OTW's Tisha Turk on the past, present and future of fair use, digital storytelling, vidding and remix culture
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | OTW's Tisha Turk on the past, present and future of fair use, digital storytelling, vidding and remix culture |
| Interviewer: | Sarah Lai Stirland for "DisCo (Disruptive Competition)" |
| Interviewee: | Tisha Turk |
| Date(s): | June 10, 2014 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | vidding |
| External Links: | online here, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
OTW's Tisha Turk on the past, present and future of fair use, digital storytelling, vidding and remix culture is a post that discusses Fair Use, Gift Culture, Fandom and Profit, and vidding. It highlights the work of Organization for Transformative Works and includes an interview with fan vidder, Tisha Turk, chair of OTW’s Fan Video & Multimedia Committee.
Excerpts
Q: Could you tell us why you think vidding is important, and its significance?A: As to why vidding is important, it’s a form of remix that precedes a lot of what is now being called remix. You have this largely women’s art form that often gets ignored when people are writing about remix.
It’s important as an early example of participatory, read/write culture, making something out of culture, not just consuming it. You’re not just watching a TV show, but saying: “I’m going to tell you about what I like about this show,” or “I want to tell you what I didn’t like about this show,” or, “I’m going to give you the best-parts edition of this show,” which of course makes an argument about what are “the best parts.”
So it’s important as audience activity, and creativity, and as a women’s art form. For me as an academic, it’s a form of multi-modal composing. It’s the making of stories and arguments not just with print text, but with audio and video, lots of different media, and this is something we’ve been talking about in academia – how do we teach this as a form of communication?
Q: Despite all this activity being legal, this still feels like an underground movement. Why is that?A: Well, I think there are a lot of reasons for that. One is that historically it was an underground movement, mostly because of reasons about copyright.
As recently as 10 years ago, more recent than that, actually, people were saying: “Clearly this is illegal, but we’re going to do it anyway. If they catch us, we’ll be in terrible trouble.” In the VCR days, you’d have to know who to ask to have a tape sent to you. You’d have to know who to talk to at a convention to get the vids.
When you look at Henry Jenkins’ book, Textual Poachers, which is one of the first academic texts on fan studies, the vidders are the only ones who want to only be identified by their initials. They don’t even want their first name to be associated with anything.
Vidding is less underground than it used to be, partly because there are advocacy organizations, like the Organization for Transformative Works and the Electronic Frontier Foundation who have said: “No, this is valuable stuff. Individual vidders don’t necessarily need to have their names attached to vids, but as a community, there’s no need for it to be as secretive as it is.”