Practices of Looking Pages 49-62

        Chapter two of Practices of Looking is titled Viewers Make Meaning, so I was expecting this chapter to be about the viewer, how viewers view different pieces of digital work and what different pieces of work can mean to the viewer. The book defines a viewer as "an individual who looks" whereas an audience is "a collective of lookers". I never thought that a viewer and a audience could be so different from each other, but both use their eyes to view these images that seem to call attention to those viewing it. I liked how the book talked about how even though images ken be seen in the same way, they can have different meanings to different people. "I do not have to like or appreciate the dominant messages of the image to be interpolated by it or to understand that message" (pg 50). I liked this quote because I felt like it was basically saying that the viewer doesn't necessarily have to like an image for it to have an effect on you. 
        In the next section titled Producers' Intended Meanings I assumed that it would be about Producers, but when I think about producers I think about movie producers and the movie industry of Hollywood. I had no idea there would be producers for digital images. I knew that people who create different things sometimes have a meaning behind their work that isn't always portrayed to the viewer or audience, but because of technology today consumers can produce their own media to create their own meanings. Our everyday reality of producers as consumers has become the norm because the technology and manipulation of images has become so ingrained that it no longer surprises me about how much piracy and plagiarism is occurring in the digital world today. 
      The last section Aesthetics and Taste talks about ho both aesthetics and taste are the fundamental concepts of value and pleasure that it brings to the viewer. The value of a piece of art can bring pleasure through its beauty, style, reactive virtuosity or its technical virtuosity. But an interesting point that the authors make is that what most people would consider naturally beautiful or pleasing is actually "culturally specific" (pg 56). This basically means our culture has predetermined what we think should and should not be pleasing to the eye. This type of brainwashing prevents the viewer and audience from foaming their own opinions of likes and dislikes. 

Free Culture–Pages 15-30

        In pages 15-30 of Free Culture Lawrence Lessing continues the introduction by talking about piracy and the war that it has unleashed. He says that because the Internet has provoked this war, piracy has become a problem for copyrighted and uncopyrighted content. The fear that Lessing emphasizes is that the author of this content will be robber of his profits when his content is being shared via the Internet. From reading this last section of the Introduction, I feel like Lessing is not completely sure where he stands on the issue of piracy. He clearly states that it is wrong, but he then goes on to also state that there are these laws that make it hard for people to not commit piracy because these laws are so strict and complicated that it is hard to keep track of right and wrong. 
        Chapter One, titled Creators, begins with the background of Walt Disney and how his ideas were not completely original ideas. The ideas were born out of the idea of free culture and public domain resulting in what was later called Walt Disney Creativity. Whether borrowing was slight or significant it was allowed, legal and approved. No permission was needed from anyone. The phenomenon in Japan called Doujinshi was something I had never heard about before, but I thought that the rules and regulations surrounding was interesting because it was essentially an illegal act. I thought it was intriguing because it kind of seemed like a way to get more people more involved with the sharing of this comic. I think that it is allowed to be a copycat comic so that people will have the opportunity to share it with others easily. Even though it is illegal I am surprised that it is still allowed to happen. I wonder if there is anything like this in America and if not I wonder if anything like this has least tried to exist. If it did I don't think that the United States government would allow it to go on for very long. Maybe one  of the reasons Japan lets it go on is only because it profits the legal comic manga. I don't feel like this is a good enough reason to let it keep happening even though I agree that it is an unique and interesting way to keep that comic Doujinshi alive. The last part of this chapter talks about how some things in our society today "remain free for the taking within a free culture" (pg 29). But what I wondered about was who gets to decide what remains free and what needs permission to be used. Lessing ends with saying that he thinks out culture is becoming less free. But he never really states his opinion on this, but I think that permission is an important thing to have for somethings, but not all things. So I guess the ultimate question is where is the fine line between the two?

Free Culture–Pages 7-15

        In Lawrence Lessing's Introduction to Free Culture he begins by talking about how the Internet is made up of collaboration, and how not one single person can be credited with its invention. I think that this was a relevant point to make because not only is the invention of the Internet a collaboration, but the every day use of the Internet continues to be a collaboration as well. Lessing goes on to say that because the Internet is constantly being used by so many different people, there has to be some kind of law that covers the people putting things on the Internet and the people viewing those things on the Internet. But he also states that even though there should be some law, these laws need to be within reason. He says, "That power has changed the marketplace for making and cultivating culture generally, and that change in turn threatens established content industries" (pg.9). He argues that these industries want to remake the Internet before the Internet remakes them and that the law is basically trying to regulate the creativity that the Internet provides to its users. Because many people do not understand the Internet and its laws, they are automatically resentful towards it. Lessing even says that the first step in a solution is just by understanding the problem. I like the quote he uses later on in this sections that states, "There has never been a time in our history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now" (pg. 12).I really liked this quote because I feel like Lessing is basically saying the we should seize the day, but in a way that accepts our 'free culture'. 

