Cultural Appropriation in Global Music

Cultural appropriation has been prominent in the music industry for decades now.  Many prominent white musicians have been accused of borrowing aspects of African American culture (AAC) in order to make a profit off what people of colour were once punished for doing (Johnson, 2015). Some of the most celebrated musicians in the industry have...

Global Film – Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians broke down boundaries as the first film to come out of Hollywood in 25 years with an all Asian cast and an Asian-American lead. The film took the world by storm in 2018, upon its release, when it became the highest-grossing romantic comedy in the past decade, making $237 million worldwide at the...

Nosedive – Privacy, surveillance and the price of content

In China, the Communist party calls it 'social credit' in Australia we think of it as a blatant copy of Black Mirror's Nosedive episode or Big Brother, but what is actually going on with China's seemingly dystopian surveillance system? Social credit is like a personalised score for all of China's 1.4 billion citizens. A higher...

Terms of use – Intellectual property and the content control industry

Copyright has been out of control in recent years, with algorithms designed for the sole purpose of detecting copyrighted material in everything that is uploaded to the internet. Youtube is a great example of a platform that overuses the copyright algorithm, with cases of noises including that of cats purring in the background of a...

Meme Warfare

Memes are an emergent medium which has the potential to provoke conversation and change, but how do they now have the power to run a democracy? Memes – Greek for “that which is imitated” - once defined as self-replicating units of culture. Memes have become a segment of media that is uncensored, copied rapidly and...

The Walled Garden of Apple – Hardware platforms, access permissions and ideologies of control

Companies such as Apple have complete control over content, platforms and users. To see this in action we need only look at Apple. In 2001 when the first iPod was released you could no longer just upload your MP3 files onto the device, you had to purchase from the iTunes store, which is, of course,...

Beta Project – Alicia McFadden

https://youtu.be/8X5qVM4RvmY My Digital Artifact Originally I pitched my idea as a bowling youtube series that focused on promoting the sport of tenpin bowling beyond the community that already partakes in bowling. I wanted instead to focus on a younger generation and hopefully encourage them to get into bowling themselves or even just get into watching...

Framing and Construction of Perception

Framing and the use of propaganda to influence a select group of people will never be an exact science as it revolves around humans. There are 2 primary approaches when it comes to framing and the use of propaganda i) targeting a leader or someone who the target segment looks up to or ii) targeting...

Interpretation – Thinx Advertisements

Images are complex. They can suggest one meaning to an individual, but an alternate meaning to someone else. This is through the world of semiotics. In semiotics, we must break an image down to the signifier and the signified (Lanir, 2019). Often this may be as simple as the red light on a traffic light. The...

The medium is the message

Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message" (Understanding Media, 1964). His thoughts suggested that mediums are "any extension of ourselves". Content can have no effect on the medium itself, but the medium can change how we interact with the content. What is meant by this is that it is not the physical medium itself, it...