Introduction

 

First of all I would like to motivate the choice of my research paper. Being a big fan (and consumer) of P2P programs as KaZaA and Emule, I became aware at one point of particular short movies-compilations of a lot of TV-shows and movies, which appeared to be produced by fans. Fans compiled fragments of their favorite scenes and of their favorite characters of particular TV-shows in such a way that it became a sort best-of-movie. On top of that they also put a song during the fragments which they thought suited best for those fragments. Fans had actually made their own movie.

As mentioned above, there are a lot of TV-shows which could be picked for this research. I decided to go with a TV-show that is very popular, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This show has a lot of fans and therefore a lot of (fan)websites. Those websites intend to create a sort of community. You can make a quiz to see which character from the show suits you most, you can talk to other fans through chat rooms and forums, you can buy shirts, games, DVD’s, comic books, regular books, music (soundtracks) etc. of Buffy. It doesn’t stop with the TV-show, no it seems to begin with the websites. The TV-show tends to be just a sort of reference for the websites where the actual marketing takes place.

With examining these (fan)websites I will focus on a few aspects. First of all, at the advertising-aspect. What’s very remarkable is that the official websites aren’t even full of references to other products and institutions etc. The fan sites on the other hand are full with advertising and free marketing for Ebay, Amazon and other online-shops. This reminded me of the question ‘is it still leisure time that is filled, or could this actually be seen as labor time?’. Second, I will focus on the aspect of the blurring of the boundary between producers and consumers. Fans make their own movies, they even write their own script which is called fanfiction. Josh Whedon, the producer of  Buffy, has already admitted that he was fully aware of the wishes of the fans through the fan sites and therefore reacted on them, which is a good example of the blurring of the boundary between producer and consumer. Through p2p programs like KaZaA it is also very easy to distribute episodes from Buffy. You don’t have to actually buy a DVD, you can easily download them on fan sites or on KaZaA.

I will examine a few websites of Buffy the Vampire Slayer very thoroughly. The choice of my websites will be based on the comprehensiveness of the sites. With this text-analysis of the websites I will focus on the advertising aspects, marketing aspects and participatory aspects.

With this research I would like to contribute something to the discourse concerning media fans where Henry Jenkins already wrote about in his article “Interactive audiences? The collective intelligence of media fans”. I would also like to contribute something to the discussion whether internet-users should get paid for there free marketing-actions as mentioned earlier like the free references to Amazone and Ebay on the fan sites.

About Buffy the Vampire Slayer

 

“In every generation, there is a chosen one

She alone will stand against the vampires ,the demon and the forces of darkness,

She is the slayer”[1]

 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is based on the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 1992 starring Kristie Swanson and Luke Perry. Although the movie wasn’t quite a hit, the spin-off serie indeed was. The TV-show casted Sarah Michelle Gellar as its main protagonist. She plays a highschool girl, that obviously is a vampire slayer. She doesn’t stand alone in this battle against demons and other forces of darkness. No, she gets help from her “watcher” named Giles, a typical English man. The watcher trains his slayer and helps her on her mission by finding relevant information about the vampire or demon. Her important friends are Willow, Xander, Cordelia and Angel. Willow is the shy and smart one with a heart of gold, Xander is the funny one, Cordelia is the need, somewhat snobistic one and Angel is a vampire with a soul who’ll lose his heart to Buffy eventually.

         The TV-show has made sure that, there are several types of characters to whom the fans can relate to and identify with. Buffy is someone who’s presented as the average girl next door, except for the fact that she’s really not. She’s beautiful, funny, independent, strong, and has great friends but nevertheless struggles with the same problems as any other highschool girl. This is something where the average female viewer of Buffy can relate to and identify with. The TV-show doesn’t only have female fans, the show’s also very popular with boys, probably because the TV-show is very exciting and adventurous and the fact that the average boy would like to have Sarah Michelle Gellar as his girlfriend.

            Although the TV-show isn’t very realistic for obvious reasons ( I never saw a vampire or demon in my entire life) they’ve tried to make it realistic by writing very out-of-life-taken scenario’s. Almost every episode involves a lovestory or a subject which can actually take place in real life. For instance, the dying of your mother, or someone you love, your heart that gets broken, having difficulties at school, afraid of not fitting in etc.

            The show also takes up society taboos in the episodes. The biggest example of that is the lovestory between Willow and Tara, which are two girls. It was one of the first openly gay relationships on national television in America. The show immediately gained a lot more fans. For the young homosexual youth it’s something they can identify with and find support in. For the people who don’t have anything to do with homosexuality (or even worse are homophobic) it might be a chance to change their point of view on this matter.