Practices of Looking–Pages 26-46

        In this section of the book the meaning and value of images is defined and explained. Before reading this section I knew and felt like I understood the basics of meaning and value. I knew that everything has meaning and everything has value, they can just come in different ways to different people. What was helpful in my understanding of the meaning of images was the comparison between denotative and connotative meanings within a image. The example the book used was of the Nike swoosh. The denotative meaning of the swoosh is that when we visually see the swoosh we automatically know that it is the symbol for Nike and the connotative meaning is that when we see the swoosh we think about its quality and popularity among consumers. There is no way of knowing any of this if we didn't already know how to decode the images we see around us everyday. Elements such as color, shades of black and white, tone, contrast, composition, depth, perspective, and style of address to the viewer can all help in relying the images we see to mean different things when put into different contexts. There is a similar process that goes with the value of an image as well. "Images do not have value in and of themselves; they are awarded different kinds of value—monetary, social, and political—in particular social contexts" (pg. 34). I feel like value can be a tricky thing to grasp, but it is so arbitrary varying from person to person that images can have different values just because someone put them there. I really liked that the book brought up the point that many people believe that just because a work of art is in an expensive gallery or displayed in a special way it gives that work of art value, but this is not necessarily the case. Different pieces of art can have more or less value to different people regardless of the state in which they are displayed. 

Practices of Looking–Pages 145-151

        In this section of the book the focus is on realism and how it affected and still affects our past and present. History is an important part of any culture so it is only natural to follow the development of different ways of seeing, knowing the world, and different cultures views about value and meaning. The main question the book asked in this section was, "...what do the different approaches to realism that we find in art and visual culture tell us about the culture and politics of a given social context" (pg.146). I thought this was an interesting question to bring up because each culture is going to have a different reaction to the histories of other cultures' approaches to realism. Not only are the ideas and attitudes towards realism are going to be different for each person, but each persons own history are going to affect the way they view not only their own culture, but other cultures as well. I feel like that because there are so many different aspects of realism, there can never be a right and wrong answer, just individual ones. A term that this section of the book used that i had never heard of before was episteme. The book explains that it is "an accepted, dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in a given period of history" (pg. 149). So not only will each culture have different views about different aspects of realism, but each culture within each period of history will have even more of a variety of different views about realism as well. I really liked how much the book emphasized this because so many people are affected by different things, but can end up in the same place in their lives, but also different people can be affected by the same thing and end up in different places of their lives. You never know where life is going to take you next and I think that is a goof thing because then life wouldn't be as much fun. 

Practices of Looking–Pages 9-26

        Chapter one, titled Images, Power, and Politics begins with, "Every day, we engage in practices of looking to make sense of the world" (pg.9). I really like that the chapter starts off with this because I feel like it can be real easy to take our eyesight for granted and the only way they we can truly 'make sense of the world' is by looking around us at what has been created for our visual stimulation to understand life and its processes. Because single images can mean different things to different people, they can have a variety of multiple different meanings, connotations, and significance. I liked how the section on Representation compared images as a type of language; a way to understand, describe, and define the world around us. I had never thought about images providing an explanation for something I don't understand. I liked the example that the book used of René Magritte's Les Deux Mysteres. I felt like this picture by itself really helped to emphasize that images are literally images and by saying that a image of a pipe it literally not a pipe is almost so mind blowing that it is hard to explain in words. The rest of this section of the book talks about the myth of photographic truth and the ideology of images. I thought it was interesting to rad about images and their not so truthful state. Images are not always what they are perceived to be, but because most of the time they come close, many people just take it for granted that what you see is what you get. Images created by cameras can be altered from their original state by the change in lens, aperture, lighting, etc., but with today's technology images can be altered or manipulated even more with the help of computer programs like photoshop. 

Practices of Looking–Introduction

        The introduction of the book Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright starts with what our visual culture is and what it entails in our society today. The very first thing that stood out to me in this section of the book was when the authors said, "We negotiate the world through visual culture...Our lives are increasingly dominated by communication technologies...that allow for the global circulation of ideas, information, and politics" (pg.1). I like this because I felt like it really summed up exactly what our world, especially my generation is going though and growing up with. I feel like the more technology evolves and becomes more complex then more complicated it gets, but every new generation is trained to adapt and change to accommodate this new complex technology because our world doesn't seem like it ever wants to give up on our technology dominated communication. The introduction of the book touches a little bit about this, but goes on to explain what the rest of the book to going to cover. It explains that even though there are all kinds of different cultures and subsets within each culture, this book is more focused on the visual, those things that we can physically see with our eyes. Things such as paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, digital images and advertising are what most people, including myself, think of when they think about visual culture, but the book goes on to include things like animation, graphic novels, comic books, popular culture, news images, entertainment, images as legal evidence and science images were all things I had never though about before, especially as visual culture that can greatly influence our lives.