Some interesting comparisons

I think the brief Hartley reading was really interesting since it put forth a few things that would "benefit from interdisciplinary and international comparison." I'm particularly interested by the second and third points from his list - and the third seems to me to be fairly related to Canclini's article (I'll explain the relation I see in a little bit).

On the second, though, I think that's really interesting is the difference between the way different copyright holders in different countries deal so very differently with their intellectual property. In the US, we see pretty frequently companies holding onto their IP for dear life and refusing to change the way they interact with it. Large music and film companies sue people for downloading and look at piracy as a problem to be eliminated rather than as symptomatic of a need to change the way they're going about distribution (TV stations seem to have caught on to this idea much more quickly, hosting their shows online in better quality than is possible on megavideo and the like). This almost seems to be part of a digital divide - hinting that one place where it may be located is across sectors of use and to what extent it defines interaction with the world (deriving from socialization, job, and so on - more on this in a few moments).

And yet, some industries are so incredibly different. Japanese anime, for example, wound up being distributed in the US largely because the people who owned the IP were so much more willing to let their property be distributed by fans to another country. Originally, it was thought that there wasn't a very large market in the US for it, partially since much of the themes are more adult while animation is traditionally viewed as something for kids in the US. However, fan distribution circuits (largely helped by fansubbing practices, which were sped up by the digital boom in the 90s because creating subtitled videos became much easier) proved a market within the US. Had companies cracked down, this may not have happened and probably wouldn't have happened nearly as quickly. Though now the market is shifting where the race to be the first to create/release a fansub has meant that tons of shows are being released and the anime market is starting to be in a bit of trouble by releasing dubbings (which are often not well loved by fans - the constant mocking of Naruto's voice actor, as well as the many voices in Yu-Gi-Oh! illustrates this pretty well) much later (you can see one fan subber's comments on this process at http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2008-03-11/3). He says the solution is to speed up the market - similar to what seems to have happened with television distribution online.

Anyway, I digress. Sorry for that rant, now on to the digital divide stuff and Canclini. The stuff about the digital divide, to me, comes from around page 45 where a split is talked about in who has creative understanding of the products and who doesn't. This hints at what seems to be a large part of the current divide - not so much who sees the knowledge as important (indeed, it seems the recognition of the ability to use it is pretty well recognized - and given an earlier point, for anyone to care everyone has to recognize the value of that use), but who has the ability to actually creatively use the tools. Here, Canclini argues that it comes from those who can afford to subscribe to information services and more exclusive networks - but I think this is a really limited view. I think, to a large extent, that creativity comes from the ability to have free time to practice - in short, who has a computer/tv/camera to use at their discretion, without worrying about the time. I think Ellen Seiter makes this point really well in her article "Practicing at Home" by comparing higher level uses of technology to playing a piano - sure, everyone may get to play some at school, but the children who can only practice there are not the ones who will become concert pianists. They need to have a piano at home that they can practice on. Likewise, to creatively use a computer means having the time when you can use one (implying often having multiple computers at home) to play around with various tools. The divide as it will continue to exist, then, seems to be still largely related to money - though not in the direct sense of being able to buy things, but being able to buy time to gain the skills that enable people to have "decision making capacity."