Drumbeat/Challenges/webmademovie: Difference between revisions

A collaborative documentary exploring the power of networks. We´re getting so used to the internet that we no longer stop to think about it. Why we love it. Why we hate it. What it really is and who it is turning us into.  

The project aims to show what the Network looks like offline - to show the ways in which it is creating community and transforming society. To show how the Internet is less a machine created by a select few brilliant minds, but is in fact shaped by everyone. The porn, the scamsters, the magical connectedness; it's all - us.

Brett Gaylor [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RiP!:_A_Remix_Manifesto (Rip! A Remix Manifesto]]) and Henrik Moltke ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Copy_Bad_Copy Good Copy Bad Copy]]) are developing a documentary project investigating the social effects of the World Wide Web. The goal is to show how very different people and groups are changing because of the Internet - from everyday tasks, to crime, sex and identity.

An overall "umbrella project" will begin on OpenSourceCinema.org to host a series of episodes profiling communities that illustrate the community-building power of the web. These will be built collaboratively using the task-based system of Open Source Cinema - each episode will be built in a participatory manner.

The project will be bootstrapped by a team of professional, international documentary filmmakers who will shoot initial episodes and serve as moderators of their respective episodes. They will manage the communities that sprout up around their episodes and bring their own communities.  In this way the project will have a pluralized, international feel, and will have wildly divergent aesthetics, processes and perspectives. Just like the web.

Contributors and partcipants will be recruited from the [[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat Mozilla Drumbeat project]] - an international effort to "enable internet users to understand, participate and take control of their online lives".  Leveraging this vast userbase, the project will have a global reach and impact. Participants will also come from the 5000 strong Open Source Cinema user base, a group of passionate collaborators who already succededed in creating the award winning "Rip! A Remix Manifesto:.

In addition to the series of episodes, a "release" version will be edited together to create a feature length film, which will be toured to international film festivals and broadcast on TV networks and spread to P2P networks in a finished state. If the community building the film is large and lively enough, multiple releases may be made over time (once a year?).

HTML5 video and other open web technologies will be combine to create a whole new kind of media experience -- letting viewers and community members mix video, social media and data from across the web in real time. The goal will be to keep nimble and generative: as open video practices and technology evolve, so will the project. The blue sky vision would be the creation of a living documentary, a wiki-type experience that can be changed and morphed through user contributions.

*** In a way, the filmmakers become like DJs or curators of the whole experience

These are drafts of potential epsidoes - the development phase will yield more concrete, character-based investigations of communities. Also, the development process will also include an open source component -- community content will yield new ideas and episodes.

 

'''1: The Power of Networks (or, Where Wizards Stay Up Late)'''

 

Little is known about the characters who built the networks that would eventually become the Internet – visiting these humble engineers will tell the story of a system based on openness and intellectual curiosity, and the tensions that naturally lead to the Internet exiting its home at the Department of Defense and enter, if not swallow mainstream culture whole.

 

This section will also explore the early tension between those who worked towards an “open” internet and the existing industrial powers that it posed to disrupt.

 

 

The network has uprooted culture for geography and local tradition, allowing artists to create new fellowships, new territories and new tribes. It has decimated traditional avenues for compensation, while providing exciting new ones. It has made us question originality and plagiarism, authorship, collaboration and “professional art”.

 

We’ll follow Amanda Palmer, an independent musician who keeps attacking the major label she has as contract with and uses social networking to connect directly with fans.

 

 

We also want to explore how our notions of originality are changing, how “digital natives”, have changed their view of originality and creativity.  Are we in danger of losing the ability to create a culture of today?  Are we regurgitating? Here I will follow the AV/DJs The Eclectic Method, whose perfectly synchronized audio/visual remixes depend on instant access to the canon of humankinds cinematic and musical output.  While each of their mixes juxtaposes and creates a new meaning in the mind of the watcher/listener, is it moving too fast to digest?

 

 

"Using the latest brain-scanning technology, scientists at the UCLA Medical School have discovered that constant immersion in digital worlds is creating new neural networks in the left front part of the brain (the dorso- lateral prefrontal cortex) that cause digital natives to 'respond faster' to digital stimulation, but it has been found that they also 'code information differently' and “have shorter attention spans” than digital immigrants. Constant and prolonged exposure to digital technology is creating new neural circuits in our brains and weakening older, more established ones. "

 

Characters in this section will emerge from brainstorming sessions at Open Source Cinema, but will also be informed by interviews with John Palfrey, author of “Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of Digital Natives” and Alea Vit, a digital native herself who runs the Digital Natives project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center.

 

 

Iranian protestors used Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to circumvent the government’s ban on foreign journalism. But the government used this same network to spy on, intimidate and harass activists. And almost all 21st century dictatorships (Cuba, Burma, China) have taken advantage of the networks ubiquity to spy on citizens and present a filtered view of the world. Consider China’s “Golden Shield”, some 20,000 “internet police” who eavesdrop on the network searching for dissidents. These same police add thousands and thousands of websites a day to a filter (called by some the “Great Firewall”) that prevents Chinese citizens from accessing information considered dangerous to the government.

 

'''5: Economics + Security'''

Warcraft has been forever transformed by a networked world.  Recently the US DOD admitted a huge strategic advantage that China held in “cyberwar”, the use of hacking techniques to spread disinformation, steal corporate secrets, or disrupt key resources such as electricity, water and transportation.

And it isn’t only a battle for resources and industrial espionage – it’s a battle for hearts and minds. China aggressively challenges any claim against it, from Tibet to global warming, with an army of uber-patriotic youth, who post YouTube videos and dispute foreigners online. The US army successfully uses a sophisticate, free online game – “americas army” – as a recruitment tool.