, the most important thing you can do to increase your media literacy is to keep making a clear distinction between opportunity and addiction. Digital platforms provide many useful services to satisfy your needs for acquisition of information, music, video, and products of all kinds. But these same platforms can lead to addiction if you allow them to condition you so strongly that you cannot control your time with them. Acquisition platforms can grow so addictive that they consume a great deal of your resources without delivering the degree of satisfaction you expect from the goods and services you acquire. If you allow yourself to become addicted to an acquisition platform, it will reshape your personal goals and cause you to slavishly work to achieve the platform’s goals. Always be careful to keep your own personal goals in mind. To make an assessment of how well you have been aware of your personal needs and using that awareness to control your acquisition experiences, work through Exercise 14.1.
SUMMARY
Digital platforms offer a wide variety of acquisition experiences for users. There is nothing inherently negative or positive about any of these experiences. Whether an experience is rendered negative or positive depends on how you engage with the platforms and how you use those platforms to achieve your own goals. When these platforms are used strategically as tools to provide you with experiences to satisfy your needs for arousal, emotion, building skills, and connecting with other people in meaningful and rewarding ways, they can be very valuable. However, when these platforms begin to dominate your life by consuming your resources while returning only frustration, false experiences, and isolation, they can be very harmful. The media literacy perspective offers you a way to make more conscious and more meaningful assessments about the degree to which various platforms are meeting your particular needs.
Further Reading
Bently, L., Davis, J., & Ginsburg, J. C. (Eds.). (2010). Copyright and piracy: An interdisciplinary critique. New York: Cambridge University Press. (471 pages, including index)
This is an edited volume of 21 chapters organized into 11 sections: introduction, history, comparative law, economics, linguistics, computer software, information studies, literature, art, sociology/music, and criminology.
Levine, R. (2011). Free ride: How digital parasites are destroying the culture business, and how the culture business can fight back. New York: Doubleday. (322 pages, including index).
The author argues that the current laws and policies to protect copyrighted material from piracy are not working. In this easy-to-read book, the author presents many examples about how piracy of music, movies, and television shows are seriously harming the media industries.
Lih, A. (2009). The Wikipedia revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion. (246 pages, including index)
This book tells the story about how the idea for Wikipedia was first conceived in 1995 and how it went online in 2001. Within eight years, it had stimulated people to write 10 million articles across 200 languages for free. How was this made possible? Read the book!
Keeping Up to Date
· Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)
This is Wikipedia’s main page. Articles are constantly being added to this web-based encyclopedia. If you have not already done so, check out this amazing resource. Also, you can use this to get more up-to-date information on almost all the concepts presented in this book.
EXERCISE 14.1
ASSESSING THE VALUE OF ONLINE ACQUISITIONS TO YOU
1. List the digital platforms you use for acquisition experiences. Now estimate how much time you spend on each of these platforms in an average week.
2. Carry a recording device (piece of paper, app on a smart phone, file on a mobile device, etc.) around with you for a week. Each time you get on an acquisition platform, record how much time you spend on the platform.
3. At the end of the week, total up all the times recorded.
4. Compare your estimates at the beginning of the week with your totals of actual time spent.
5. Ask yourself the following questions: Was your actual usage time higher, lower, or the same as your initial estimate? Did this surprise you?
o In your initial estimate, were you able to list all the acquisition platforms you typically use?
o What do these patterns tell you about how important acquisition experiences are to you?
o What percentage of your overall media use is devoted to acquisition experiences?
o What percentage of your waking hours are devoted to acquisition experiences?
6. Answer the following questions: What do you get out of this acquisition activity?
o What emotions are triggered while you are on these platforms? Are these the emotions you want?
o What skills are you developing while you are on these platforms? Are these valuable skills to you?
o Does engaging in these acquisition experiences make you feel more confident or powerful? If so, are you able to transfer those feelings to your real life or are those feelings limited to those acquisition experiences?
7. How valuable are those acquisition experiences to you? Compare your answers to #6 with your answers to #5 to see if you are getting enough payback for the time you are investing in your acquisition experiences.
EXERCISE 14.2
HOW BIG IS A CREATIVE UNIT?
1. Think about the size of the unit that is copyrighted. Where would you draw the line between what is protected by copyright and what is too small to be protected by copyright? Check those elements in the list below that you think should be protected by copyright.
· An artist’s entire body of work
· An album
· A song
· A chorus in a song
· A chord progression or a lyrical phrase
· One note or word
2. Think about how big a unit of information you would feel comfortable copying. At what point does the resulting recording stop being the work of other artists and become your own artistic product? From the list below, check those products that you believe would be primarily your own creation.
· a compilation recording of songs of one artist from several different recordings
· a compilation recording of songs of different artists from different recordings
· a compilation recording of songs of different artists along with recordings of your own original music
· a compilation of recordings of songs of another artist—some performed by that artist and some performed by you
· a song from a recording that you own as a soundtrack on a home movie that you made and will give to your parents on their anniversary
· a song from a recording that you own as a soundtrack on a movie that you make for a grade in a film production course
· a song from a recording that you own as a soundtrack on a movie that you make and enter into a contest to win a scholarship to college
· a song from a recording that you own as a soundtrack on a movie that you make to show on a public-access cable television program
3. Now that you have considered the options in #1 and #2 above, what is the key criterion that defines a creative unit?
EXERCISE 14.3
WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE?
1. Let’s say that you pay for a download of some songs by your favorite musical group. What do you really own? How much control do you have over using that music? Read each item in the list below and consider your ownership rights. Put a checkmark next to each item you feel comfortable doing. For each item you think is wrong or illegal, do not put a check mark.
· Listen to the recordings alone in the privacy of your room
· Listen to the recording in your room with friends
· Take the recording to your friends’ room and listen to it there
· Play the recording in your car with all the windows down so everyone on the street can hear it
· Make a backup copy of the recording
· Make a copy of the recording and rearrange the songs into the order you prefer
· Make a compilation recording with songs from several recordings you own
· Lend a recording that you own to one of your friends so they can make a copy for their own personal use
· Lend a recording that you own to a dozen of your friends so they can make a copy for their own personal use
· Copy the songs from a recording you own onto your computer so you can listen to them while you are on your computer
· Copy the songs from a recording you own onto your computer and then send an email to a friend and arrange for one of those songs to play in the background as your friend reads your email
· Copy the songs from a recording you own onto your computer and then send a song to your friend to let them check it out
· Copy the songs from a recording you own onto your computer and then send all those songs to a friend
· Copy the songs from a recording you own onto your computer and then make those songs available to anyone in cyberspace to make a copy
· Take the recording to a secondhand store and sell it to the store
· Sell the recording to another person on eBay
· Make copies of the recording and sell those copies to other people
2. Go back over the list above and every time you see something such as a recording you own or a recording you bought, substitute it with a recording you borrowed from the public library. Read each item in the list above and consider your usage rights for borrowed material. Put a plus sign (+) next to each item you feel comfortable doing. For each item you think is wrong or illegal, do not put a plus sign.
3. Compare the pattern of checked statements to the pattern of statements with plus signs. Look at the statements that have checkmarks but no plus signs; these are the special rights you feel you have as an owner of a recording compared to a user of someone else’s recording.