Leisure  Time

When thinking of the term leisure time and how it is defined, I think there has been a change over the last years. Leisure time was always seen as time free from obligation or compulsion. Nowadays we speak of leisure time as time not spent at work. In our free time we choose which activities we want to explore, whether that is watching television, doing sports, play an instrument or just sit back and relax, isn’t really important. The important thing is that we choose it ourselves and that it has some sort of entertainment value. Like Vogel says “ free time is used for doing things and going places, and the emphasis on activity more closely corresponds to the notion of recreation” [2] and  ” entertainment is defined as that which produces a pleasurable and satisfying experience. The concept of entertainment is thus subordinate to that of recreation”. [3]  With the shift of free time, that is the definition, there has also been a gain in spare time. “The most gains in free time have occurred between 1965 and 1975 but since then, the amount of free time people have has remained fairly stable.”[4]

With the coming of the Internet there has been a new form of recreation and spending of free time. There even became a whole new way of communicating. People come home from their daily jobs and can check there email, they can start talking to friends through the chatsystems like ICQ or the most famous of them all MSN-Messenger. This is the communicating and functional side of the Internet. The Internet also created a lot of recreation forms like online games, fansites, information-sites about almost everything and the possibilities to create your own site. The main activity is just the surfing on the Internet. One of the biggest features of the Internet for companies is the advertising. There has been a boom in advertising with the coming of Internet. People are surfing and whether they want to or not they see al these advertising. Sometimes this advertising is very aggressive, in that way that when you visit particular sites, the site will automatically change the settings of your internet and change for instance your homepage to one of theirs and give you an extra toolbar. 

There are also a lot of so-called fansites. Whenever somebody wants to create a fansite they don’t need some sort of permission or legislation, they can just build it. They can write, contribute, produce anything they want (obviously not everything, there are some exceptions like for instance kiddypornography) without some institution telling them what they can or can not do. The internet created a lot of tools for people to spread their wishes, their knowledge without having to use the Xerox-machine and a staple machine. Henry Jenkins mentions this topic in his publication Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture, he says “The Web made it possible for alternative media productions of all kinds to gain greater visibility and to move beyond localized publics into much broader circulation.”.[5]

            On these sites you can also find advertising, there are a lot of banners and almost every fansites of whatever icon has a shop where you can buy stuff concerning the particular icon. This is a very interesting facet of the internet. What there is actually happening is that people are making free adverts for companies. For example if it’s a fansite for a particular TV-show and the show is available on DVD, it is very likely you will find a reference on the fansites to for example Amazon.com where you can order the DVD. This is free marketing! This is such an unusual aspect of the internet. The same goes for your personal information.

There are a lot of sites where you can fill in questionnaires, and in exchange you get a little gift or something. People are often not aware of the impact of this sharing of your personal file. For companies it is a very profitable way of earning this information. With the knowledge of people’s spending habits or eating habits or buying habits etc. etc. it’s very easy to start a marketingproject for a particular commodity. Since we’re not aware of this we are actually working for free. Later on in this essay, I will compare different sites of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and examine whether these sites are performing this free form of labor and I will take a look at the gaining influence of the consumer through the possibilities that the internet provides for consumers but I’ll come to that in the next chapter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fancommunities in general

Fan communities aren’t a phenomena that came with the emergence of the internet. They existed all along but through the internet it has been a lot easier for fans to share information, pictures, files etc. concerning their idol or TV-show or whatever. Especially with p2p-programs as KaZaA, E-mule and Gnutella it is very easy to exchange files. In his article Interactive audiences? The collective intelligence of media fans  Henry Jenkins says that the new participatory culture is taking shape at the intersection between three trends:

” (1) new tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content

(2) a range of subcultures promote Do-it Yourself (DIY) media production, a discourse that shapes how consumers have deployed those technologies

(3) economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates encourage the flow of images, ideas and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship.”[1]

 

Good examples of the first trend are the p2p-programs mentioned above. Those fancommunities encourage one and another to use these programs, this is the discourse that Jenkins mentions.

Fan communities gain a much bigger freedom than they used too. Fan fiction for example; fans turn the content of their favorite TV-show into the version they would like to see, furthermore it’s easy for them to spread this through the internet. The internet created a great distribution system with it’s peer-to-peer programs. It doesn’t stop with the rewriting of episodes, fans have the tools and knowledge of the new technology to actually  remaster the episodes, mix it up and in some way manipulate some images but nevertheless in the way the fans would have liked to see it. They can actually participate in the process.

