Doonesbury
February 29th, 2008 by GregToday’s “Doonesbury” comic deals with some issues that I’ve been thinking about in relationship to the vidding discussion, namely, who gets to define fair use?
Currently in the Doonesbury story arc, characters are enrolled in “The Poetry of Barack Obama”. The context of this particular comic strip is the recent contention that Obama lifted some of the text of his speeches from a political ally (Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick). Regarding this practice, Hillary Clinton said: “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in. It’s change you can Xerox.”
The comic, however, takes a different tack, putting the reacquisition of language in a more fannish context, utilizing the language of hip-hop and music remixing. Or does it? Any Trudeau fans? Is this comic critical of rewriting practices? Critical of the academy’s reading strategies? Does the fact that (stereotypical deadhead/stoner–here, in an orange shirt) Zonker, endorses the “collaborative” assignment, mean anything?
P.S. The Universal Press Syndicate guidelines allow educators/students the use of 7 images per year free of charge, providing they are used in an academic context. Not that I’m endorsing one particular fair use policy over another, but it’s nice (for me, the blogger) to know that this post is doing nothing illegal.
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I was not aware of that story, Noah. Last spring in Bob’s TV and New Media class (which you were in as well) my final project involved studying race in politics and the uses of social-networking models for campaign sites. Our group examined Deval Patrick’s campaign site from a few years ago and Barack Obama’s campaign site. It looks just like Facebook, complete with the most niche groups you can imagine.
It seems that Obama was openly borrowing media strategies from the Patrick campaign, so these allegations are interesting to me when viewed in that light.
If you feel like looking through the groups, note that they include: Battlestar Galactica Fans for Obama, Star Wars Fans for Obama, and Nigerian and Colored Biomedical Scientists for Obama.
This seems like one of those situations where someone’s behavior is being called poaching (in a negative light, in this case), when in fact what’s going on is that Obama was invited to hunt in this guy’s forest (not a slash innuendo, I swear to god). Obama’s been quoted as saying that Patrick is “one of my national co-chairs, who gave me the line and suggested that I use it”, and I’m pretty sure Patrick backed him up.
I find it very interesting that one of Obama’s campaign strategies really seems to be to make him, as a candidate, into a kind of popular fan text. He’s trying to be as accessible as possible, from having a Facebook profile to an iconic, visually “catchy” logo, to these things that Aaron mentioned about being welcoming to niche groups. His self-identification as the candidate of hope is extremely intertextual, identifying him with any number of fictional/mythical heroes throughout time. For example, there’s this application of some dialog between Dream of the Endless and Lucifer from Sandman to Obama and Hillary. (Which brings up another issue: Hillary gets characters ascribed to her in opposition to those ascribed to Obama, as in that remix of the 1984 Apple commercial). I think the fact that this campaign is so heavily “storylined” is one of the reasons people are paying so close attention to it — as I said at the beginning of the semester, I think one important characteristic of many fan texts is that they have easily-identified-with narratives.