Ads and Authorship

There are a few things that I think are important to keep in mind when considering whether advertisements are "authored" in any way. First of all, it is certainly true that advertisements have creators (something can't just come out of nothing), but are they really authors? I think it would be useful to think of advertisers in terms of certain "criteria" of what constitutes an author. For example, if you define an author as a person who has a considerable amount of creative control over their work, then I would not categorize advertisers as authors. They are there to do a job and are given direction of what to do (kind of like Amy, was that her name?). They may be creative in the sense that they have some room to decide what kinds of marketing strategies to use, but ultimately, if what they create is not to the liking of the corporation they are working for, it may be rejected, or else edited. This leads to another point to be made, namely about collaborative authorship. If anything, I would tend to think of advertisers as part of a process. Therefore, if you define authorship as attributed to a "sole creator", then advertisers would not qualify as authors here either. Although one person may have the original idea of how to market a product, many people ultimately are involved in the development of that idea, not to mention that these ideas are essentially constrained by the task at hand, the whims of whatever corporation they are working for. If anything, I may attribute the work of advertisers as "collective authorship". In fact, collective authorship may be too strong of a term; maybe something more like "collective production" or "collective work" would be more suitable, because it is really a stretch for me to say that advertisers really author anything at all - in many ways, they can be categorized as what Negus calls "cultural intermediaries". They are more involved with the translation and facilitation of ideas from author to consumer. From this perspective, they are simply relaying a message, and moreover, they are relaying it in a way that must be approved by the author themselves. In other words, I see advertisers as more of the telephone than the speaker, as merely an instrument.

AMV Hell

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3aTgINExt2w

What I have chosen to analyze for this assignment is essentially a montage of AMVs entitled "AMV Hell 3", which runs almost an hour long (and can be seen at above link). For those who don't know, AMV stands for "Anime Music Video" and usually is a series of clips from a particular show set to a song/songs and edited in such a way that it seems that the characters are performing the song. This particular example is a compilation of hundreds of these kinds of clips, usually about 5-20 seconds long set to popular songs or audio bytes from movies, etc. The illusion of flipping channels and almost an overload of information is created through certain editing techniques, and it is clearly evident that a lot of work went into the creation of this "film" (or maybe I should say exposition?).

Before even going through the readings for this week, I knew that whatever I chose for this assignment would probably be based on my own tastes and what I have had exposure to, and based on what I think others would enjoy as well. As Curran points out, however, what people (literary editors in particular) perceive as being popular or well received may not always be a perfect match, and might even be far from the actual sentiments of the public. I think it's important to keep in mind how well received a work would be in the consideration of whether to publish it or not, but I also think it's important not to let public sentiments restrict the type of material being published. That being said, I think that products like AMV Hell 3 deserve a chance, and would be in the same vein of programming as Robot Chicken, and perhaps Family Guy, South Park, etc. With a bit of polishing, I think that something like this would be worth publishing because of its humor and novelty, and I believe that there would be a significant audience for it. And yet, as I write all of this, I feel that maybe my decision to publish is really based on my own preferences. It really is difficult to separate oneself and think purely objectively about something, especially if you had a previous interest invested in something..

And If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where To Land...

Where I stand on the issue between humanism and materialism in reference to authorship is a bit complicated. First of all, my understanding of the definition of these terms goes as follows: humanism embodying the possibility that there can be original ideas and that authors have varying degrees of creative license, but nonetheless, their works are their own, created for their own purposes and from their own intentions (as postulated by those like Buscombe and ; and on the other hand, materialism, which holds that works of authors are simply just products of labor, produced for mass culture, and excludes the possibility of original ideas, stating that ideas are merely social constructions (as put forth by those such as Macherey and Benjamin). That being said, I seem to lean a bit more toward humanism. I can understand how materialism may have some merit in its arguments. It is difficult to say if there are any "true" original ideas, since all that we learn is a result of social interaction, and it can be argued that all works are merely manipulations of old works, or otherwise their antithesis. Yet, what I am tempted to argue here is that there has to be a conscious decision made to create, whether it is considered an original idea, or a rehashing or reworking of an old idea, and this is what makes works more than mere products for consumption, but the product of an author's mind, a portait of their ideas.