 There are several reasons why we participate. An interesting one is mentioned on the website www.hypergenic.net  “ The abundance and proliferation of virtual communities and collaboration environments provide the opportunity for anyone to play just about any role in the journalistic process”.[2]  Another reason why fans might participate is maybe because they simply would like to see their fantasy actually come through. Bring the producers to other thoughts, because they can easily reach them now. There is a good example of this, in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  There was this plotline about Tara and Willow, two witches who we’re having a relationship, which was one of the first openly lesbian relationships on a regular TV-show. There are a lot of young homosexual fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer who will especially like this plotline and would like to see more of the Tara-Willow-saga but since it I just a part of the TV-show, it isn’t really possible. Fans have made a lot of music videos only concerning bits of fragment of Tara and Willow. By the time the producers of Buffy The Vampire Slayer decided to let Tara die, they had the whole Tara-Willow community on a riot. Josh Whedon, the producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has admitted in an interview that he was well aware of the dissatisfaction of the fans. They decided to give Willow another girlfriend (Kennedy). Willow who had relationships with men as well in the past, would stay gay as a sort of  compensation for the death of Tara.

Fansites of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and their advertising habits

In this chapter several Buffy will be examined more thorough, especially on the parts of their advertising habits and on their production and distribution activities and capacities.

http://www.saifai.co.uk/bfanfic.shtml

This website is hosted by Rhonda Cluff. If you just take a glance at this site you can immediately witness the huge amount of fan fiction and the work that has been delivered. There‘s fan fiction about Buffy meeting Ghostbusters, Buffy meeting Xena the warrior princess. Without the facilities of the internet, fans wouldn’t be able to spread their fan fiction, they could still write but they couldn’t share it that easily. On the site there are also some musicvideos, merchandise, multimedia (like icons for instance), postergallery, adoptions (you can actually adopt your own Buffybabe at a website), an episode guide and a message forum. You can also register on this websites, so you feel really part of a community, that is the Buffy community. With this subscription you’ll be sure that you’re not missing out on anything because they’ll keep you posted with a magazine. You’ll also get some gifts from Buffy for free and you ill get a 10% discount on other VIP collectibles. So far a global journey through this website.

On the part of the advertisements, you can find a link to the Buffy store. Here you can purchase DVD’s, goodies, funstuff etc, just to keep the site running (the site also gives the opportunity to make a donation). Besides the store commodities there’s also a link to Amazon and Ebay, where you can buy almost anything that has to do with Buffy.

http://www.slayersource.homestead.com/home.html

This website is hosted by eclectic girl. It’s more clear than the previous site. In principal it has the same features as the other site. Only this site seems to be less profitable. This site however included an interactive-section where there is the possibility to play games, take quizzes which will tell you which character will suite you the most. These are all tools that will help to stimulate the sense of a community. As far as the advertising goes, there isn’t really anything to find on the site. There are only free assets available like wallpapers, images, fan art and off course the selfmade musicvideos. The webring are fully exploited on this site but they’re all for free. This is a fan site that’s merely intended for the creating of a community than for moneymaking purposes.

http://angel-btvs.co.uk/

This website is a sort of combined one between the TV-show Angel (which is a spin-off of Buffy) and Buffy. At the first glance it is very obvious that this site is very profoundly undertaken. Anything there is to know about the TV-show is written down here. The site doesn’t have music videos, there ‘s only concrete information, like the biographies of all the cast-member, the places where buffy is filmed, an episode-guide, etc. The most interesting part is the fact that this site offers Buffyclothing, it shows al the available clothing, like t-shirts, caps, thongs (!) etc. The garment pieces all have a link to the site http://www.emerchandise.com/browse/BUFFYTHEVAMP/CAP/s.MDAaQ0Xn which is the largest TV and Movie Studio Store. The person who made this site will probably get some sort of compensation in return but most it’s probably a lot cheaper for emerchandise to sell their products by clicking on a link on a fan site then putting some general banner of their products on several websites. This probably isn’t the site of just one fan but probably from someone who’s a professional webbuilder.

http://www.buffyuk.buffyfans.co.uk

This site is a good example of the free labor some fans do. The site is from someone called Gareth and like he points out himself, Fox maybe thankful that he made such a wonderful site and spared Fox the hassle of doing it. Furthermore you can find almost anything you can also find and do on the other sites but this particular fan is really linking for free to the site of amazon.com, where you can buy DVD’s etc.

