Culture machine live

Culture Machine Live

The online, open access journal of culture, theory and technology, Culture Machine, is pleased to announce the launch of Culture Machine Live. This series of podcasts considers a range of issues including the digital humanities, Internet politics, the future of cultural studies, transparency, open access, cultural theory and philosophy. Interviewees and speakers include Chantal Mouffe, Geert Lovink, Alan Liu, Ted Striphas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Visit http://culturemachinepodcasts.podbean.com
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/culture-machine-live/id582930981

This series is curated by Janneke Adema, Clare Birchall, Gary Hall & Pete Woodbridge

Comments

[Niels-Oliver Walkowski]

It's a great resource. I really enjoyed reading Culture Machine and appreciateed that it is Open Access. So why for God's sake it is publishing the Podcast in ITunes which hardl spoke the opposite of the Open Access approach. I can'r download the file without registering for ITunes and I will propably never do that. So Culture Machine is blocking people like me out for the "advantage" to give away their content to a private corporation which even holds the rights over the content which is published. In no way I do understand that and I am really angry about it. There are so many other possibilities to publish podcast without restrictions.

[Gary Hall]

Thanks for the positive comments about Culture Machine; and for the feedback, too. It’s really helpful and very much appreciated. There are a few points we’d like to make by way of response.

To begin with, I wonder if there hasn’t been a degree of misunderstanding or misreading. It’s not the case that you can’t download the podcasts without registering with iTunes. As both the email we sent out about the series and the above blog post make clear, the Culture Machine Live podcasts are all also openly available at:

http://culturemachinepodcasts.podbean.com/

So we’re certainly not ‘blocking’ anyone out in the sense you imply. In fact, the podcasts are published on Podbean, and appear there under the terms of a Creative Commons CC-BY license, which means they can be made available elsewhere too, by anyone interested in downloading, copying, distributing, publishing, embedding and sharing them.

What’s more, our understanding is that even when it comes to iTunes, Apple do not hold the rights over the content, just some rights around its distribution within that particular platform.

Having discussed this issue amongst ourselves at length, both before and after receiving your post, we’d also want to place a question mark against the moralistic temptation to understand phenomena such as Apple, iTunes, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Creative Commons in terms of a good/bad, public/private, open/closed, independent/proprietary dialectic. We’d argue that those of us who are interested in digital culture, including open access, open data and open science, actually have a political and ethical responsibility to remain open to analyzing and experimenting with such entities in all their complexity, specificity and indeed singularity. In fact, we consider the responsible production of such analyses and experiments to be another important aspect of the work those of us involved in the production of this podcast series do. (For instance, one plan is for the next episode of Liquid Theory TV to take as its focus Creative Commons. In the future we would like to do something similar with regards to the subjectivation associated with publishing on Mendeley or Academia.edu.)

That said, providing a rigorous analysis of iTunes that explains why we've decided to use it for this particular project is probably more than we want to undertake at this point in time. We are also aware that that Culture Machine has gone to great lengths to champion a certain (albeit to some quite radical) version of open access; and we think it's important - for political and ethical (as distinct from moralistic) reasons - that such a version of open access continues to be championed.

Consequently, we have taken the decision to stop making Culture Machine Live available via iTunes.