From Here On Out

 All creative work is the result of shared knowledge and labor; originality springs forth not from the forehead of geniuses but from the ideas pooled by communities of peers. (Nice Work If You Can Get It : Life and Labor in Precarious Times, Andrew Ross) I have felt lost for a long time. I look […]

The Semiotics of Compromise

The message is clear. We all need to learn how to communicate better. Miscommunication and fear defines negative interactions. Experience and education define the ways that we interpret and understand one another. It’s a basic idea of semiotics: the tree that I imagine when I say the word ‘tree’ isn’t the same one that you imagine. If […]

Here’s a Tip

A bit about the history of gratuity.   Although the precise origin is not agreed upon, tipping began as an aristocratic habit in Europe sometime around the 1600’s. Some historical accounts of tipping provide accounts of detailing how European aristocrats would hire bodyguards for protection and would give extra coins along the way to guarantee […]

Neo Bohemia: Aggregation of Exploitation

This is going to be a rather serious post as I found most of what Richard Lloyd had to say to be rather indicative of a deadly neo-liberal attitude that I find puts too much value on the movements of big business capital while also seeming to promote individual creative freedom, but only insofar as […]

Proletariat or Privilege

Due to some technical errors with the reading, I am responding to Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class, through a critical response to Florida’s book, Struggling with the Creative Class, by Jamie Peck. Florida’s thesis centers around creating a desire to re-imagine the places we live in order to appeal to a […]

They Are The Titans

The new giants of media have learned much from their studio system predecessors. Although the new giants differ in term of management tactics, style, content production, distribution and marketing are concerned, but they do share the structures of diversification that create the structural inequalities originally meant to be regulated by the now defunct Paramount decree, […]

Give The Audience What It Wants.

  I want to take a look at this statement and the questions it raises about management practices and culture within the studio system. Hortense Powdermaker makes reference to this sentiment in her book Hollywood, The Dream Factory, when discussing the relationship between the front of house executives and producers and the production teams (the creative laborers) responsible for crafting the films that […]

Over worked, under appreciated: Managing Individuality, Reliance, Autonomy and Happiness as a Creative Worker

  Zero Dean, an artist who worked for Rockstar Games during the development of Red Dead Redemption, a game that has been almost universally celebrated by gamers and which became even more famous after Zero Dean release an expose on the deplorable workplace practices being employed by Rockstar. The original essay by Zero Dean is […]

Blind Faith: The Individual and Vertical Integration

  Within Mark Deuze’s book, Media Work in the Digital Age, there seems to be an almost blind faith in the structural changes that are taking place within the creative industries, especially with regard to how individual workers, producers, and consumers ought to be understood within the larger context of the global economy, the creative […]

The Myth of Divine Creativity

Throughout their Introduction to the Creative Industries, Davies and Sigorthosson address a dichotomy that has daunted me since I realized that I wanted to work creatively. This is the separation between the creative and the lucrative. The notion that creativity can manifest itself as intellectual capital that in turn can be transformed into economic capital is not something […]