 

            There are a lot of Buffy fansites, it would be impossible to look at all of them. Most of them are more or less the same. They can tell you everything about the TV-show about the characters, about the content, about the producers, you can play games, adopt your own buffydoll etc. The point is that the fans also made a lot of their own musicvideos. The thing that is most interesting is the fact that those fans are actually doing free labor. First of all, bringing the attention to the TV-show, and second of all with the free references and linking of merchandise to websites like ebay, amazon, emerchandise. Even when there is some sort of arrangement. For instance, the Lycos site and the Tripodsites. You can make your own fansite, for free if you use the URL of Tripod or Lycos, in exchange they want to put banners on your site. Where is the boundary between leisure time and labor time?  Surfing on the internet is considered free time spend on a recreational and entertaining base. Building your own fansite, promoting a TV-show and making free references to commercial websites is in my opinion not leisure time but labor time.  Second of all, with the rewriting of the scripts and the making of their own little musicvideos, they are making some sort of own commodity. This is in my point of view the blurring of the boundaries between producer and consumer.

Conclusion

            Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a very popular TV-show that is broadcasted in a lot of countries. It has several characters where the viewers can relate to and identify with. On top of that, the TV-show is full with adventure and entertainment. Although the subject may not always be very realistic, there’s always a certain level of realism put in, by creating storylines that are taken out of live.

            Leisure time has had a switch in definition the last couple of years. Leisure time used to be explained as time free from obligation or compulsion. Nowadays it’s explained as time not spent on work and based on a recreational activities, such as sports or going to the movies. With the coming of the internet, there has been a whole new way of communicating. People can let themselves be heard on the internet by creating a website. People with an interest in common can easily find eachother on the internet and create a community. On those websites are a lot of free references to other websites. Websites that are only intended for money making purposes. The fans are actually making this references/advertisements for free.

            Internet provided also a very easy distributionsystem for the fans. Through the use of peer-to-peer-programs like KaZaA and Emule it’s very easy to share files. These are all tools for creating a bigger sense of a community. The websites contributed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all have quizzes on them, chatrooms, forums etc. The fans cane easily find eachother on the internet, and talk with one and another and share files with one and other and write fanfiction and create their own musicvideo. They’re not really depending on the studio’s to give them more of their favorite TV-show.

The coming of internet  brought up several changes. A change in the filling of free time, a blurring of the boundaries between producer and consumer and a lot of tools to start some sort of community. I don’t think you can still talk about leisure time when you’re making a website. You’re doing actually two things than. First the promoting of a TV-show and second the making of free advertisements for commercial websites. These activities are considered to be activities where one normally would get paid for. It isn’t leisure time anymore but labor time.

Producers can easily keep up with the wishes of the fans, through their fansites. Fans are making their wishes clear through the forums, through the musicvideos, through the fanfiction. These fans who are considered to be the consumers become more or less producers themselves.

Bibliografie

 

H. Vogel, Entertainment industry economics - a guide for financial analysis (Cambridge 2001).

 

H. Jenkins, ‘Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars? :Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture’ in Rethinking Media Changes (Cambridge 2003).

 

H. Jenkins, ‘Interactive audiences? The collective intelligence of media fans’ in The New Media Book

( Londen 2002).

 

http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php?id=P40

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, that was the end of my critical questions sessions. Poeh and did I gave those writers a hard time hey ;-).
I only have to write my final research......but first I'm going to the biggest Rugby tournament of the year. Ameland Beachrugby
I'll probably be exhausted when I come home and full with bruises but it's all worthwhile.
Talk to you later!

A Critical question to the article of J.D. Lasica

 

Question: Lasica refers tot the following statement of Clay Shirky “The order of things in broadcast is filter, then publish. The order in communities is publish, then filter.”  What are your thoughts on this statement.?

Answer:  Since this article is about journalism I will take the daily news as example. As always I have double thought concerning this matter. At this point, I’m almost at the point that hardly believe anything that’s on the news. Due to my study I’m almost indoctrinated with the idea that everything we see on the news had been carefully picked out for us to be broadcast or on a higher level has been constructed for us. Everything about the war in Iraq, I tend to take with a little bit of sold (to use a Dutch phrase which I can’t pronounce in English). I would almost go as far to argue that the footage we saw last year about those people thanking president Bush and America for his support after the fall of the Hussein-regime was all set-up on forehand but I don’t have any evidence to prove this but I will elaborate on this matter in my next critical question. So on one hand I think it would be nice if  the truth would be broadcasted so we can filter for ourselves. On the other hand, I think it’s good that broadcast networks filter on forehand. A good example is the decapitation of an allegedly American soldier in Iraq. It was on the 6 o-clock news, children we’re also watching for instance. On the news they showed some footage of the decapitation but not really the core-part of the decapitation so to speak. I think it was  a good thing, you don’t know on forehand what your about to watch on the news, before you know it you could see a actual decapitation. You don’t have a choice. So in this case I think it’s a good thing that they filter the footage for us.

 

 

A Critical question to the article of Dan Gilmor.

Question: Gilmor argues that “not even a well-staffed big-city newspaper can hope to cover every aspect of civic life, but it has readers whose information and perspectives could contribute much to improving and broadening the coverage.” Do you agree?

Answer: I can see the point of Gilmor. Off course it would come in very handy for a newspaper to have free workers like that, a journalist is way more expensive. But that’s exactly my point why a newspaper shouldn’t use those so-called journalists. A journalist doesn’t get paid so much for nothing. They actually study how to provide news, there are actually some rules to it. One of those “rules” is that there has to be some objectivity. I believe Gilmor doesn’t see it like that  according to his  quote    “ I dropped mini-essays onto it without worrying about compromising the objectivity that beat journalists at traditional news organizations try to maintain.”. Like I mentioned on my last critical question, it is already so hard to believe what is true and what isn’t true. If we all start posting all sorts of news and nobody really has  a clue whether is true and objective, what would be the truth (if there is something like A truth).

 

 

A Critical question to the article of Luuk Middelaar

Question: The article isn’t really optimistic. Middelaar argues in this article that “There’s no way out of the world of money, not even for the people who think they’re fighting against it.” It makes me wonder if this is really true?

Answer:  I’m thinking and I’m thinking but I don’t seem to get much further than agreeing with Naomi Klein when she’s says that “as long as one searches for an economic way out of the economy,  one will keep turning around in circles.” I think that’s true, you can’t fight economy by using the economy. But there has to be a solution. There are still people living on this planet who live without the economy. Like for instance Indians in South-America. They live there in a autonomic community without any money or governmental regulation. They have there own rules. In the United States of America there are also Indians living but I have to admit they can only live there because the government gave them their piece of country. Allright so far I’m not really making  a point here. But why should we stop globalisation? It’s true that the Global labour and environmental standards should be regulated by law and governments, a democratic government that is. I tend to think that there is indeed no way out, it’s already too late. So maybe I shouldn’t ask myself it there really isn’t a way out, maybe I should ask myself “Is globalisation such a bad thing?”……

 

A critical Question to the article of Alan Warde

Question: Warde claims in his article that there are two alternative casual claims to the relationship between culture and the economy. First; culturalization implies that culture has become more central in economic relations, a process usually implicitly considered good because no one is against more culture. The second suggests that economic relations are now more central to culture. What claim would you choose?

Answer: I would definitely go for the second claim, I also always tend to go with the thoughts of Adorno, so it isn’t really surprising that I’m choosing for the second one. I think our whole world is economising and not culturalising (I wished it would be true). There are so many examples of that surrounding me. Just look at the mainstream movies from Hollywood, I can tell the whole story of the movie just by looking at the poster and the title of the movie without even having it seen. In Hollywood they’re still following this Classical narrative structure, so when you’ve seen one movie, you’ve seem them all. I’m not even mentioning the remakes of movies (talking about a culture industry!). The same goes for music, there are so many covers of songs. It’s the same over and over again. Fortunately there are still original things brought upon the market, but not as many as the commodities that are brought upon the market with only one purpose and that is to make money. So I would definitely go for the second claim.

 

Hereby I will give my final outline for my research-project which I’m about to begin with for the course Participatory Culture. I will make this outline with the help of the famous “schijf van vijf” made by mister Eggo Muller. My research will focus on the official websites (because there are more of them) and fan sites of the TV-show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”.

 

Motivation:

First of all I would like to motivate the choice of my research paper. I’m a big fan (and consumer) of P2P programs as KaZaA and Emule. At one point I became aware of particular short movies-compilations of a lot of TV-shows and movies, which appeared to be produced by fans. Fans compiled fragments of their favourite scenes and of their favourite characters of particular TV-shows in such a way that it became a sort best-of-movie. On top of that they also put a song during the fragments which they thought suited best for those fragments. Fans had actually made their own movie.

 

Object:

As mentioned above, there are a lot of TV-shows which could be picked for this research. I decided to go with a tv-show that is very popular, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This show has a lot of fans and therefore a lot of (fan)websites. Those websites  intend to create a sort of community. You can make a quiz to see which character from the show suits you most, you can talk to other fans through chat rooms and forums, you can buy shirts, games, DVD’s, comic books, regular books, music (soundtracks) etc. of Buffy. It doesn’t stop with the tv-show, no it seems to begin with the websites. The TV-show tends to be just a sort of reference for the websites where the actual marketing takes place.

 

Theory:

With examining these (fan)websites I will focus on a few aspects. First of all, at the advertising-aspect. What’s very remarkable is that the official websites aren’t even full of references to other products and institutions etc. The fan sites on the other hand are full with advertising and free marketing for Ebay, Amazon and other online-shops. This reminded me of the question ‘is it still leisure time that is filled, or could this actually be seen as labour time?’. Second, I will focus on the aspect of the blurring of the boundary between producers and consumers. Fans make their own movies, they write their own script. Josh Whedon has already admitted that he was fully aware of the wishes of the fans through the fan sites and therefore reacted on them, which is a good example of the blurring of the boundary between producer and consumer. Through p2p programs like KaZaA it is also very easy to distribute episodes from Buffy. You don’t have to actually buy a DVD, you can easily download them on fan sites or on KaZaA.

 

Method:

I will examine a few websites of Buffy the Vampire slayer very thoroughly. The choice of my websites will be based on the comprehensiveness of the sites. Wit this text-analysis of the websites I will focus on the advertising aspects, marketing aspects and participatory aspects.

 

Relevance:

With this research I would like to contribute something to the discourse concerning media fans where Henry Jenkins already wrote about in his article “Interactive audiences? The collective intelligence of media fans”. I would also like to contribute something to the discussion whether internet-users should get paid for there free marketing-actions as mentioned earlier like the free references to Amazone and Ebay on the fan sites.

 

Sources:

http://www.spoilerslayer.com

http://www.slayage.com/index.html

http://www.upn.com/shows/buffy/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/buffy/

http://www.buffysearch.com/

A critical question to the article of Clay Shirky

Question: This is the first time that I actually have a hard time making up a question. I just can’t come up with something critical. It’s all a bit of a blur to me what the article is about. Is it about the preconditions that distinguishes peer-to-peer from programs that aren’t peer-to-peer and if so, who cares, really? It seems to me like an rather technical article. But anyway, my question will be, what makes Napster P2P?

Answer: The addresses of Napster nodes bypass the DNS system, and because once the Napster server resolves the IP addresses of the PCs hosting a particular song, it shifts control of the file transfers to the nodes. Furthermore, the ability of the Napster nodes to host the songs without central intervention lets Napster users get access to several terabytes of storage and bandwidth at no additional cost.

 

A critical question to the article of Emelie Rutherford

Question: This article is obviously a commercial article. At one point the article explains the benefits of P2P for a company. One argument is that workers collaborating on a project can instantaneously chat and complete a task. My critical question is and what would be the negative effects of P2P?

Answer: It’s nice that people can look up information needed for their work through a cunning keen P2P program. But don’t you think that workers will also ‘share’ a lot of other stuff? Like music, fun things, games, porn etc. Workers are  already doing this with their email-system. So why wouldn’t they do this with P2P. I don’t think they will share and look-up information at the same time their completing a task. No they download and share a lot more while watching the other stuff they just collected. My advise to company would be NOT to acquire this, unless there’s a version with a filter that only allows work-related stuff but I don’t think it’s on the market yet….

 

A critical question to the article of Jeffrey Boase and Barry Wellman

Question: reading this article and especially the example of FREE Email system Hotmail, I had to think about the rotisserie assignment of last week about the participating being labour(it was last week wasn’t it?). My question would be, how would you consider this Labour?

Answer: I do consider it labour. Hotmail is making so much money due to our email-actions. Hotmail being free isn’t good enough. We should get paid and we should at least get more space in our inbox. I mean, the viral marketing-actions are so humongous with this email-system and hotmail is receiving so much income that it would only be fare if they would let us, the workers, get paid. And what’s really worthless is that when you sign up for hotmail they’ve put in a tiny junction which allows them to send you Spam!!! So not only are we working for free for Hotmail , second of all the email-system isn’t even user-friendly!